Arthur's Accidental Home Birth

Arthur was due on Monday, and on Wednesday night I started having contractions about 10-15min apart, you know, just enough to keep me from sleeping.  They continued sporadically all day Thursday and I had hoped that I would go into active labor that night.

Well as soon as I went to bed the contractions stopped.  And then nothing all day Friday and I was feeling very annoyed because I really wanted this baby out!

Then in the middle of the night on Friday the 10-15min-apart contractions came back so...another night of no sleep.  And the contractions continued all day Saturday.

Finally Saturday evening the contractions started to get closer together and I was thinking “Thank goodness!  Finally!”  They got to 6 minutes apart for a little bit and then to my dismay, went back to 10-15 min apart!  I was so frustrated!

The weird thing about these contractions though was that in terms of pain and intensity, they were like a 9 (on a scale of 1-10) and felt like the end of labor, but they were too far apart, right? Right!?

So around 9pm I called my midwife exhausted and frustrated telling her what was going on and she told be to try and relax and take a bath and get some sleep.

So I took a bath but the contractions continued the same.

It was a little after 10pm and Stephen was sitting in bed reading and I was sitting on an exercise ball next to the bed when with one of these contractions, still 15 minutes apart, my water broke.

Now at this point, I was pretty darn sure this baby was going to be born at home.  With all my previous births I started pushing right after my water broke and with Jane and Rutherford it was only about 10 minutes of pushing.

Stephen jumped up and started grabbing our stuff while calling the midwife and she told him to head to the birth center and she would meet us there.

Then I felt it, the need to push and I dropped to all fours on the bedroom floor and yelled “Stephen, I’m pushing!”

He ran in the room and said “You need to get in the car!” and I said “No! He’s coming now!”

So he grabbed some towels while calling the midwife again and she said she was coming over and hung up.

1^st push Arthur was crowning, 2^nd push his head was out and 3^rd push Stephen caught him.

He handed Arthur to me and ran outside just in time to flag down the midwife who was about to drive past our house.

So there I was, sitting on a bunch of towels on our bedroom floor, holding my baby.

Honestly it was surprising but neither Stephen nor I were scared.  If we had to wait a long time for the midwife to get there, we would have been a little more nervous.  Practically this wasn’t much different than my previous births.  The midwife has always been there just in case anything goes wrong but other than that my births have been “unassisted”.  Also with us having the view that birth is something natural and normal and, in most cases, not a medical emergency, made it not that big a deal.

So back to me sitting on the floor holding a baby... Stephen and the midwife came down the hall and reached the doorway of the room at the same time as my mother-in-law, Nancy, opened the door from the guest room, right next to our room and says confused “I thought I heard a baby cry?”  And the moment I will remember forever is sitting there, calmly smiling up at Stephen, the midwife and Nancy in the doorway looking down at me and the hilarious look of shock/terror on Nancy’s face.

The midwife, Sherri, was the same midwife I had for Jane and Rutherford, and we love her.  She came into the room with her usual calm friendly manner and said “Hey, there!  How ya doin?” and looked at me and Arthur and said we looked fine.

The moments after that were a bit crazy as Stephen tried to get all things together and in the car so we could drive to the birth center.

Sherri didn’t have anything with her for cutting the cord so we put the placenta in a bowl, I threw on some clothes and got in the back of our car holding Arthur and a bowl with the placenta in it.  Then we drove the 15 minutes to the birth center talking and laughing about this crazy birth.

As we walked from the car to the birth center with Stephen holding the bowl, he said “This has got to be the weirdest thing I have ever done.”

We settled ourselves in the bed of the beautiful birthing room and spent the mandatory 12 hours so they could monitor our vitals and at 11am we went back home.

And that was our accidental home birth!