Our Second Home Birth

Our little Isla Jane is now ONE!  I’m not entirely sure how this happened!  Wasn’t she just born last week?

I thought it was probably time I wrote about her home birth–something I’ve been meaning to do for, well, a year now.

Here’s what I learned during my second home birth…

1.  No two pregnancies or labors are the same.

Landon was a very fun surprise coming four days before his due date.  I felt so good and was so comfortable by the time he arrived, that I thought for sure he’d be two weeks “late.”  He wasn’t.  (Which leads me to a little side point: you do not have to feel terrible at the end of your pregnancy.  There is probably nothing wrong if you do feel terrible and nothing wrong if you don’t!)  So, I thought for sure Isla Jane would arrive a few days before her due date just like her big brother.  I “planned” her birth for the Saturday or Sunday before her Tuesday due date.  Babies cooperate like that, right?

Now, a big reason this was important was that my best friend is also a doula, but she lives in Colorado.  I really, really wanted her to be there for the birth because she was absolutely amazing during Landon’s birth and I totally needed her!  So, she arrived five days before my due date and booked a ticket to go home four days after my due date.  A nice little window of time to try to plan a spontaneous birth, right?

And then every morning I woke up, and I was still pregnant.

And then I thought I would be pregnant forever.

And then, of course, my water broke on the Friday night before the Saturday my friend was supposed to leave, and she rescheduled her flight and it all actually worked out!  And of course she was amazing all over again, and I totally needed her there.  Thank you, Lord!

So, all that to say…it can be totally different every time, and that is all normal!  If you’re the scheduling type, this is very, very hard.  Babies certainly teach us flexibility–even before they are born!

2.  Labor is really, really a mental thing.

Yes, it’s a physical thing, but it is a mental thing in a really big way.  One of the big reasons I don’t want to go to the hospital is because I have heard about tons of women who’s labors have stalled out as soon as they get to the hospital.  They are suddenly in someone else’s environment, and there are bright lights and paperwork, and someone else is running the show.  So then things don’t progress as quickly as they could and medical interventions start (which often lead to more interventions, which lead to more interventions).

Here’s where I saw this as the case in this birth.  My water broke around 9:30 at night on Friday night.  I had childcare for Landon lined up for the whole week leading up to this, and all of the next week, but not Saturday.  Of course.  I thought, okay, I’ll have the baby overnight, and Landon can wake up to his new sibling!  But then nothing really happened.  We got the house ready.  The midwives came as soon as my water broke (since my last labor was only 5 hours, and they live about an hour and a half away). Everyone was prepared for another fast labor, but then nothing much happened overnight.

I got a few hours of sleep, but then I was too uncomfortable to sleep.  I hung out in the living room with a heating pad on my back.  I checked my email.  I tried to sleep (sometimes I would sleep for 15 minutes at a time, wake up to a mild contraction which was not much more than just something that woke me up, and then go back to sleep).  I listened to music.  I laid by the fireplace.

By 7:00 the next morning, I started to think about what on earth we would do about Landon.  We really didn’t want him to be there.  He was two and a half at the time, and I just thought he would be really scared about the whole thing.  I am not one of those silent laboring women.  Labor rather sucks, and all I know how to do is make some noise about it.

So, Matthew’s aunt gets aunt of the year award.  She volunteered to take Landon for the day while we focused on baby.  And I think my labor started just about as soon as he walked out the door to leave.  By the time my friend returned from dropping him off (maybe 45 minutes later), I was already in the birth pool, probably somewhere around 5 cm.  It was amazing how quickly my body responded once I knew Landon was taken care of and safe.  It knew just what to do once I was in the right environment.

3.  You know your own body!

I wondered how different labor would be the second time around having experienced it before.  It is very, very common for your second labor to be about half the time of the first labor.  This would put me at a two and a half hour labor this time.  Yikes!  That sounded intense!

Once things really kicked into gear (upon Landon’s exit), they did progress very, very quickly.  I was in “latent labor” for one hour from 8-9, then active labor from 9-11.  She was born at 12:12, so you could say it went pretty quickly.

Now, with Landon, even though I’d never had a baby before, I just knew everything was right.  It was a crazy intense feeling, but the whole time, I knew things were going well and what I was feeling was right.  This time around I knew what level of intensity I had to get to before I could push.  I decided to get checked!  (I never got checked with Landon.  It wasn’t necessary.  Everything just moved along, and when it was time to push, I didn’t need anyone to tell me that! This time, I needed to know I was close to pushing.  Sure enough, I was at 9-10 cm.)

I think things would have gone actually much faster had we not run into the issue of a hematoma in my vaginal wall (basically a big pocket of blood that took up a lot of space).  I started pushing at about 11 a.m., and I felt like I knew what I needed to do to get her out.  I tried some of the same positions that worked great for Landon, but she wasn’t coming.  I knew something was off.  Turns out she was sideways and a bit stuck behind the hematoma (I did not know I had this.)  It wasn’t until the midwife physically moved the hematoma back behind the baby’s head that everything felt “right.”  I just knew she was in the right position after that.  Sure enough, twelve minutes later we were looking at each other and having our first face-to-face little chat.

I knew things were different with this birth.  I knew a few things were off.  For as hard as I was working, she wasn’t coming!  I also knew that I was getting really tired.  Probably around 11:30/11:45 I demanded a snack.  (I am apparently very bossy during labor.)  I knew I had to try to really relax and rest between contractions, eat a few berries for a little sugar, and listen to some brain wave therapy on my headphones to try to calm myself down and relax.  I knew I was headed for c-section territory if I didn’t regain a little energy.

4.  The hospital is not my happy place, and my midwife is smart.

So, after Baby Girl was born, my midwife strongly advised that we go to the hospital to make sure the hematoma was not continuing to grow in size.  These things can either go away completely on their own, or they can fill up with a ton of blood and cause you to, essentially, bleed out without ever bleeding out.  She didn’t have the proper tools to observe the hematoma based on its position after birth, so we went to the hospital to have it looked at.

I was so not happy to be there.  I yelled at a resident (who tried to stitch me up before I was numb!  Can you blame me?).  I wanted my baby.  (Big mistake.  Should have brought her along and not worried about keeping her away from hospital germs…she did come to the hospital later, and I was much happier!)  I had a little meltdown.  I wanted some food.  (Although my midwife made these really amazing date muffins, and I had pounded two of them immediately after giving birth.  No joke, but I did send Matthew to Chick-fil-A.)

But ya know what?  I needed to be examined in a hospital.  It’s all okay.  It’s why we have hospitals.  It just made me really, really glad to be home for the birth.

I ended up leaving the hospital that evening when it appeared that the hematoma was decreasing in size.  I went in the next day and had it examined again and then I went in to see my OB (who is also great) in the office a few days later.  Since it continued to decrease in size, no surgery was necessary.

As my doula friend says, “I’m not anti-hospital.  I’m just pro-home.”

They do not have cozy fireplaces and date muffins in hospitals, folks.

I think what I learned can apply to really any birth scenario that you choose!

• Trust your body!  
• Be mentally flexible with the timing of your labor (when it does and doesn’t start and how long it “should” last).  
• Educate yourself on all the “normal” ways to have a baby so that you can be mentally ready for whatever type of birth experience you want.  
• Birth without fear!!