Ari’s Birth Story // Part 1.

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It’s taken me over four weeks to sit down and write this out for a few reasons. One of which would be because I’m just plain busy + overwhelmed with a new baby. The other is because I’ve had to really process it all; which has taken a bit of time.

In full disclosure, there is nothing pretty about his birth story. It’s raw. It’s real. And it’s uncensored. Oh — and there’s a lot of talk about poop.

Let’s start at the beginning…

The weekend before baby boy made his grand entrance I started to get restless — really restless — so I took some advice from my sister-in-law and scheduled an acupuncture appointment for Monday morning. The acupuncturist worked his magic, I went home, and went about my business [like scheduling this 41 week blog post]. I went back for a second session of acupuncture in the afternoon and then came home.

When I got home I noticed something that I thought may be my mucous plug when I went to the bathroom. But who could be sure? Ha!

I told Chad that I wanted to go to the gym so we could walk the track.

I thought I started feeling some contractions while we were were walking, but I wasn’t counting on it [nor was I counting them]. I just didn’t want to get my hopes up only to be let down.

When we got home, Chad was busy making dinner while I was busy making cookies [cause what else do you do when you’re 41 weeks pregnant? Ha!]. At this point it was about 7:30 PM. I started counting my contractions and they were 6 minutes apart. I knew that I was supposed to go about my daily routine to ensure that it wasn’t false labor, so I took a shower and vacuumed the whole house. The contractions didn’t go away.

And now they were about 4 minutes apart.

And if you’re not familiar with the early stages of labor, here’s something you may not know [but someone should tell you the ugly stuff, so I’ll be that person — you’re welcome]:

An early sign of labor is pooping. Like, the baby drops and you have to go NOW type of pooping. Generally, a few times.

So when that happened I knew it was game on.

We decided to try and get some sleep around midnight. But as soon as I got into bed, I had to get back out because my contractions were too uncomfortable for sleeping. And I felt like I had to poop again. So I labored in the bathroom. And then on the stairs [just trying to find a position that was comfortable, and the one position that worked was laying up the stairs]. And went back and forth between the bathroom + the stairs for a couple of hours.

By 2:00 AM we decided it was time to go to the hospital. My contractions had been at 2.5 minutes apart since midnight. Plus the feeling that I had to poop just wasn’t going away.

We arrived at the hospital around 2:30 AM and went to triage before we could be admitted. In triage, they checked my cervix for dilation. Which was incredibly painful. The resident who checked my cervix said that she had difficulties because my cervix was ‘opening towards the back.’ Super.

I was only 3 cm dilated. Bummer. But I knew that dilation could change quickly.

I was admitted to my room. Then I met my night nurse and told her that I still felt like I was going to poop. Turns out, when you tell nurses and doctors that you feel like you have to poop and you’re only 3 cm dilated, they freak out a little bit. That feeling of having to poop usually happens when you feel like you are going to start pushing. And you aren’t allowed to push until you are 10 cm dilated — and I was nowhere near 10 cm.

To be continued in Part 2.