My water broke early in the morning on June 9. At the time, I wasn’t sure if it was my water that had broken. I woke Adam up, and he then called the doctor. The doctor stated that we could go in to the hospital to have a test run to determine if the fluid was indeed amniotic fluid, or we could try the “gravity test” at home. I decided to try the gravity test. After 20 minutes of laying down, I stood up quickly to see if any more fluid came out. Nothing happened so Adam and I went back to bed.

The next morning, Adam and I got up at our normal time to get ready for work. As I was getting ready, I decided that we should go in to the hospital just in case since things didn’t quite seem normal. We packed all of our stuff and had a big breakfast in case this was the real deal. I had to call a sub for my classroom and inform my teammates that I wouldn’t be at school.

When we got to the hospital, we went to Maternal Assessment. They did the swab test and hooked up the fetal monitors. I was having regular contractions but I couldn’t feel any of them. The results came back from the lab after about 30 minutes. The nurse walked in to the room and said, “It’s baby day.” I remember feeling neither excited or scared; I had a hard time believing that our child was on its way 8 days early.**

We were walked over to labor and delivery and checked in to our room. My doctor did an exam to determine how dilated I was, and to re-break my water since the initial tear had shifted.

Adam and I spent the next 3-4 hours walking the halls. The floor is shaped like a Y. My contractions were regular enough that I would consistently have a contraction in the same arm of the Y. I found myself trying to speed up as we walked through that arm in order to make the contraction pass quickly. Unfortunately, that’s not how contractions work…

Around lunch time, we returned to our room for a popsicle break. My contractions were getting stronger so I decided to try the birthing ball. At this point, my contractions escalated very quickly. Almost all of my labor was back labor. I started to max-out the meter on the ticker tape. They also had an abnormal pattern where I would get three contractions back-to-back with no break and then have a 5-6 minute break. We asked the nurse to start an IV in order to prepare for an epidural when I was 5-6 centimeters dilated.

I went into the birth with an open mind towards medication. I wanted to go as far as I could go without medication. If that meant that I would deliver without, then great. If that meant that I opted for an epidural, then I wouldn’t be disappointed or upset with myself. Given my abnormal contraction pattern and almost exclusive back labor, I’m very glad that an epidural was still an option.

Once I got the epidural, I spent the rest of the afternoon resting with a peanut ball between my legs to widen my pelvis to encourage the baby to continue to move down and possibly rotate. The abnormal contraction pattern was suggesting that the baby was “sunnyside up,” but this was never officially determined.

Shortly after 5pm the nurses began to prepare me for pushing. We were told that we would spend about 30 minutes doing practice pushes before they would call my doctor since I was a first-time mom. Ten minutes into pushing, the nurses told me that I needed to stop or slow down or else I would beat my doctor.

Once my doctor arrived and scrubbed-up, we had about three more sets of contractions until the baby was born. We had a healthy baby boy weighing in at 8 pounds and measuring 20 1/4 inches.

 

Once Tiny was cleaned off, we had our Golden Hour together before being transferred to recovery.

We spent the rest of the evening deciding on a name for Tiny. Eventually we decided his name would be Henry Oswald Adventure Wolf. The name Henry had gradually been gaining on our list of contenders over the past few weeks. Oswald was a name that came to Adam after the birth (and, yes, it does have a Doctor Who connection but that’s not why we chose it). I had been thinking of other “O” middle names as well but I really liked how it sounded when paired with Henry. We knew we would get a lot of questions about the second middle name of Adventure. We had decided long ago that we wanted our child to have a unique middle name. Our choice of Adventure reflects the “theme” of this pregnancy. This pregnancy has been nothing less than an adventure with travels to Germany, Malaysia, Spain, Canada and Japan for one or both of us, and with learning about and dealing with the ups and downs of my uterine fibroid.

**Adam had told me 2 weeks prior that it would be best if the baby didn’t come until the second Monday in June (the 9th). That would give him enough time to finish his projects and feel prepared for the baby. I was convinced that I would go past my due date so I didn’t see any possibility of this being a problem at the time.