It didn't go as planned but it was pain free and my son was perfect...if not slightly HUGE! No real mention of p*** just discomfort but not from the birth.

I found hypnobabies long before we got pregnant and knew that I wanted that kind of birth. I've always been very into mind over matter so the whole process really appealed to me.

We were 7days late and my midwife wanted to run a NST because I told her I didn't think I'd had any contraction yet. However the day of of testing she was at the hospital catching a couple babies so I headed down to L&D so get my testing done. After being hooked up for 40min she came in and saw that I had not had even 1 contraction so we decided to do an ultrasound to make sure everything was still looking good in there fluidwise. She measured the pockets of fluid and said he looked great and guesstimated him at about 8 ½ lb but definitely out of room. She asked me what I wanted to do and my husband and I already decided that we would induce so we set up for us to check into the hospital on Thursday night.

Thursday evening we first went to my midwifes office to have the saline catheter inserted to help ripen the cervix. I felt some pinching but nothing that my husband putting his hand on my shoulder and giving me the relax cue could overcome. She said she'd never seen anyone go through the process so well...thank God for hypobabies! She told us to go out to dinner and walk around and that L&D had a room waiting for us and to be there by 9pm. That's exactly what we did. She also warned me that with an induction I would need to be hooked up to an IV and I would need to be monitored after the pit drip was started and that she would be breaking my waters to kick things into gear.

We headed to the hospital got checked in and the nurse wanted to get the IV started so she wouldn't have to do wake me when she started the pit drip at 4am. (warning pain mentioned) I'm deathly afraid of needles and the nurse took 3 tries to IV. Blew out the vain the first time, punctured through the second time for the third try she gave me a ambien to help me sleep and wrapped my arm up in hot towels to relax the veins and snuck into my room after I was sleeping to get it. This was the worse discomfort of my whole birthing!!!

At 4am she hooked up me to my first dosage of pit...it was increased every half hour. At 7am my midwife came and asked me how I was feeling...if I was feeling anything because the monitors were picking up plenty of pressure waves? Nope not feeling a thing. We then went ahead and broke my waters. Again some pinching but nothing that my husband putting his hand on my shoulder and giving me the relax cue could overcome.

Probably about a half hour after that I felt my first pressure wave and it really wasn't much of anything. More of a `oh, hey' and a smile that we were getting close to meeting our little guy. I wish I could tell you about the rest of the time but it really was just a blur I spent most of the time either laying bed on my side listening to Easy First Stage or rocking in the rocker or sitting on the birthing ball get my back massage by my midwife and/or the L&D nurse. I can tell you they continued to up the pit every half hour and that everytime they tried to turn it off to let my uterus labor on its own it would completely stop! Honesty how annoying after all this that my body was working against me...it turned out my body knew exactly what it was doing!!!

After 16 ½ hours of pressure waves I was complete and ready to breath my little guy out. I popped on that track on my iPod and went to town for an hour. At which point my midwife check things and the little booger had not budged at all!! So she asked if we wanted to try some `coached pushing' I was exhausted and hungry and willing to do whatever needed to be done. We did coached pushing for 1 ½ hours and still the little booger had not moved down at all! At this point I asked "What's going on?" They called the L&D OB on-call to come take a look did a couple test pushes with him and he said "That head is not coming out this way" At which point I was rushed off to OR for an emergency c-birth.

I won't go into detail on lead up to hearing the first cry but I will say when I heard the surgeon say "I've got $20 on 15lb" I just about had a heart attack! After they had him cleaned it tested it turned out he was only 10lb8oz 21in...with a 15in head and a 14 ½ in chest!!! He was HUGE!!!!! I didn't have GD I didn't look that big when I checked in. Every nurse on the floor was shocked not to mention my midwife who just saw him on the ultrasound 2days earlier. His apars were 9/9 and he was sooo alert at birth and has been ever since.
Here we are almost 4months later and he's a smidge under 19lb and 25.5in.

In the end I relied very heavily on my midwife (who was just incredible) because my husband's voice would bug me so he stuck to taking pictures of the day.

Cheers,
K