10lb 6oz Isaac's Birth By Kedi Simpson I was 40 plus 1 – more pregnant than I’d ever been, and was fluctuating between feeling ‘this baby will come when it’s ready’ and thinking ‘I want this baby out’. I was slightly anxious on one level that the longer he stayed in, the bigger he was going to get, and I knew I grew big babies anyway. Although Lynn had said she thought he wasn’t going to be as big as I was predicting, I felt that we were expecting more than 10lb of little boy – and although I knew I could do it, at some level I would have been delighted to birth 7lb rather than 10!
I had on-and-off contractions on the Sunday morning, and again on the Monday morning, including one painful catch-your-breath type at 10.30am. Then nothing much until the kids’ bedtime, when they were irregular but making their presence felt. Three times over those two days I tried to time them and write them down, but it was almost as if the mere act of writing down the times sent them haywire again. Instead, at around 8.30pm Jo decided to go to bed; we both felt that this could well be it tonight, and thought it would be sensible to go to sleep. At 9, I followed him, and again on lying down and relaxing, the contractions stopped.
At 9.50 I was woken by a strong one, though, and lay awake, breathing through just three or four more contractions, until I woke Jo at 10.45pm and told him I thought we were in business – still far from regular, but consistently strong. And at 11.15 I called Lynn – feeling calm and not too worried about what was to come. Her reaction was absolutely positive: no numbers, no ‘are they five minutes apart’, no pigeon-holing. No element of mistrust or an attempt to assess me on the phone to make sure I was genuine. Just ‘excellent, that’s great news, I’ll see you as soon as I can’.
Suddenly I felt shaky, and by the time I’d finished the short walk into the kitchen, my whole body was quivering, my teeth chattering. We weren’t planning any vaginal examinations or intervention in this labour at all so I didn’t feel the need to do things by the book either. I knew that you’re not ‘supposed’ to get into the pool until you’re 4-5cm dilated, or if you’re not using dilation as a guide, when you’re in established labour. But I got in anyway because my instinct told me that’s where I’d feel most comfortable, and I knew these pains were not going to go away. This was the real thing.
Instantly I stopped shaking and felt relaxed; the pains, though still coming, became far gentler and I leant forwards in the pool with my head on the side and tried to relax. Jo had lit some candles – about six, around the kitchen – but that was far too bright and slowly he extinguished them until we were left with just one: a level of brightness that I could just about tolerate.
Lynn arrived at around midnight and I remember smiling at Jo, feeling that I knew our baby’s birthday then: it was going to be the 17th August. Lynn unpacked her bits and pieces and joined Jo next to the pool, on the floor, while I rode the contractions with my breath. Long exhalations helped immensely but I was acutely aware that the parts of the contractions where I had to breathe in was painful: it was a pay-off between the painful inhalations and the relief of the exhalations. Like in the last two labours I tried counting my breaths, and like in the last two labours I found that most of the contractions lasted around ten breaths, with the most painful bit around breath four.
The rest is already hazy. Time passed neither quickly nor slowly, and between the contractions I sometimes tried to doze, and other times felt really quite bored. I would have a batch of contractions that were regular, then some more time off, although gradually I could feel the strength of each one building in comparison to the last.
Eventually I asked Lynn where she thought I might be. I’d had a few double-peaked contractions by then – or were they simply one on top of the other – and I was disgusted to hear that she thought I might just about be in established labour! I wanted her to offer me a VE to give me a guage; I wanted to know whether I was in this for another hour or two or whether I was going to be at it all night. I wanted her to tell me it was all going to be over soon.
My noises changed. I had been blowing my breath out and then I began to make throaty noises within the contractions: I had to. The contractions were also feeling ever-so-slightly pushy. Within a few I was roaring hard and clutching Jo’s hand tightly as he sat opposite me. Around this stage I had a good length of time off, as well – no idea how much but it felt like at least five minutes – and the intellectual part of me that was still functioning wondered whether this was ‘rest and be thankful’. I certainly enjoyed the short lack of contractions. I also had a few that began to build and lasted a single breath, then went away. I think I was mentally fighting them; controlling their absence for a while.
I had this strange feeling that I can only describe as a ‘passage’ and asked Lynn whether the baby’s head was crowning. This wasn’t because I wanted a marker for the labour, but because I just didn’t recognise the feeling at all – there was no classic urge to poo that I’d experienced with the other two but a definite feeling of hardness inside, and several times I put my hand down to see what I could feel. Actually it was a precursor to the crowning, because then I could feel that immense pressure of the baby’s head just inside me, and the urge to push. It was about this time that I felt I did have a marker from Lynn – we’d discussed during the pregnancy how to do second stage, what her role would be and whether she would coach me, and she had said she was usually behind the woman with a torch watching the progress. I was dimly aware of the torchlight shining into the water, and knew I was nearly there.
Still, the urge to push was overwhelming but I felt I had to control it – it felt like I would pop otherwise. I really could control this stage; I let the baby come so far – as far as I dared – and then stopped it again. I bit on the side of the pool and it felt good to do that; I squeezed Jo’s hand (he said later that he thought I was going to break his fingers) and that felt good too. There was no ‘splitting in two’ sensation but finally a time where I knew I was going to open up further than I ever had done before, and with a huge push the baby’s head was born.
I felt like it was nearly over, but I knew I had one more hard bit to do. I waited – I wasn’t in any hurry to do the last hard bit! And then my body overcame my mind and out came Isaac’s body. ‘Pick your baby up. Pick your baby up,’ I heard, and saw this enormous pink body at the bottom of the pool, that I scooped up. It was no surprise that he was a boy.
He was weighed: I think that was the first time Lynn had felt him – even just looking at him she thought he was going to be 9lb something, but as she lifted him up in the stork-scales she began to laugh. ‘Old money or new?’ she asked – Jo said old, but when Lynn got out her conversion table and said ‘new’ because I didn’t want to wait another 30 seconds to hear how big her was. 4.7kg… 10lb 6oz.
Rosie (5) and Edie (2) were both born at home (8lb 15.5oz and 8lb 10oz) so I never expected to be anywhere but at home with baby number 3. I had a hard pregnancy and felt incredibly tired all the way through and at 36 weeks the baby was still breech. Thankfully a session with a Hypnotherapist had my baby turned round within 12 hours and we were ready to go, so much so that I expected him to arrive within the day.
No such luck. As I tell all my friends, babies come when they’re ready! On the day of his due date I finally had a show. Both the girls had been early so I couldn’t believe I was still carrying round this giant-sized bump. My husband was up in London, and the girls were off school, so not surprisingly nothing happened during the day. But, by the afternoon I’d had enough of waiting around, and called my sister to look after the girls so my husband could walk me round the village and try to get things moving. That turned out to be somewhat more effective than I expected with my waters gushing all over the local pub – I’d decided a pub crawl would be the ideal solution! – and we went back home to phone the midwife.
With the girls, my waters breaking was the signal that everything was about to kick off, but clearly this baby knew exactly what he wanted to do and when, so after eating tea, treating myself to a glass of wine – the heartburn having finally subsided - and mooching about for a bit, I gave up and went to bed, hoping I wouldn’t have too long to wait.
I woke up at about midnight to find the surges/contractions were finally getting going, so I went downstairs to walk about, put on my
