A Birth Story | Welcoming Baby M

Our sweet baby, Morgan, was born on June 14th after about twelve hours of labor.  Looking back on it now, I can say that labor and delivery with her was fairly smooth, especially when compared to the birth of our first daughter, Madison.  So, let’s discuss the progression of her birth…

Prenatal Appointment (40 weeks)
I had a prenatal appointment on Monday at 3:45pm.  I hit 40 weeks on Sunday so at this checkup the doctor wanted to see if baby and I were making progress and  she wanted to schedule me for an induction.  After an exam she noted that I was about 5cm dilated but there was no effacement.  Bummer. With that said, we scheduled an induction for Friday, June 17th, which definitely worked for me as I did not want to have the baby on my birthday, June 19th (yikes)!  She then asked if I wanted to have my membranes stripped and I did.

Monday Evening
As soon as I got in the car after my appointment I started having somewhat intense contractions.  I made it home, ate and told Mario to get home as soon as he could because I wasn’t feeling well.  Once Mario arrived he gathered all of our bags and packed the car just in case tonight would be the night.  I started timing my contractions around 7pm.  But, on average, they were about 10 minutes apart.  I honestly wanted to make it through the night so that our four year old, Madison, could get a good nights rest.  If I could plan it out we would drop her off to daycare in the morning and have baby before it was time to pick her up that evening.  Silly me!

Early Tuesday Morning
We all went to bed but I never truly made it to sleep.  I’d try to drift off but the contractions were becoming unbearable.  By 2am I started timing them again and they were finally 5 minutes apart.  I waited until 3am to wake Mario.  We got dressed and headed to the hospital arriving at 3:30am.  Dr. Stembridge was on call and she had the nurses check me when I arrived.  Unfortunately, I was going through all of that pain without much progress. I continued to push through consistent contractions until daybreak.

Tuesday
Around 6am the doctor came in to check me and found that I was at about 6cm and finally starting to efface.  We would have this baby TODAY!  At 7am the shift changed so I had Dr. Benoit-Wilson and all new nurses, and they were ready to get the show on the road.  They did some monitoring and tried to make me comfortable.  I had Mario get Maddie dressed and he took her to daycare.  While he was gone I got my epidural and by the time he had returned I was feeling good and starting to rest/sleep a bit.

Tuesday Afternoon
Once the doctor realized that I was not going to progress much further on my own, she broke my water and we eventually had to start Pitocin as well.  By 2pm it was time!!  The doctor did a check and asked me to push lightly.  She quickly asked me to stop pushing realizing it would not take much before baby would be out.  She quickly called in more nurses, got fully gowned, got Mario fully gowned and we began.

She’s Here!
Once everyone was ready Dr. Wilson stated that I would push during the next contraction. I did just that, and she and Mario worked together to help me bring baby Morgan into this world at 2:16pm after just one push.  When people say that the second and subsequent babies come much faster they are correct.  Everything happened so fast and before I knew it I had the prettiest little baby in my arms.  We laid skin to skin for a bit before they took her to do a few checks in the room.  Soon after I had them hand her back to me so that we could attempt to nurse.  As with Madison, she latched just fine that day which is always a good sign to me even though we struggled in the days to come.  We were eventually moved to another room and we decided to check out of the hospital the next day after staying only one night.

It was such a good labor and delivery experience and we are STILL in disbelief that we have a new baby in the home making us the parents of two. TWO!  The past two weeks have been full of adjusting, sleeping, healing, cleaning, eating and taking it all in.  I keep feeling like I should be doing so much more while on leave but I’ve been forcing myself to relax and live in this moment.

God is good and I can’t help but #LoveThisLife that he’s blessed us with!!

Be Intentional,

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Photo by Natasha N Smith Photography

 

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