Today is Hamish’s second birthday so I am finally posting this recount of his birth I wrote ages ago.
From 37 weeks onward I was certain I had reached full capacity. Every day that crawled by without any ‘signs of labour’, the more convinced I was that this baby was never coming out. I was so done with everything, exercise felt near impossible, rolling over in bed was a mammoth effort, picking up toys off the floor took its toll, and everyone who encountered me had some comment like ‘oh the baby hasn’t come yet?’, ‘why are you walking around? You should be resting!’, and my personal favourite – ‘ARE YOU SURE THERE’S ONLY ONE IN THERE?’.
I could feel my smile wearing thin as I grew tired of my body being fair game for discussion and as my weight continued to creep towards 100 kilos. Apparently 15 kilos is ‘healthy’ weight gain during pregnancy and I had put on 25. I found this disheartening, I had exercised so consistently throughout this pregnancy and maintained a healthy iron rich diet.
If you know me well, you know I’m a pimple popping little freak. If I have any kind of build up under my skin it makes me crazy until I can meddle with it (usually with poor results, eg: huge wound on face). Being this pregnant I felt like a giant pimple that I couldn’t pop.
As the due date drew closer I started to lose hope and could only visualise myself being induced at the latest possible moment. Each day I felt like there was just no way labour was going to start naturally and I was still just getting heavier and slower and grumpier. My belly button DISAPPEARED. I normally have a deep bell button but look at this, just look at it!
And then it happened.
So fast.
I woke up around 3.30am on the morning of the baby’s due date. I’d been dreaming about having contractions. As I lay in bed I noticed a dull ache that felt a bit like period pain and wondered if that meant I might go into labour sometime over the next few days. After experiencing 3 bouts of this type of cramping I roused Lochie and optimistically alerted him to the development. He suggested that I try to sleep more and save my energy. I agreed that this was a good idea except I couldn’t stop thinking about how I had a massage booked for the next day and Lochie was meant to be playing golf. Also I really needed to poo which was making me annoyed because I didn’t want to get out of bed. I got up, did my business and went back to bed. I had a sinking feeling of dread/anticipation/excitement, this sure seemed like labour but I didn’t want to get too optimistic yet.
Over the next hour or so the cramps got stronger and quickly went from being 10 minutes apart to 8 minutes. I also did an impressive number of poos which I took to mean that the baby was moving down and putting pressure on my bowels. I thought my waters may have broken while I was on the toilet but I wasn’t sure, it felt like a sudden gush of wee. I kept trying to go back to bed to ‘relax’ but it was getting a bit unbearable.
Lochie was also struggling, he had developed a fever from his COVID booster the day before. Terrible timing, we thought we were so smart getting that out of the way nice and early. Things sort of felt like they were ramping up pretty quickly but I couldn’t quite let myself believe that it was possible for things to be moving so fast, that seemed way too good to be true. I had to mentally book in at least 10 hours, maybe more, of labour endurance. Around 5.30 Lochie called his aunt Trina, our support person who technically wasn’t allowed at the birth because of COVID restrictions but who would ride out the labour with us and take us to the hospital. Around this time I started timing my contractions, they were 3-5 minutes apart already. I used an app on my watch to time them and noticed they were oscillating between 40 seconds long and 20 seconds long. Trina and Lochie didn’t seem too concerned but I was starting to develop a suspicion that maybe I was blasting through the stages of labour a lot faster than any of us could have imagined.
Trina often mentioned that during labour women tend to get a bit lost on a different plain of consciousness but I didn’t find that at all. I was very aware and conscious of my sensations and surroundings and found it fairly easy to articulate myself. I was surprised at how annoying I was finding it to labour at home. I couldn’t stop thinking about logistics and had an underlying feeling that the baby might be coming soon, though I was scared to be too optimistic in case it ended up being 10 hours later. I would always prefer to be pleasantly surprised than to expect something to be fast/easy/simple only for it to turn out to be the opposite.
I could suddenly feel the pressure of the baby’s head pushing down and was overcome with a desire to get out of the house. I told Trina I was feeling agitated to be at home and thought we should go to the hospital, this was probably around 6.30am, around when I recorded my last contraction because it seemed redundant at that point to keep taking note. Everyone sprung into action very quickly, Lochie’s parents arrived to look after our daughter Sam and we hustled out to the car.
The drive to the hospital felt HECTIC. About 5 minutes in I started feeling the urge to push and knew that the baby was coming. When we went to our first appointment at Mount Barker hospital, everyone was talking about how a baby had been born in the car park that morning and at the time I had vaguely considered that it was possible that we would follow the same path, but now it seemed very probable! It felt like Trina was driving like a maniac, at one point I snuck a look at the speedometer and saw we were going 100 on what I considered to be a windy road and decided I didn’t have it in me to be thinking about safety, when I should be focussing on not pooing all over the car seat. I really felt like I was going to poo and after the absolute poo fest that morning I was annoyed that there could possibly be anything left to expel. Pretty quickly I decided 1. It didn’t matter, I could poo anywhere I wanted, and 2. It was actually the baby, not poo, so I should still focus on not letting it out just yet. All this baby coming out of you stuff is so much more closely linked to doing poos than I ever imagined.
We turned onto the freeway, blasting along with window open and I decided I might just put my seatbelt on, just in case. I really don’t like driving fast. At least Lochie didn’t have to keep propping me up as we barrelled around corners. I started chanting a little mantra to myself which was surprisingly effective, ‘you’re OK, it’s ok, you’re OK, you’re OK, you’re OK’ which is something I often say to Sam. I must have been muttering, or getting lost in the roar of the open windows, Lochie leaned over and said ‘pardon?’, it took a monumental effort to explain that I was ‘just talking to myself’.
It was a huge relief to pull up outside the hospital. As I walked up the ramp to the door I had to stop because my body was trying so hard to push I felt like the baby was going to go splat on the ground. I grabbed at my butt like a little kid who needed to go to the toilet. As we were ushered in I joked to Lochie – ‘well, the big poo is coming I reckon!’ and caught the eye of a couple sitting in the waiting room immediately after I said it.
I remember saying something to the effect of ‘get me on the floor’ and ten minutes later our son was born. The actual pushing part, where I had to consciously help push the baby out was a little bit more ‘stingy’ than I remembered it feeling with Sam, but a lot more swift. The baby came out with a big plop of gross amniotic gunk. I was a bit stunned and someone told me to move back a bit so I could pick up my baby. I looked down and was surprised to see a gunky baby on the floor underneath me. He had such a cone head. We had opted to not find out the gender and we had two names planned, Hamish and Chloe. Deep down we were both expecting Chloe so it was pretty wild to see Hamish down there looking so shell shocked. Hard to know who was more shell shocked, Hamish or Lochie in the throes of COVID booster fever. Here’s Lochie conked out on my bed a few hours after I gave birth.
As the dust settled, Trina and Lochie revealed that our car was still running out the front of the hospital with the keys in the ignition.
I was inspected for tearing and just had one first degree tear which I elected not to have stitched because last time the stitches were more irritating and painful than the actual tear. This proved to be a good choice because after a day or so my vagina didn’t even hurt whereas last time it felt endlessly painful and uncomfortable. Somehow from one shower and one trip to the toilet, the ward bathroom seemed to be covered in blood. It looked so wild in there. It felt weird for all that blood to just be there looking hectic while we hung out in the ward with the bathroom door open.
Hamish was 4.7 kilos which was the biggest our midwife had delivered, looking back at photos of newborn Hamish I’m a bit amazed at what a whopper he was. He was a wacky little baby who completely rumbled us but he has grown into the most charming, loving little maniac and we love him to the bloody moon and back.
Pictured below, a dad who thought that a second child would be 1.5 the amount of work of one (if that) and then discovered that sometimes you get a baby who doesn’t follow the rules because he is a baby and you can’t do anything about it and its more like triple the work of what you already had going on. Also your wife is still trying to recover from birth so you carry everyone everywhere and your shoulders hurt and you just want to watch the Australian Open in peace.
