Clay's birth

Before the labor becomes a distant memory, I want to write everything that I can remember of Clay's amazing arrival.  I thought the Saturday before my due date was going to be the day.  We (me and Chris) were going to go to prenatal yoga but since I had contractions, I decided to skip it.  Then, it stops, and a few days later my Aug 14 due date comes and goes.  Then, finally, on a full "blue" moon I start labor in the early morning of Wednesday August 21.  It was a hot day, as most of them are.  I "slept" until about 6am when I got up, showered and put on makeup (it's a big day after all).

Karen kept her normal appointment at 9am and confirmed everything was good.  Chris and I went for a walk in the woods behind the house.  I don't remember a lot of the day (already?!) but we were in our room, I labored a lot on the exercise ball from Kerry.  We listened to my dad's music mix as well as the hypnobirthing CDs.  By about 6pm my contractions were getting more intense and were 3 minutes apart.  We called Karen and she came over around 6:30pm at which time she checked me and I was 6 cm.  They decided I could (finally) get in the tub.

My mom lit the candle (which prompted the neighbors to light their candles) but I got worried that maybe I still had 8 hours or more to go.  The candles only burned for 8 hours so I would be very frustrated if the candle burned out before I met my son.   I kept thinking that it's going to get worse and this could last a long time.  Trying to mentally prepare myself for a long night.

I got in the tub around 7 and immediately felt relief from the contractions.  It got much better..I had maybe 5 contractions and then..TRANSITION!  The next 6 contractions were the most painful I had experienced.  It made me want to crawl out of my skin.  I got on my knees in the tub, trying to find a less painful position but there just wasn't one.  Chris talked me through going to the waterfall.  He did such a great job and although I was in so much pain I couldn't interact, it was really helpful.  I remember mustering all of my energy to ask him to keep going.  I remember saying "go", hoping that he would know that meant to keep "go"ing with the story but realized that it could have been my invitation for him to leave...not what I wanted.

I remember seeing what looked like a balloon come out and I think that was my bag of waters but I could also just have been seeing things.  Hypnobirthing prepared me to breathe through the pain and to remember this was the path towards birth.  The more I resisted and tensed up, the harder it would be.  If I could just breathe and try to relax, the contractions would actually be better.  It only took those 6 awful contractions to get me to full dilated and I said "I think I need to push."

I pushed a total of 4 times