The Labor and Delivery Story, Part I

With Nicholas's birthday coming up, I've been reading over our posts from last year around the time he was born.  In doing so, I realized that we never told The Story, or, What Happened the Day (and Two Days Before) Nicholas Was Born.

So, to set some context.  The due date for Peanut was May 22, a Friday, which came and went with no excitement whatsoever (so little, in fact, that we managed not to mention it on the blog).  That Sunday, Sarah woke up and thought her stomach felt funny, but couldn't quite place why.  So we went to church, then to our friend Eddie's for an already planned brunch.  Towards mid-afternoon, Sarah noticed while resting her hand on her belly that it was tensing up in rhythmic waves at relatively predictable intervals.  Hmmm, we thought.  So we timed it, to see if it might be real.  And sure enough, the tensing up lasted about 30 seconds, and occurred every two to three minutes.  Holy cow, we thought, Peanut might actually be on his way!  (Though of course publicly we still referred to "its way.")  On the other hand, this was not "textbook" early labor, which involves contractions every fifteen minutes or so.  But we just hoped that would speed things up; this was back in our naïve pre-parenting stage, you see.

We had already arranged to play games and have dinner with Sarah's parents, and we went ahead and told them to come up.  Every book, every mother, every class instructed us that early labor is characterized by three things: pain, anxiety, and boredom at the slow passage of time.  Might as well play Ticket to Ride, right?  Sarah at this point was uncomfortable but not in pain, and the social time made life move a little quicker through the evening hours.

Once Sarah's parents left, we figured we should get things set to go for the hospital for when the time came, so we did our final preparations of bags and snacks (for me), the kinds of things we couldn't have packed earlier because we used them frequently.  It was a nice evening, so we headed outside to walk, both because it helped Sarah feel better as things progressed, and because walking is supposed to help things progress.  We were very grateful that we'd decided to leave the city, because we felt no worries wandering our complex's parking lot at 10pm (or 11pm, or midnight ...), or the parking lot of the small office park next door.  I have no idea how far we walked that night (May 24 to 25), but we spent hours doing laps, then coming back inside.  As the night went on, the contractions got more intense.  At some point (maybe 9pm or so?) we called the doctor to check in, and she told us to come in "when you're starting to have to really work through" the contractions.  She also said she thought she would see us that night, in large part because the contraction timing was already at a place where you'd normally go to the hospital.

At some point we decided to try to sleep a little while, maybe at like 11:30, but I don't think either of us fell asleep for more than a few minutes at a time between then and 1am.  Sarah woke up with somewhat more intense contractions, we went walking again, and then decided it was time to think about heading to the hospital.  We went back inside and took showers (not knowing when we'd get the chance again).  I had something to eat, since I was allowed and am generally a pansy about these things (Sarah acquiesced because she'd rather be jealous of watching me eat than have to deal with a cranky father-to-be).  We put on an episode of Friends as we did our final final prep (using the counter on the DVD player to track contractions) and steeled ourselves for what was about to happen.

Sometime around the ten-minute mark the contractions began to subside.

[Stay tuned for the rest of the story tomorrow, including the surprise ending!]