Delivery

I began having contractions the morning of 10/21/2014 with them occurring every 18-20 minutes or so. As the day went on, I tried keeping myself busy and making sure everything was ready to go as I knew our little Lia was going to be entering the world any time now. David came home from work early and brought us food for lunch before we relaxed in our last moments as a family of 2. My contractions started getting more and more intense and much more frequent so we decided to go for a long walk with Rex to keep labor progressing as it should. 7:49pm came around and it was time to give the on-call midwife at Best Start Birth Center a heads up that we were at 4-1-1 (4 minutes in between each contraction, lasting about a minute long and consistently for an hour). We were told to wait about an hour and see if anything had changed by then but we ended up waiting about 1.5 hours before calling saying we were down to 3-1-1. It was time.

The midwife informed us to gather our stuff and meet her at the birthing center just after 10pm. We arrived as our doula Natalie arrived and were guided up to the upstairs birthing room to finish labor. At this point I was still only dilated to 3cm and had the possibility of being sent home. Contractions got more and more intense and after a couple key indicators, I was given the okay to enter the tub. I entered the tub around midnight amongst a dimly lit setup with David, Natalie and our midwife Roseanne as labor got to be incredibly intense. I was still only dilated to 5cm but Lia was determined (and so was I) to have her arrive sooner than later. At 1:10am on 10/22/2014, Lia Jenette decided it was finally time to meet us. We had immediate skin-to-skin before David cut the umbilical cord and whisked her away for continued skin-to-skin as I was helped out of the tub to begin postpartum.

We spent the next few hours getting acquainted with each other as the nurse and midwife checked Lia out to make sure everything went well. Lia was perfect and I was in great shape as well. My mom (Lyzah) stopped by to say hi around 3:30am and David’s dad (Chip) stopped by around 4:00am. We packed up our stuff, got the car seat ready, and went home around 5:30am. I couldn’t be happier about my delivery and birthing process, it was everything I had hoped for and more!