Matilda's Here!

A blog is long overdue, but babies keep you REALLY busy! Matilda Gail Moline was born on Saturday, March 27th, 2010 at 3:24pm. She weighed 9lbs and was 20.5 inches long. Leave it to me to have a giant kid!

We were planning to have a home birth, and spent the first 27 hours of labor at home. I went into labor around 11:45 Thursday night, and woke Jeff up around 5am to let him know he should stay home from work because I was pretty sure we were having a baby that day. Later in the evening my friend Cheska and my midwife Cathy came over, and our friend Nam came to pick Quinn up for an all night game night with some of Jeff's guy friends.

I don't even want to re-live the whole home experience, but it was really bad. The first several hours were fine, and I was doing really well with managing the contractions. Jeff gave me bubble wrap to pop during them to take my mind off things, I took some really hot showers, and it wasn't a huge deal. I called my midwife when things started getting hard to handle. By about 2am I couldn't handle the pain anymore, even with the birth tub. My contractions never really got regular, nobody could tell me how things were progressing, I couldn't pee by myself anymore.. I was SO done. The midwife and her RN were telling me all the reasons I shouldn't go to the hospital (2 hours wait, by then it will be too late for an epidural, blah blah blah) but at 4am I was outta there having Jeff take me to the hospital. The midwife called ahead to her back up doctor, who was fortunately already at the hospital that night.

We went in through the emergency room and they had me at labor and delivery about 5 minutes later with me whining and begging all the way for pain meds. They got me hooked up with an epidural about 30-40 minutes later after they did all their procedures like taking blood, etc. I got to lay there for a really long time having contractions I really didn't feel (thank goodness) and at about 11:30am I started pushing. I pushed until around 2:45pm, with them backing off the pain meds once so I could feel how to push and the intensity I needed, then I started getting really mad until finally they bumped the meds back up. I really didn't want a c-section, which is why they let me push so long, but finally the doctor came in and said that only about 5% of women deliver after pushing that many hours, and I could keep exhausting myself and turn it into an emergency, or we could just go ahead and do the c-section and have a baby soon. Everyone (Jeff's mom was there the whole time in the hospital helping, Jeff was there and my midwife came along and was allowed to offer lots of guidance) agreed that it was probably the best idea, even though I was freaking out and not wanting one. It didn't take long for logic to set in, though. Matilda's head was positioned wrong, my contractions still weren't super regular, pushing for 3.5 hours only moved her down the birth canal a centimeter or so, and they were seeing a lot of meconium once my water broke.

The c-section was kind of scary. They put the big curtain up, but you can still feel what they're doing. I could feel a lot of pain when they pulled her head back up to get her out. Just like it hurt going one direction as I was pushing, it hurt coming back up the other direction! Jeff got to go in with me and he watched the entire thing. He was pretty excited later to tell me that my guts are purple, and the doctor laid them on a table. I apparently met Matilda for a second after they got her out (Jeff has a picture proving it), but the first time I remember seeing her is in the recovery room when they brought her to me. I do remember hearing a lot of gurgling and suctioning when she was born, which I think was them getting the meconium out. She had a lot of it in her lungs. They got even more out in the nursery.

So things didn't go the way I planned. At first I felt like a failure, abandoning what I had wanted to do when I felt all that pain. I was really against epidurals because of the risks, and against hospitals in general. Now I am just grateful to have a really healthy baby. We would have ended up at the hospital anyway, and I am really glad we did because I don't think the midwife would have been equipped to handle it. Maybe she would have, maybe she wouldn't have. It ended up fine, though, and Matilda was born safely and got the care she needed as soon as she came out... which is a strange twist, considering part of the reason I wanted to stay out of the hospital was for her safety against interventions.

The one thing I have learned from this is not to judge. That seems to be a frequent lesson in my life. I am definitely not against home birth, and was really happy that my midwife was involved to the extent she was. I think it would have been much scarier if she hadn't been there acting as an advocate for a lot of my wishes. I guess I got a lesson in sitting on my home birth high horse, though, because after 27 hours my body was just not handling the pain and I have no idea how I would have gotten through having her at home. Plus with all that meconium, it could have gotten bad for her quickly.

Oh well. I have a really awesome baby and that's what matters! She didn't get her "I Was Born At Home" t-shirt, but she did get a "I was Helped Out by a Midwife" t-shirt. That works for me.