Taryn’s Birth – Part 1

Even though I seem to have kind of given up blogging (don't worry – pregnancy #3 is documented, I just didn't bother posting them here), there is absolutely no way that I could ever let the birth story of one of my babies be left untold. So, here we are.

Where exactly do you start when recounting the birth of a baby? I feel like these stories always begin long before the actual labour begins. So, I'm warning you from the get go. This will be lengthy. And wordy. And full of details that may or may not seem important. But to me, it's all the necessary details in the beautiful God written story that brings us to Taryn. So sit back and enjoy.

There was a lot of impatience and struggle at the end of my pregnancy. Despite being five days overdue with the girls, I somehow let myself believe that maybe this one would be different. Well, was this one ever different – just maybe not in the way I had hoped. I held my composure together rather well when my due date came and went – I guess I wasn't naïve enough to believe that I would be early, but as I got closer and closer to the magic 40w4 and 40w5 (I went into labor at 40w4 and gave birth at 40w5 to both older girls) I started to get antsy. In my head, I guess I just assumed those would be the days.

On my due date, I had a scheduled midwife appointment at which they (both my primary midwife Taryn and the student, Fiona) checked me, determined I was 2cm dilated and stripped my membranes. Taryn told me she wouldn't bet money that I'd have my baby that night but assured me it would be coming soon. Of course, because time was slowly creeping away from us we had to start talking about back up plans for organizational purposes. Especially because we were leading into a long weekend. I was booked for and ultrasound and biophysical profile for Tuesday morning and from there, we would discuss plans for inducing if we ended up making it to 42 weeks. Of course, I kept reminding myself that 8 more days was an eternity in baby birthing days and there was tons of time. However, in the back of my mind, the fear was always there of what if my body didn't do its job this time. What if. I kept praying that God would help me to be patient and at peace with His timing. But really, I know the back of my mind was saying, “Let me trust Your timing, God, but hey, today is a great day to have a baby!”

Despite knowing and experiencing twice before that things could go from nothing to something in an instant, I was starting to feel defeated. Over the course of the day Thursday, I hoped that the membrane strip would start to get things moving but aside from some minor mucous and blood, there didn't seem to be much action.

The good thing was, by lunchtime on Thursday Nana arrived and informed us she was parking her butt until the baby arrived. I kept telling our baby that now that Nana was here, we were good to go! Yet still, Thursday passed with no action at all.

Friday morning, we got up and decided to take the girls swimming at the Y for the morning. We had a fun morning in the pool, followed by a special McDonald's breakfast treat and grocery shopping. The afternoon was spent napping and playing outside, with Dana, Cindy and Lochlan joining us for dinner in the evening. Shortly after they arrived, around 5pm, I started to feel some mild contractions. Of course, I had been feeling mild contractions for weeks and weeks, so they were nothing to get excited over. But as the evening progressed, they started to change and my body's memory started to be jogged, thinking “Hm I think I remember this. I think this is different”. A few times through the evening, during dinner and clean up afterward, I found myself needing to stop to take a breath as I zoned myself out through a contraction. There didn't seem to be any pattern, though, so I just kept on keeping on, but told Cindy to sleep with her phone volume turned up, just in case. I wasn't sure if I should send the kids away for bedtime, and in the end decided not to. I just didn't want to do it preemptively because I didn't want them to have to spend more than the necessary time away from home, and I just wasn't quite confident enough at that point. We spent the evening moseying around home, all the while I was having contractions anywhere from 10-25 minutes apart. But again, nothing to get too excited about. I had a bath and they were fairly steady. Around 9:30, I decided to call it a night. I had a few more as I laid in bed and drifted off to sleep around 10, wondering if there might just be a baby in my arms by morning...