A Birth Story, Part 1

By Saturday, everything was in place.

Friday night I had driven with my dad up to Bremerton to look at a car; we had sold the Scion on Tuesday and after just a few days I was already done with driving the rusty old Ford truck around. Friday night is a crappy time to buy a car, especially when your wife may go into labor at any moment, but there you are. Much better to have it done before labor than to try and find time to do it after.

So I bought the car, a 1994 Honda Accord EX Wagon, and it was a pleasant drive home on a clear night, and after that, we were in business. Now that we had a family car, we were ready to go. We were more than a week “past due” at this point, but the baby was healthy and there was still room and fluid for it to hang out in, so past due is really just academic. We were following our own schedule and it was right on track.

The wife woke me up just before 8:00 am on Saturday morning by saying, “I made potatoes and sausage. You should get up and eat them while you can because I think we’re going to have a baby today.”

I replied with an eloquent grunt and spent a good five minutes weighing my choices: be there to help my wife begin her labor / get more sleep.

I pulled myself out of bed, ate some sausage and potatoes, and proceeded to bustle.

Contractions up until that point were noticeable (to me, obviously the wife had noticed them all along), but they were something that the wife put up with quietly and privately. Saturday morning, though, they were loud and public, and I knew we were in business. By 9:00 am I had eaten my sausage and potatoes, taken a shower, and was dedicated to following the wife around to serve as her leaning post whenever a big contraction hit; they were all big contractions at this point. A little after 9:00 am we called the midwife, but told her she didn’t need to come over quiet yet, and called the birth support team (two of the wife’s best friends).

By 9:30 am the support team had arrived and we decided to call the midwife to come over. In the meantime, we began to fill the birth tub, boil lots of water, and we generally stayed quite busy. By 10:00 am or so, the midwife had arrived, and we were in business.

Continued in A Birth Story, Part 2