Tl;dr: pushed out 10lbs 11oz of cuteness in a planned, natural, birth center birth.

It started off Monday morning, after my midwife decided to go ahead and have me take a verbena and castor oil cocktail to hopefully get me into labour due to a not so nice case of PUPPP. I was already four days overdue at this point and was ready to have this baby. We knew he was a "good sized baby", but no real clue how big he'd actually be.

I took the labour concoction at 1:30pm and again at 4:30pm, as instructed by my midwife. It was pretty nasty tasting, but I thankfully did not have awful bowel movements afterward like I thought I would. Because of that, by 10:00pm I decided that it probably wasn't working and would just tuck in for the night.

At 10:55pm, I was browsing Reddit in bed when I felt Eddie headbutt my cervix, followed by a pop and gush. My water had broken! I was laughing and called out to DH as I waddled to our ensuite bathroom. The fluid was clear with a little pink; exactly what we wanted for going ahead with the birth center birth. I wasn't having steady contractions yet, so I popped on a Depends pad and called my midwife to let her know. She instructed me to call back in an hour if contractions had started and were 3-4 minutes apart. No sooner than I had gotten off of the phone with her, my first real contraction hit. I went to the washroom to clean myself up a bit again.

While in the bathroom, I started a conversation with my husband who was out in the living room. Midway through a sentence, a contraction hit, and I exclaimed "Son of a bitch!" (which my husband found hilarious). It was the only time in the process of labour that I made any vocalization. I felt like, if I made any noise, that I'd lose control of my concentration and my attempt at a natural birth would go down the drain.

After that, I had even more contractions. At 11:20pm, I started timing my contractions. Right from the get-go, they were 2.5-4.5 minutes apart. I hunkered down on my yoga ball and just did my best to focus on breathing through the contractions. I didn't fight them or try to ignore the pain; I just let my body relax and work with them. I don't know how else to describe it other than just utter and complete focus. Outside of contractions, I felt like I was in a bit of a daze and kind of tired, but super excited that this meant we'd be meeting our baby soon!

I called my midwife back at 12:05am, now November 5, and told her my contraction times. She said she'd be right over to check me. About an hour later, she arrived at our apartment and checked me. I was already 3-4cm dilated, and she said that we'd wait another hour or so and then head out to the birth center. I was focusing with my contractions so much at this point, I wouldn't even let DH touch me during the contractions, lest I break concentration. An hour later, at 2:00am, my contractions were about two minutes apart, so the midwife said we should head out to the birth center. It was a 20 minute drive, and by the time we were all there and my midwife checked me, it was about 3:00am. At this point, I was already 5cm dilated. Active labor! I was allowed to get into the birth tub!

The water was quite nice for laboring in, as it really took the baby's weight off of my pelvis. I labored in the tub until about 5:00 am, when I felt the urge to poop. DH and my midwife helped me out of the tub and onto the toilet, but no poop came. My midwife decided to check if I was perhaps fully dilated. Frustratingly, I was only 8-9cm. She instructed me to not push and to breathe through the contractions in the birth tub until I could no longer fight the urge.

The next 20 minutes or so were spent between trying with all my being to not push while in the tub, and popping out of the tub a few times thinking I needed to poo. The last time, I told my midwife that I just couldn't fight the urge anymore. She checked me and I still had a lip of cervix that was about 8-9cm, but asked me to just try a test push. As soon as I pushed, that lip of cervix just slipped right out of the way! It was 5:30am and time to push!

For the first while (I can't remember how long exactly), I labored on all fours on the bed in the room. Shortly after I started pushing, the secondary midwife arrived. The midwives decided it'd be a good idea to try to let me push on the toilet again. I'm so glad they did. It was much easier to push like a bowel movement and focus my energy downward while sitting on the toilet. I labored there until just before he was going to crown. The midwives had me waddle back to the bed and lie on my left side. DH was instructed to hold up and brace one of my feet, while one of the midwives did the same with my other foot. Each time I felt a contraction build, I pushed with everything I had in me, and then a little more just as they would peter off. DH told me afterward that he thinks this was pretty much the only reason I managed to make progress and not stall out. Honestly, I was just listening to what my body was screaming at me to do at the time.

While crowning, my main midwife applied hot compresses to my perineum to help avoid tearing. As I crowned, it became evident that there was just nothing that could be done - I ended up with a clean 2nd degree tear that stitched up wonderfully afterward. Once Edgar's head was out, it was another two big pushes and the rest of him came out screaming at 7:27am. I had pushed for just under two hours.

He was on my chest right away and we were able to breastfeed for the first hour before the midwife took him to weigh and check him. We opted out of eye drops, but still did vitamin K.

He was huge! We were expecting a big baby, but nowhere near his size! 10lbs 11oz, 52cm long. When we were first told the weight, it was in metric (4.85 kg), and we did a quick conversion and thought it was 10 lbs 8 oz. We announced with those numbers, but then we did a proper conversion when we got home and found out he was actually 10 lbs 11 oz. He's basically the size of a two-month-old, and full of cuteness.

I loved my birth experience, but I was in shock for the first week post-partum. I didn't expect or anticipate a labour that would cause my body to feel so thrashed, and I'm still kind of in disbelief that this all happened. My midwives, even, were in shock at how calm I was throughout everything, as a first time mom. Honestly, I don't entirely feel like I did it or like I can feel proud of what I did quite yet.

I'm hoping sometime soon I'll be able to totally own this experience, but for now I'm just happy with my baby and am starting to feel a bit more like a mom as we settle into a new routine.