Two Little Monkeys: Vance's arrival

I woke up on Sunday morning feeling disappointed. I had been feeling pretty confident that I was finally going to go into labor that night (you would think I would have been more patient since my due date was September 14th, but I was feeling very ready to be done with this pregnancy). Harrison had left on Saturday with Michele and Reese to spend Labor Day weekend with my parents at the lake. Adam and I had decided that we would use Saturday to get things done around the house and Sunday would be our day to do something fun, we were planning to go to a movie and maybe do a little shopping. I finally got out of bed around 8am and figured I should get ready for church, but that is when I had the first contraction. Nothing major-in fact I had been having these for about two weeks now. I ignored it and continued getting ready. By about 9am I had noticed that I had been feeling several of these small contractions and we decided to stay at home and see what would happen. Just in case, Adam finally packed his bag for the hospital and put the infant seat in the car. At 11:00 we started timing a few contractions just to see if there was really anything to this and they were about five minutes apart. Adam ran to the store to grab some of my last minute demands for the hospital (you know, important stuff like snacks and The Office Season 4). We wanted to be prepared for a long labor-we were at the hospital for 10 hours before Harrison was born. From noon-1pm we went for a walk to try to speed up the process just a bit. It apparently worked. We called ahead at 1pm and they said to get ready and come in once the nurse at the hospital called us back. At 1:45 they had still not called, but I felt like we should just go in anyway. It is a good thing that we did. We checked into the Birthways floor at about 2:05-Vance was born at 3:13pm. The hour at the hospital before he was born was such a whirlwind. They started to hook me up to the monitors and check my vitals when I commented to Adam that it wouldn’t be so bad if there wasn’t so much pressure making me feel like I had to go to the bathroom. The nurse looked at me funny and immediately called to have someone check to see how dilated I was-8-9cm and 100% effaced. She paged the midwife and suddenly there were about ten people in the room rushing around. The on-call doctor came in and had a seat in the room-he introduced himself and politely explained that he was there “just in case”. Adam and I were both in shock that this was happening so quickly. The midwife arrived just as it was time for me to start pushing. Four contractions later Vance was born-all 9lbs. 5oz. of him. In no way did I prepare for a natural childbirth, but in many ways I am happy with how all of this turned out. I was up and out of bed within 30 minutes of Vance’s arrival which would not have been possible with an epidural, Vance caught on to nursing very quickly which my midwife attributed to the natural birth, and we eliminated all of the hours of walking the hospital halls. I guess both ways have pros and cons and I am happy that I have now experienced both. Adam I think is most happy that the doctor who stopped in “just in case” taught him a trick to prevent me from breaking his fingers-he says it came in very handy!!!