I am excited to announce that after a little hiatus, I am back to posting birth stories here each week! To start the new season of stories, my friend Rachel Gabrielson has contributed one of the most compelling, creatively written, and heart-wrenching accounts that I have read. Thank you so much, Rachel, for sharing!--Leigh
Note from Rachel: "This is where I was three years ago. This experience and the discovery of Leigh's blog has opened my world to the crucial discourse about birthing options."
Thursday, October 4th, 2007
Lost time. This thought looped through my mind as I watched our beautiful Olivia deep asleep in that newborn slumber. No matter how much I snuggled her, it wasn’t enough. Twenty six hours might as well have been an eternity. Three hours could have been three years.
“Please take more photos of us,” I told R. My eyes were bloodshot and my nose was puffy red. All three of us were healthy and safe, yet I couldn’t stop weeping and no number of photos of me and our baby was enough. Why did the gaps of our time together feel as wide and deep as a canyon?
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007
2 a.m. “Goodnight, my angel now it’s time to sleep. And still so many things I want to say. Remember all the songs you sang for me. When we went sailing on an emerald bay.”
Billy Joel’s lyrics eerily pierced the silence of the pitch-black room on the bottom floor of the hospital. The music was trailing out of R’s cell phone. He had set this new ringtone, one of his favorite songs, amid the exuberance of our new baby. It was our alarm clock. R flipped the light switch. The fluorescent lights blinked erratically before flooding the room. Everything about the room gave me the creeps. It was like being on the set of a Stanley Kubrick film. This is where we had been moved. We were told we were no longer allowed to stay in the same unit as Olivia who wasn’t quite three days old. Our insurance coverage didn’t extend to a third night. Since they have a special nursery where babies undergo light treatment or sleep separately from exhausted parents upon request, Olivia’s new room was there. It had been a long 18 hours.
When the nurse on duty late Tuesday afternoon broke the news to me, my tears soaked half a box of tissue. At that time, it wasn’t clear if we could stay at the hospital. We had missed the boat for what was apparently a limited number of “nesting” rooms for parents whose babies were admitted longer than the mother. We didn’t even know there was a boat to catch. And why couldn’t I spend the night next to my baby who needed light treatment for jaundice? When my mom was in this very hospital, I slept in a cot right next to her bed. Why is this different? No one had answers. This is just how it is. We were told most parents go home and come back for their babies when they are better.
R, who avoids confrontation in 99 percent of scenarios and hates making a scene, paced around the nurses’ station. From his soapbox, he demanded answers and a quick fix.
“My wife is breastfeeding our daughter. If we have to camp out right here in the nursery, that is exactly what we will do!!” This confrontation is what led us to our creepy, “off the books,” digs.
When I swung the heavy, wooden door open in my nightgown carrying a boppy pillow, the nurse on duty looked puzzled. We were those people. The troublemakers. We had been made to feel like anarchists for trying to stay in the same room as our baby and breastfeed her around the clock.
9:30 a.m.
Our nightmare is almost over. The sun is out and the natural light is diffusing the creepy ambiance of the room. Any moment, we were expecting word of our daughter’s progress. We might get to take her home today. In the meantime, I showered, dressed and awaited R’s return with waffles from the cafeteria. We had just returned from Olivia’s most recent nursing session recently and we stared eagerly at our cell phones for a call from the pediatrician. We left very specific instructions for the nurse on duty: please call us the moment Dr. S arrives! Every bone in our body ached to be whole again so we could go home with our baby and snuggle her to our heart’s delight. No more wrist bands, no more nurses. Just us. Please. Please.
“Is the volume up?” I asked R about his phone as I checked my phone’s ringer volume for probably the 10th time.
11 a.m.
“Any missed calls?”
None. It was getting closer to our baby’s next breastfeeding session.
“Let’s just go back up.”
Off the elevator and one more wristband entrance later, the nurse told us that Olivia was ready to go home.
“We bathed her for you! Dr. S got here right after you left the last time. We were wondering where you were.”
“What?! Someone was supposed to call us!”
“Oh, Dr. S said he would. We just thought you went out to breakfast, so we didn’t want to bother you. She’s much more alert now and her skin looks great.”
Someone had dressed Olivia in a white hospital shirt, hat, and socks.
“Can I hold her?” I asked. The question dripped out of my mouth and only later would it seem absurd. We felt like slaves to hospital rules and protocol.
I held Olivia and wept again. We could have taken her home three hours ago. Every fiber of my being felt a loss. I rocked her on the hospital rocking chair, holding her tight…We were supposed to be together. We were supposed to be together. We were supposed to be together.
When we signed the proper paperwork, someone escorted us outside, per hospital protocol. She was buckled into a carrier since I was not allowed to carry her out. These were the rules created to prevent kidnapped babies. Apparently. Amid all the wristband checks, I felt compelled to look at our daughter again carefully. This better be our baby.
When we finally got home around lunch time, I searched in vain for a pair of scissors. Every wristband was snipped immediately.
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007
What an amazing 36 hours. Not even a cranky post-birth nurse (who cleaned me up like I was a baby, what with my legs being dead logs) could get me down. Nor the awkwardness of having various nurses handle my breast into my baby's mouth when I only asked for some input. Our spirits were difficult to darken with our new baby there with us. The tiny hospital room’s door was constantly swinging with friends and family coming in to gush over her. It was absolutely the happiest time of my life. Olivia, so beautiful, her name so fitting and with eyes bluer than the sky. When we breastfed, her two big, blue eyes would stare so deeply at me – I couldn’t think of anything cuter or more beautiful than the way her eyes would stand out among the snuggly blankets.
Her skin was yellowing, but R and I didn’t realize this. Being around her all the time made it hard to notice. We’d been told the previous day that they were keeping an eye on her bilirubin levels, which were pretty high. But this morning we got the news that our baby would undergo light treatment. Otherwise, she was in grave danger of brain damage, they told us. I had no more than 30 seconds notice. I was told and then Olivia was being rolled away to the next room on the day we were all supposed to go home together.
After they rolled her away, we were to attend the semi-required, hospital parenting class for newborn care tips. All three of us were supposed to attend as a family.
R and I walked in without Olivia. I quietly wept through the entire class Every woman in attendance was nestled with her baby, many were even breastfeeding. The void I felt trumped even my darkest moments when my mom was dying of cancer. I had literally just been taken from the happiest moments of my life to the saddest. Something very wrong and unnatural had just taken place.
Sunday, September 30th, 2007
My labor was like something out of a text book. And by text book, I mean the spiral-bound hospital manual with Baby Blues cartoons in each section. I did everything I could think of to prepare for our daughter’s birth. This was not easy because I couldn’t think of much. Our obstetrician wasn’t interested in chatting or getting to know us at all. She pointed me to the manual when I inquired about birthing preparation. Luckily, my aunt told me prenatal yoga would be helpful. Other than that, I was on my own with only my skewed, preconceived notions about birthing. Information outside of a doctor’s office made me nervous. Surely I should take my tips only from people who went to med school. TLC programming became my only window into the world of birthing. And since my mom died six years earlier, I couldn’t go to her for answers. Even worse, I knew she probably wouldn’t have many: my late sister and I were delivered by a prescheduled C-section per the advice of her obstetrician in Mexico City, where she was living at the time of her first pregnancy. She never talked to me about laboring because she never experienced it. I still remember so vividly the vertical scar on her belly – it was light white and silky.
In our roomy labor & delivery room, I placed a printed sheet of photos of my mom beside my bed. I had procrastinated, so they were not cut out and placed in the picture book I always envisioned I would have for my first birth. They would be focal points in case I could feel the pain through the epidural. The concept of labor pain frightened me. And even knowing that my mom brought me into this world through a prescribed c-section, the idea of that scared me too.
The morning proceeded quickly – I was not to be the 95 percent of women I viewed in The Baby Story who got stuck at 5 centimeters dilation. Less than 11 hours into my labor (which felt like three), our wonderful labor and delivery nurse, C, was reporting that I was 9 centimeters dilated. The nurse guided us so lovingly through the whole process. She took time to explain what was happening. She was reassuring in exactly the way I’d want her to be. This was a relief since the obstetrician I’d been seeing all these months would not be seeing me today. She wasn’t on call. Someone else, someone with a brusk personality, would be “catching” our baby.
When the obstetrician walked in to the report that I would start pushing soon, she measured my dilation.
“She’s only 6. Maybe 6 ½.”
“Really?” C responded, puzzled.
The two of them had an exchange about the discrepancy in their measurements, but the doctor didn’t forfeit her position. She ordered me on pitocin, saying that I needed some help to progress faster and left the room.
C couldn’t make heads or tails out of the doctor’s measurement, so she checked again.
“Maybe the doctors fingers don’t stretch enough?”
I started to feel a burning sensation in my back. The numbness was wearing off from the epidural and the pitocin was kicking in. My contractions started to become relentless and would last for several minutes straight. Is that normal? I have no idea. When no one was looking, C turned my pitocin level down. She explained that she’s been doing this for some 20 years and that I didn’t need that much pitocin and that I would be ready to push any moment.
She was right. A little after 10 a.m. (shortly after the obstetrician told me I was only 6 centimeters), I was ready to push.
She comforted and cheerleaded me during the hard labor stage, zig-zagging between me and the sink to place warm, wet wash clothes on my groin.
“What happened with the epidural?” the doctor asked to no one in particular.
Everyone shrugged – no one had answers. The epidural was clearly functional to some degree since I couldn’t lift my legs after our baby’s arrival. Yet… I was in a lot of pain. “Do you mean pressure?” the doctor asked me.
“Pain.”
I was sweaty, nauseated, and my lower back ached and burned. That’s about all I can remember about the pain. Without realizing it, I had been rubbing my thigh in a rhythmic fashion, which our nurse explained is a natural coping mechanism to distract my mind.
I couldn’t have been more happy to push because it felt like a relief.
I pushed for an hour at which point the doctor told me she would be doing an episiotomy. I didn’t feel this and didn’t know how to respond when I was told. But after the cut, I did one more push and R tells me that our baby came flying out as though a quarter-inch of skin was all that I needed to push by.
The moment Olivia gushed out of my body, I felt nothing but extreme bliss. All the pain was gone, R and I were crying joyfully and nothing else mattered.
Olivia was placed directly on my chest, skin-to-skin, where she cried. She was tucked inside my hospital gown and I stroked her back and told her, “I know… I know… tell me about it.” I was so in love with her from the moment I saw her. Her little fingers were pruned, her hair was dark brown and soft, and her eyes were a little squinty. She was perfect and scored a 9 on the Apgar. C gave me a hug, told me how great I did, and said goodbye. She had another patient to attend to.
A little later, on the phone, a friend of mine asked about my cold.
“Cold?”
Saturday, September 29th, 2007
Mid-afternoon: Of course I’d get the sniffles. It was my due date and I was staring straight into the reality that my first-ever labor experience may include a stuffy nose and fever.
And GASP… it will be October on Monday! Why was my heart set so firmly on a September baby? Because I like sapphire? I felt ready to have our baby with us – to rock her in the rocking chair we purchased, to lay her across my lap on the squishy, nursing pillow we obtained... to snuggle her and love her and get our lives as a family started.
But why the sinus pressure and sore throat. *Groooooan* I leaned back against the balance ball I had purchased, special for this pregnancy, and stretched my back across it. This pose had become one of my favorite summer activities as our Phoenix, Arizona home’s air conditioning unit pumped refrigerated, 77-degree air across my baby belly. All summer, I basked in my growing belly. I took better care of it than our dead house plants – I slathered it with coconut butter lotion on a daily basis and then would crawl into bed with my husband and read the baby bump stories. We’d read all kinds of stories, like Cat in the Hat. Or Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. It was a very happy and literate belly and we couldn’t have been more proud of it. Summer also meant a reprieve from the petri dish that was my 5th grade classroom. But there I was with the tissue box, ready to pop any moment. Or never. I’m never having this baby, she’s never coming. I’m pregnant forever. A third phone call came in and it was ignored like the other two. That’s fine – pregnancy has been fun, so why not forever? How hilarious was it when my stomach jumped seemingly two feet when we went to that acoustic concert at the coffee shop? That was awesome. Pregnancy is fun.
Evening: Another dinner and movie with R before there’s three of us? Okay. That’s weird. I never turn down cheese cake.
10 p.m. “I guess that movie was okay. I mean, it was entertaining I suppose,” I explained to my very sleepy husband. I don’t think he even heard my ground-breaking critique of The Kingdom; his head was already on the pillow and he had become unresponsive.
10:01 p.m. Cramping.
10:05 p.m. Cramping.
10:10 p.m. What IS this, my first period ALL over again? Images of Teen Magazine and Noxema face wash flashed through my mind. This can’t be early labor can it? Cramping, cramping.
10:15 I need to stand up. I explained to R that I would go take a bath since I am cramping. Unrseponsive. *Deep, sleepy breathing sounds*
If I can relax in the bath, then I’m not going into labor.
Midnight: “Wake up R. My contractions haven’t stopped for almost two hours and they’re coming regularly.” (He’s alive!) I pulled off my Mickey Mouse watch and we began to keep track.
This hospital birth took place at Banner Desert Medical Center in Mesa, AZ.
Cutting Bands
Our hospital birth saga that kept going
Thursday, October 4th, 2007
Lost time. This thought looped through my mind as I watched our beautiful Olivia deep asleep in that newborn slumber. No matter how much I snuggled her, it wasn’t enough. Twenty six hours might as well have been an eternity. Three hours could have been three years.
“Please take more photos of us,” I told R. My eyes were bloodshot and my nose was puffy red. All three of us were healthy and safe, yet I couldn’t stop weeping and no number of photos of me and our baby was enough. Why did the gaps of our time together feel as wide and deep as a canyon?
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007
2 a.m. “Goodnight, my angel now it’s time to sleep. And still so many things I want to say. Remember all the songs you sang for me. When we went sailing on an emerald bay.”
Billy Joel’s lyrics eerily pierced the silence of the pitch-black room on the bottom floor of the hospital. The music was trailing out of R’s cell phone. He had set this new ringtone, one of his favorite songs, amid the exuberance of our new baby. It was our alarm clock. R flipped the light switch. The fluorescent lights blinked erratically before flooding the room. Everything about the room gave me the creeps. It was like being on the set of a Stanley Kubrick film. This is where we had been moved. We were told we were no longer allowed to stay in the same unit as Olivia who wasn’t quite three days old. Our insurance coverage didn’t extend to a third night. Since they have a special nursery where babies undergo light treatment or sleep separately from exhausted parents upon request, Olivia’s new room was there. It had been a long 18 hours.
When the nurse on duty late Tuesday afternoon broke the news to me, my tears soaked half a box of tissue. At that time, it wasn’t clear if we could stay at the hospital. We had missed the boat for what was apparently a limited number of “nesting” rooms for parents whose babies were admitted longer than the mother. We didn’t even know there was a boat to catch. And why couldn’t I spend the night next to my baby who needed light treatment for jaundice? When my mom was in this very hospital, I slept in a cot right next to her bed. Why is this different? No one had answers. This is just how it is. We were told most parents go home and come back for their babies when they are better.
R, who avoids confrontation in 99 percent of scenarios and hates making a scene, paced around the nurses’ station. From his soapbox, he demanded answers and a quick fix.
“My wife is breastfeeding our daughter. If we have to camp out right here in the nursery, that is exactly what we will do!!” This confrontation is what led us to our creepy, “off the books,” digs.
When I swung the heavy, wooden door open in my nightgown carrying a boppy pillow, the nurse on duty looked puzzled. We were those people. The troublemakers. We had been made to feel like anarchists for trying to stay in the same room as our baby and breastfeed her around the clock.
9:30 a.m.
Our nightmare is almost over. The sun is out and the natural light is diffusing the creepy ambiance of the room. Any moment, we were expecting word of our daughter’s progress. We might get to take her home today. In the meantime, I showered, dressed and awaited R’s return with waffles from the cafeteria. We had just returned from Olivia’s most recent nursing session recently and we stared eagerly at our cell phones for a call from the pediatrician. We left very specific instructions for the nurse on duty: please call us the moment Dr. S arrives! Every bone in our body ached to be whole again so we could go home with our baby and snuggle her to our heart’s delight. No more wrist bands, no more nurses. Just us. Please. Please.
“Is the volume up?” I asked R about his phone as I checked my phone’s ringer volume for probably the 10th time.
11 a.m.
“Any missed calls?”
None. It was getting closer to our baby’s next breastfeeding session.
“Let’s just go back up.”
Off the elevator and one more wristband entrance later, the nurse told us that Olivia was ready to go home.
“We bathed her for you! Dr. S got here right after you left the last time. We were wondering where you were.”
“What?! Someone was supposed to call us!”
“Oh, Dr. S said he would. We just thought you went out to breakfast, so we didn’t want to bother you. She’s much more alert now and her skin looks great.”
Someone had dressed Olivia in a white hospital shirt, hat, and socks.
“Can I hold her?” I asked. The question dripped out of my mouth and only later would it seem absurd. We felt like slaves to hospital rules and protocol.
I held Olivia and wept again. We could have taken her home three hours ago. Every fiber of my being felt a loss. I rocked her on the hospital rocking chair, holding her tight…We were supposed to be together. We were supposed to be together. We were supposed to be together.
When we signed the proper paperwork, someone escorted us outside, per hospital protocol. She was buckled into a carrier since I was not allowed to carry her out. These were the rules created to prevent kidnapped babies. Apparently. Amid all the wristband checks, I felt compelled to look at our daughter again carefully. This better be our baby.
When we finally got home around lunch time, I searched in vain for a pair of scissors. Every wristband was snipped immediately.
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007
What an amazing 36 hours. Not even a cranky post-birth nurse (who cleaned me up like I was a baby, what with my legs being dead logs) could get me down. Nor the awkwardness of having various nurses handle my breast into my baby's mouth when I only asked for some input. Our spirits were difficult to darken with our new baby there with us. The tiny hospital room’s door was constantly swinging with friends and family coming in to gush over her. It was absolutely the happiest time of my life. Olivia, so beautiful, her name so fitting and with eyes bluer than the sky. When we breastfed, her two big, blue eyes would stare so deeply at me – I couldn’t think of anything cuter or more beautiful than the way her eyes would stand out among the snuggly blankets.
Her skin was yellowing, but R and I didn’t realize this. Being around her all the time made it hard to notice. We’d been told the previous day that they were keeping an eye on her bilirubin levels, which were pretty high. But this morning we got the news that our baby would undergo light treatment. Otherwise, she was in grave danger of brain damage, they told us. I had no more than 30 seconds notice. I was told and then Olivia was being rolled away to the next room on the day we were all supposed to go home together.
After they rolled her away, we were to attend the semi-required, hospital parenting class for newborn care tips. All three of us were supposed to attend as a family.
R and I walked in without Olivia. I quietly wept through the entire class Every woman in attendance was nestled with her baby, many were even breastfeeding. The void I felt trumped even my darkest moments when my mom was dying of cancer. I had literally just been taken from the happiest moments of my life to the saddest. Something very wrong and unnatural had just taken place.
Sunday, September 30th, 2007
My labor was like something out of a text book. And by text book, I mean the spiral-bound hospital manual with Baby Blues cartoons in each section. I did everything I could think of to prepare for our daughter’s birth. This was not easy because I couldn’t think of much. Our obstetrician wasn’t interested in chatting or getting to know us at all. She pointed me to the manual when I inquired about birthing preparation. Luckily, my aunt told me prenatal yoga would be helpful. Other than that, I was on my own with only my skewed, preconceived notions about birthing. Information outside of a doctor’s office made me nervous. Surely I should take my tips only from people who went to med school. TLC programming became my only window into the world of birthing. And since my mom died six years earlier, I couldn’t go to her for answers. Even worse, I knew she probably wouldn’t have many: my late sister and I were delivered by a prescheduled C-section per the advice of her obstetrician in Mexico City, where she was living at the time of her first pregnancy. She never talked to me about laboring because she never experienced it. I still remember so vividly the vertical scar on her belly – it was light white and silky.
In our roomy labor & delivery room, I placed a printed sheet of photos of my mom beside my bed. I had procrastinated, so they were not cut out and placed in the picture book I always envisioned I would have for my first birth. They would be focal points in case I could feel the pain through the epidural. The concept of labor pain frightened me. And even knowing that my mom brought me into this world through a prescribed c-section, the idea of that scared me too.
The morning proceeded quickly – I was not to be the 95 percent of women I viewed in The Baby Story who got stuck at 5 centimeters dilation. Less than 11 hours into my labor (which felt like three), our wonderful labor and delivery nurse, C, was reporting that I was 9 centimeters dilated. The nurse guided us so lovingly through the whole process. She took time to explain what was happening. She was reassuring in exactly the way I’d want her to be. This was a relief since the obstetrician I’d been seeing all these months would not be seeing me today. She wasn’t on call. Someone else, someone with a brusk personality, would be “catching” our baby.
When the obstetrician walked in to the report that I would start pushing soon, she measured my dilation.
“She’s only 6. Maybe 6 ½.”
“Really?” C responded, puzzled.
The two of them had an exchange about the discrepancy in their measurements, but the doctor didn’t forfeit her position. She ordered me on pitocin, saying that I needed some help to progress faster and left the room.
C couldn’t make heads or tails out of the doctor’s measurement, so she checked again.
“Maybe the doctors fingers don’t stretch enough?”
I started to feel a burning sensation in my back. The numbness was wearing off from the epidural and the pitocin was kicking in. My contractions started to become relentless and would last for several minutes straight. Is that normal? I have no idea. When no one was looking, C turned my pitocin level down. She explained that she’s been doing this for some 20 years and that I didn’t need that much pitocin and that I would be ready to push any moment.
She was right. A little after 10 a.m. (shortly after the obstetrician told me I was only 6 centimeters), I was ready to push.
She comforted and cheerleaded me during the hard labor stage, zig-zagging between me and the sink to place warm, wet wash clothes on my groin.
“What happened with the epidural?” the doctor asked to no one in particular.
Everyone shrugged – no one had answers. The epidural was clearly functional to some degree since I couldn’t lift my legs after our baby’s arrival. Yet… I was in a lot of pain. “Do you mean pressure?” the doctor asked me.
“Pain.”
I was sweaty, nauseated, and my lower back ached and burned. That’s about all I can remember about the pain. Without realizing it, I had been rubbing my thigh in a rhythmic fashion, which our nurse explained is a natural coping mechanism to distract my mind.
I couldn’t have been more happy to push because it felt like a relief.
I pushed for an hour at which point the doctor told me she would be doing an episiotomy. I didn’t feel this and didn’t know how to respond when I was told. But after the cut, I did one more push and R tells me that our baby came flying out as though a quarter-inch of skin was all that I needed to push by.
The moment Olivia gushed out of my body, I felt nothing but extreme bliss. All the pain was gone, R and I were crying joyfully and nothing else mattered.
Olivia was placed directly on my chest, skin-to-skin, where she cried. She was tucked inside my hospital gown and I stroked her back and told her, “I know… I know… tell me about it.” I was so in love with her from the moment I saw her. Her little fingers were pruned, her hair was dark brown and soft, and her eyes were a little squinty. She was perfect and scored a 9 on the Apgar. C gave me a hug, told me how great I did, and said goodbye. She had another patient to attend to.
A little later, on the phone, a friend of mine asked about my cold.
“Cold?”
Saturday, September 29th, 2007
Mid-afternoon: Of course I’d get the sniffles. It was my due date and I was staring straight into the reality that my first-ever labor experience may include a stuffy nose and fever.
And GASP… it will be October on Monday! Why was my heart set so firmly on a September baby? Because I like sapphire? I felt ready to have our baby with us – to rock her in the rocking chair we purchased, to lay her across my lap on the squishy, nursing pillow we obtained... to snuggle her and love her and get our lives as a family started.
But why the sinus pressure and sore throat. *Groooooan* I leaned back against the balance ball I had purchased, special for this pregnancy, and stretched my back across it. This pose had become one of my favorite summer activities as our Phoenix, Arizona home’s air conditioning unit pumped refrigerated, 77-degree air across my baby belly. All summer, I basked in my growing belly. I took better care of it than our dead house plants – I slathered it with coconut butter lotion on a daily basis and then would crawl into bed with my husband and read the baby bump stories. We’d read all kinds of stories, like Cat in the Hat. Or Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. It was a very happy and literate belly and we couldn’t have been more proud of it. Summer also meant a reprieve from the petri dish that was my 5th grade classroom. But there I was with the tissue box, ready to pop any moment. Or never. I’m never having this baby, she’s never coming. I’m pregnant forever. A third phone call came in and it was ignored like the other two. That’s fine – pregnancy has been fun, so why not forever? How hilarious was it when my stomach jumped seemingly two feet when we went to that acoustic concert at the coffee shop? That was awesome. Pregnancy is fun.
Evening: Another dinner and movie with R before there’s three of us? Okay. That’s weird. I never turn down cheese cake.
10 p.m. “I guess that movie was okay. I mean, it was entertaining I suppose,” I explained to my very sleepy husband. I don’t think he even heard my ground-breaking critique of The Kingdom; his head was already on the pillow and he had become unresponsive.
10:01 p.m. Cramping.
10:05 p.m. Cramping.
10:10 p.m. What IS this, my first period ALL over again? Images of Teen Magazine and Noxema face wash flashed through my mind. This can’t be early labor can it? Cramping, cramping.
10:15 I need to stand up. I explained to R that I would go take a bath since I am cramping. Unrseponsive. *Deep, sleepy breathing sounds*
If I can relax in the bath, then I’m not going into labor.
Midnight: “Wake up R. My contractions haven’t stopped for almost two hours and they’re coming regularly.” (He’s alive!) I pulled off my Mickey Mouse watch and we began to keep track.
This hospital birth took place at Banner Desert Medical Center in Mesa, AZ.
Heather Armstrong (self-described as "the woman who was all EPIDURAL ON THE ROCKS, PLEASE!") has me doing a happy dance this morning with her 
