The Birth Story - Part 1

I didn't know if I would feel like sharing Preston's birth story, but I decided I wanted to write it up and share mainly so I would have it for my own memories. Yes, it's been almost 2.5 months, so my memories might already be a little bit fuzzy at this point, but here goes nothing.

TMI Alert - I will be talking about gross, labor related things in these posts. 

So P had been breech until our 39 week check up, when he surprisingly flipped head down. At that point, my midwife did a cervical check so we would know what was going on down there and found that I was 75% effaced and 2cm dilated. Woo Hoo! She thought I wouldn't make it to my 40 week appointment a week later so I, of course, got super excited!

Well imagine my disappointment when I did make it to my 40 week appointment (Tuesday, May 29th) and let them check me again, only to discover I had made zero progress from last week. The midwife said we needed to schedule an appointment with the Maternal and Fetal Medicine doctor now that I was over my due date (they do this for everyone who goes over) just to check everything out and make sure the baby was doing ok. I set the appointment for Friday, June 1st and the funny receptionist at their office assured me that I would probably not be making it to the appointment and would have the baby before then.

I spent the rest of that week walking, walking and walking some more. I'm not kidding when I say I walked 6-7 miles a day. Yes, at 40+ weeks pregnant in the late May heat. I'm sure I was a crazy sight to see. I should also mention that at this point, I hadn't had ONE single real contraction and I was barely feeling my Braxton Hicks either. So I was pretty depressed that my body wasn't doing anything and that I was going to have to be induced.

Thursday, May 31st, I went on a cleaning spree. I was scrubbing baseboards, vacuuming and wiping down windowsills. Jake had called his mom that afternoon and told her about my cleaning and she said "ooh, she's having that baby SOON!" Considering I still had no contractions or really any feelings or signs of labor, I laughed it off.

Around 6:00pm on the 31st, we were downstairs eating dinner and watching TV. I decided to bounce/rock/sway on my exercise ball that I had been using for most of the last part of pregnancy. As I'm bouncing up and down, I felt a weird wet sensation down there. I immediately said "oh crap, I think my water just broke!" Jake looked scared and I ran to the bathroom.

Let's just say, it was not my water breaking. It was my mucus plug. And it was the most horrifying and fascinating thing I have ever seen in my life. I won't get too into the details, but it was way bigger than I ever thought a mucus plug would be (even though I had no idea what to expect). And yes, I called Jake into the bathroom and made him look at it! I figured he was going to be seeing things far more gross than that when I was in labor so he should start preparing HA!

I got oddly excited after realizing that I lost my plug, even though I knew that it didn't really mean anything as far as going into labor. I was just happy that my body was finally doing something. Of course, I still had no contractions after that. I dragged J out to get Chick-fil-a milkshakes at like 9:30pm that night and on the way home, we drove over some speed bumps (gotta love all those old wives tales!)

We went to bed around 11:00pm that night and I still felt completely normal and no contractions at all. I woke up around midnight and thought to myself "wow, I've been having these really realistic dreams about having painful contractions". But I still felt normal and went back to sleep.

At 1:30am exactly, I woke up to my first "real" contraction - it jolted me awake and felt like a crazy menstrual cramp that was ripping through my belly. I sat up and said to J "Holy shit, I'm in real labor"