a change of plans :: welcome baby louis!

As many of you may or may not know, these last few weeks of pregnancy have been slightly harder on me than I'd anticipated.  I'd been feeling more run down than normal and had been experiencing my fair share of some intense braxton hicks contractions.  My doctors, much like myself according to Paul, are super laid back and constantly assured me that everything was as it should be.  Thursday I hit the 38 week mark (and because they don't check for effacement/dilation) I was in and out of there in less than 15 minutes and on my way to work.  Every day that I've gone to work, majority of my co-workers said they were surprised to see me there ... though at this rate, I assumed that baby boy was going to take his sweet time.

The days crept by, and I found myself once again feeling less than favorable on Saturday.  I wrote it off as me just being pregnant while hanging with a very active almost two year old, but did request to be reprieved from bedtime duty that evening.  Later that night, those silly contractions came back, and lingered for almost an hour.

Apparently, this was finally the real deal.

I woke Paul up to let him know that we should probably get ready to go to the hospital.  It was a little after 12:30 when we'd decided to make moves.  Olive was sleeping, my bag was packed and in the car, Knox was away at camp because of the wedding that weekend, and all that was left to do was get dressed, let Paul's parents know we were leaving, and go.  Paul woke up his mom and went to pull the car around (because I'd parked it in the venue parking) and I decided to make one last bathroom trip before we left (despite the poop jokes I'd made during Olive's delivery, my goal was to avoid that happening this time around).

I'd been timing my contractions, and though they were getting closer together, my pain level wasn't too over the top, and surprisingly, I was breathing through it much better than I thought I had the first time around with Olive.  Bear with me here now, because things started to get a little blurry...

While in the bathroom, I noticed some bleeding.  I found myself trying to determine if this was the mucus plug my doctor had mentioned, or, as Seth Rogan so eloquently put it, my "bloody show" - a bloody, mucusy discharge that only comes right before the baby comes, so if that hasn't happened yet, we have time and can make it to the hospital.

Spoiler alert: it was my bloody show.

At that point my contractions got really real and I was convinced I was about to toss my cookies (something that happened with O's delivery) I'm not a quiet thrower-upper (I cry like a baby) ... so as I proceeded to get ready to do that, I simultaneously got the urge to poop push.  

And that was it.  One push and he was crowning.  

He was crowning and I was panicking.  

I've been informed that while all of this was happening, Paul was outside pulling the car around.  He said he could hear me screaming from the other side of the barn (it's a decent distance, I promise).  His parents were on the other side of the (locked) bathroom door.  

I remember seeing the door jiggle, and I remember yelling "help me" as I braced a baby head and made my way to the door.  No sooner did I unlock it than Paul's mom ran in and caught the babe.

Cue epic amounts of shock.  

This was not my birth plan.

Paul's dad called 911, his mom wrapped Louis in a towel, and I sat on the floor and stared in disbelief.  A local EMT heard the call and came by, as did Paul's sister (a physician's assistant that happens to live across the street), and everyone did their best to encourage warmth and action from a very calm, blue in the face baby boy.

When paramedics came, they loaded Louis and I up on an odd chair stretcher to get us down the stairs, transferred us to a real stretcher, and popped us in the ambulance.  For anyone who hasn't done this whole delivering a baby pain-med free (which was also me) you will still feel all the feels of labor after having a child, because you still have to "birth" your placenta.  So... I was still having contractions, while in shock, almost completely naked, holding a blue in the face baby, in an ambulance.

This was not my birth plan.  

I wanted an epidural and cable.  

I stated that to the paramedics when they asked about this being a planned home birth.  They laughed.  Then they told me when it was time to deliver the placenta, that they'd pull over.

That sounds terrible.

They laughed again.

((Humor is a coping mechanism for me))

They asked which hospital we wanted to go to.  The original birth plan was to deliver at WDH in Dover (30 minutes away).  FMH was 15 minutes away, and since Louis was exceptionally blue in the face, that's where we went.

When we got to FMH, they informed us that we were the only ones in the maternity ward.  Interesting.  It's typically a full house in Dover.  They wheeled us in, checked us in, and popped Lou under a heat lamp.  He was 4 degrees colder than you're supposed to be.  I delivered my placenta there, got cleaned up, and they moved us to a different room (with a full sized bed!).  Lou stayed under the heat lamp until he was warm enough, and the three of us tried to come to terms with everything that had happened.  

Beyond having a natural birth, at my in-laws, and ending up in a hospital I didn't want to be at, everything turned out ok.  Lou was blue in the face because of some serious bruising (probably from me walking waddling across the bathroom to open the door while he was crowning), but passed all of his tests other than that.  The even let us go home Monday afternoon!  

And now I've got this wonderful baby boy sleeping on my chest.  Olive loves being a big sister so far and is exceptionally happy to be able to touch Lou's head (ahhh toddler logic).  So that's the story.  It was slightly unbelievable, and still is.  Luckily, Paul's mom popped in during the decreasing chaos and took a photo on the iPad to commemorate the whole experience.

Sorry Lou, it's a small town, and Strafford will be talking about this one for a while.

:)