The Story of Rhys--The Beginning

I was having regular appointments with my midwife about once a week.
On the Friday 5 days before my due date my family was having a get-together about 3 hours away for my 95 year-old grandfather’s birthday. I wanted to go, but was a little leery of spending the night so far away from my midwife. I prayed really hard that if anything was going to be wrong, I would be prompted not to go. With how slowly my first labor progressed, I was pretty sure I would have at least 3 hours warning before the baby was born this time, so we decided to go and come back early the next morning. We wanted to stay until the evening, when the birthday party was going to be, but we figured the less time spent away from the midwife the better, and there was also a “comfort measures” birth class the Saturday that I really wanted my husband to go to with me.
Saturday morning we had just gotten in the car (around 7:00 am) to drive back when I started having contractions. They were not as intense as the first one I had had more than a week earlier, but they were definitely not Braxton-Hicks. They kept coming every 4-7 minutes, and as I had nothing better to do on this ride, I keep meticulous notes. As meticulous as I was, however, I wasn’t necessarily accurate, because I didn’t have a second hand to consult, only the minutes on the digital clock.

We went straight to the house of another midwife where the birth class was being held. It was interesting and informative, but I was extremely distracted, and secretly feeling smug as I noted and breathed deeply through each contraction, about every 5 minutes throughout the entire meeting. At the end of the meeting, around 2:30 pm, I had already scheduled a regular appointment with my midwife, which we had there at the other midwife’s house. I had been trying to manage my mounting excitement but secretly growing ever more confident that this would be the day, maybe only an hour or two away to a new baby! So I was very disappointed when the midwife found I was only 1 cm. dilated and that, though close together, the contractions themselves weren’t long enough to signify imminent birth or even expeditious progress. However they were consistent and they weren’t going away, so it looked we were definitely on our way.

I was sent home with the instruction to keep an eye on things and call the midwife when they got to be 45 seconds long. I told myself that was OK, since I wasn’t actually ready yet. I didn’t have anything packed up to take to the house where the baby would be born, there were still some grocery things I wanted to get, and, Oh no! I just remembered I still didn’t have anything to wear during labor. I had been planning all along to get some big nightshirts or something, because nothing I had already would keep me cool and covered. It was early afternoon as we headed home (to my mom’s condo) and I knew my toddler needed a nap, which meant someone had to be home with her. My parents weren’t back from grandad’s yet and I knew I couldn’t just send my husband out to get the things I needed, because he couldn’t try on night shirts for me and I didn’t want to have to justify to him why I wanted cranberry juice and Twix bars and yogurt and pineapple juice and granola. Besides, he was pretty tired from our late night and early morning, and who knew when he would get to sleep next.