Labor was longer and more painful than I had thought but didn’t leave any traumas. I had the greatest midwife ever during the last 7 hours of the labor, a girl about my age with whom it was very easy to communicate.
To reduce the pain I tried out concentrated breathing, the shower, gym ball, an acupuncture procedure where sterile water is injected on specific points (hurts like hell for the first 15 seconds!) and DH was keeping a warmable bag on my back during contractions.
I had thought before hand I wouldn’t try out entonox since I’ve heard so much bad experiences but it turned out to be just my drug. At some point though none of these pain reducements were enough and I had been in labor for about 20 hours and was still only about 4cm dilated. The pain was too much and I requested for an epidural. Despite the local anesthesia contractions were extremely painful and I hung to the entonox like my life was depending on it. The most beautiful words I’ve ever heard were midwife’s “you are finally fully dilated”. The pushing part took 45 minutes but it was really the easiest part of the whole experience. I chose the traditional position since I was too tired to try out any other and it was easy for me to find the right breathing (with entonox) and direction for the pushing.
We spent two nights at the hospital after our son was born and as he was doing very well we got to go home a day early. It was so scary and great at the same time to be home just the three of us.
Before he was born I had thought newborns to be the most fragile things in the whole world; how on earth could I handle one of them? Now that he’s 8 days old and we have managed to keep him alive and content I must say it hasn’t been as difficult as I thought beforehand.
He’s eating constantly, at least every two hours. And we are also changing his diapers at the same pace. He already reached his birth weight on Saturday which is very good; me and sis were poor eaters as babies (and beyond..) and it took us several weeks to get to that point.
DH has 3 weeks of faternity leave which is great; he cooks for us and holds the house together as well as changes diapers where as I concentrate on being a milk machine for the little one. We are having his christening next month, name was chosen already months ago. My sis and cousin are going to be godmothers and DH’s brother and goodson are the godfathers.
He is precious, he is a wonder and I still can’t comprehend all of this.
