SPLASH! The super speedy arrival of our little man Tate 8/1/2010

[Campari]

The birth of our beautiful son Tate was such an amazing thing to have experienced, I still can’t believe how it all happened. If it hadn’t happened to me, I’d never have believed such a fast and painfree labour were possible!

With our first daughter (2.5yrs) , I had had a fairly fast first time labour, which started at home when my waters broke with a huge gush. My contractions began 4 hours later and were two minutes apart right from the start. I used lots of great coping mechanisms from “Birth Skills” and had really got in to a great headspace, or zone, and banged, stamped and bounced my way to a drug free birth with her. I had been in labour for about 5 hours, with 45 minutes of pushing. I tore quite badly and had low iron levels, so my recovery was pretty painful and slow, but I felt very empowered by my labour and was genuinely looking forward to doing it all again!


Throughout my pregnancy I read so many birth stories on BB, and had moments of worrying about super fast labours, and our baby being born in the car, or being born at home unassisted. When meeting with my midwives I expressed this concern and was always told to just come in to hospital when I felt I needed to. DH was doing temp work leading up to the birth, and had turned down some work that we considered too far away, just in case I went in to labour. We both just kind of knew it would be a fast one.

In the first week of January (EDD was 11/1) I had had a few painful tightenings overnight, and often I would wake up and think “is this it?!” only to find that they had stopped. Early in the morning of the the 8th January however, I woke at 1:30am and after 3 ouchy “cramps” decided that they could really be contractions. They were three minutes apart, but really not hurting very much at all. At 2am I rang my sister and asked her to come over and look after DD. I got DH out of bed at 2:20am. At 2:30am I paged my midwife and said that I would need to come in quite soon. She said to wait a bit, and we agreed I would get back to her when I was ready to leave home. My sister arrived and I bounced through the contractions on my fit ball while DH got his bag ready. We left home at 3am after a quick call to my midwife and student midwife. The roads were so quiet, and we had a nice drive in to the city – I could definitely feel the contractions, but I was chatting to DH, sending smses to his parents, running through my birth plan (telling DH what I wanted in case I needed a C-section!!), and it was not the horrible car trip that I had feared.

DH dropped me in front of the hospital and went to park the car. I waited for him, felt a bit nauseas and wondered if it were better to vomit in the hospital gardens (in front of the taxi zone), or in a really filthy rubbish bin. Fortunately I didn’t have to do either! DH ran back to the hospital and we walked up to the Birth Centre together. My midwife was there waiting for me and had the bath filled. I am sure she thought I should still be at home, as my contractions were really not hurting me very much, despite being 2 or 3 minutes apart. She offered to do an internal check for me, which I was happy about, but we decided to wait 10 minutes for my student midwife to arrive. By now it was 3:45am, and I was feeling very strange. I had contractions regularly but they really didn't hurt very much, and I was still chatting and smiling and joking through them. I wanted to bounce on the fitball and get in to my “groove” but it just wasn’t working, and I was worried that the midwife thought I was still just in pre-labour. DH had only just taken his shoes off, and had found a CD for the CD player, and we were just settling in. My student midwife was still not there, so at 4:00am my midwife did the internal without her, only to stand back and say “wow, you are a super birthing woman, you are already 7 or 8cm dilated!!” I am sure she was genuinely surprised! My waters were bulging, and she said that as soon as they broke, the birth would be very quick. I was so relieved that it was real and that now I could relax and not worry about being sent home, and not worry about what the midwife was thinking of me!
The midwife left the room to call my student midwife, and I had a whopper of a contraction – probably the only one that I really needed to work through. I leant over the baby change table that was in the room and stamped my foot.

Then I was able to hop in the bath. It was 4:06am. The first thing I said then, jokingly, as another strong contraction began, was “oh, it still hurts!”. In my birth plan I wanted to labour in the water, but had intended to hop out and birth on all fours on dry land. I just had in my mind an irrational fear of the baby’s head being out in the water, and me taking too long to get the rest of its body out. When I gave birth to DD I had felt that the moments between her head coming out, and the rest of her, was an eternity. At 4:11am, after being in the bath for only two contractions (which DID hurt!), my waters broke with a pop and I could feel the gush. Moments later I felt the head descend, and I instinctively put my hand down to feel it. I quite calmly said “I can feel the head, he’s coming!!!” The midwife looked at me and said that it was too late to get out of the bath, and I was happy to stay in – there was no way I could move now! I was on my knees, with my arms leaning out of the bath. I didn’t even have to actively push – his head descended and I breathed him down til I could feel the crowning, and as the midwife and DH leant in behind me, I felt his head being born, and was re-assured that he was OK, and that I just had to wait for the next contraction. I asked again if he was OK as those moments ticked over, and everyone was assuring me that it was fine. I was just in disbelief that my labour was almost over before I had even felt it truly begin! I had to give a small push to get the shoulders out, and after that came the amazing feeling of all those little limbs being born! DH caught him in the water and he was passed up to me. He began to cry as soon as he was exposed to air, and though quite purple, he was a healthy pink colour straight away. His poor little face was bruised and swollen from his fast descent – he’d bashed down through my pelvis and birth canal from a great height, in such a short time. It was 4:16am when he was born, so I had gone from 8cm to birth, in just 16 minutes. It was only 45 minutes since we had arrived at the hospital, and less than 3 hours since I had woken up with a few niggles.

After a few minutes I hopped out of the bath and sat on the birth stool to birth the placenta. I had chosen to have a physiological third stage. Just as I got out of the bath holding our little boy, my student midwife arrived! She had been to so many boring appointments, but she missed the birth by 2 minutes! Less than 5 minutes later my placenta was birthed with no problems at all, and I had only a moderate amount of blood loss over the next hour or so. I had not torn at all – not even a graze, and that has been such a good thing, especially when compared to the tears I had with my first labour.
I then went to lie down on the mattresses and bean bags on the floor, and I breastfed and cuddled him for over an hour before he was taken to be weighed and measured. He took a while before he was ready to attach to the boobies, but after about half an hour he was sucking really well and knew what he was doing. He weighed 3.56kg.

We were going to be sent home at 8am, but the paediatrician who needed to discharge him kept getting paged away and it wasn’t until 3pm that we left the hospital. We had a lovely day in the Birth Centre though – my sister brought DD in to meet her little brother, and we then lazed around and fed him and watched him sleep. We were both just so spun out that it had happened so quickly. I could count maybe 4 contractions that really “hurt”, and I had largely escaped the entire transition and pushing phase! I’d not even had time to think about needing the gas!

We named our little boy Tate Joseph. Tate because we love it and it means cheerful in Old English, and Joseph after DH's dad.

Vital statistics were:
Weight: 3.56kg (7lbs 13oz)
Length: 52cm
Head circumference: 34cm
Total length of labour including pre-labour – 2 hours 45mins
Ouchy stage - 30 minutes
Second stage - 5 minutes
Third stage - 8 minutes

Thanks for reading! Writing this has taken longer than the labour I think!!

Next time I am going to have a homebirth