Greenleigh Ruth was born Sunday, November 3rd (nine days before the due date) and weighed 6lbs 10oz. She is practically perfect in every way and I am deeply in love ☺

TLDR

• I went in to labor a little over a week before my due date after spending the day before walking around an art festival.

• Didn’t think I was really in labor until the hospital confirmed I was already at 4cm

• I was 6cm by the time they got me my epidural, at which point I was very relieved.

• I had the WEIRDEST experience with getting a catheter.

• The epidural didn’t slow down my labor in the slightest and I was pushing within a couple hours.

• I am so happy my labor went so smooth and I didn’t have to evict her or anything ☺

Preface: My husband is a physician who owns his own clinic, so his time (appointments) is scheduled months in advance. Because of this, we decided months ago that we would induce on the due date, so he could go ahead and block off a week in his schedule to be with the new baby and avoid pissing off too many patients. I wasn’t exactly gung-ho about inducing, but it made sense for us. Plus I liked knowing she would be here by a certain point. I fully expected this was the way she would be born. The women in my family do not tend to deliver early.

The Long Story: Last Saturday I made a giant vat of marinara sauce in preparation for making some freezable meals then my husband and I went to our town’s art festival, which is the biggest event the town does all year. It involves tons of walking, so needless to say it was the most I’ve walked in a while. We bought a toy trunk for the nursery agreeing to come back the next morning to pick it up and went home. We were supposed to go out to eat at a nice restaurant, but I was tired and didn’t feel great so we skipped it.

(TMI) I had multiple bowel movements throughout the day and by that night I was waking up and having diarrhea. At some point I started noticing a cyclical element to the cramping I was experiencing. I didn’t want to get my hopes up about going into labor early. Before this I had not experienced any Braxton-Hicks and my doctor didn’t seem to think I would go into labor early. By 4am that morning the cramps were enough to keep me awake. By 5am I noticed spotting in my underwear and conceded there might be a small chance we would end up at the hospital that day. Immediately my brain went to worrying about my 5lbs of marinara going bad if I left it in its cooking pot in the fridge for a few days. So I got up and set about putting the sauce into containers for freezing. Priorities!

At that point my husband noticed I was up, heard me in the kitchen and came to check on his wife’s peculiar behavior. The pains still weren’t enough for me to believe they were real labor. Though I couldn’t deny they were getting more set in intervals. We started timing them and spent a couple hours watching some Nova’s on our dvr. I told myself if I was still experiencing them at 8am I would call the doctor and try to get his opinion on if I was experiencing something real or not. The on-call doctor who called me back was very unimpressed with my symptoms and wasn’t much help. By this point we had started slowly getting everything in order. Making sure we had everything we needed in our bags, getting showered, calling my Mom to put her on standby. The pains still weren’t unbearable though, so I sent my husband to go pick up our art show trunk while I finished showering. By the time he got back I was ready to go.

Even when we got to the hospital I was in denial about being in actual labor. But I couldn’t deny the pains were starting to get worse. By the time I finally got up to the L&D floor to be examined I was at 4cm. At which point a switch flipped in my head to “Wow, this is happening right now.” I knew I needed to wait to get to 4cm before getting an epidural and I was already there! This was when the pains turned a corner and started to get pretty intense. You have to have a bag of fluids administered before you can get the epidural, so by the time they actually administered it, my contractions were coming less than every 2 minutes and I was at 6cm.

After the epidural was placed, I immediately felt better. It definitely was not fun at all to get, but once it was in it was completely worth it. This was when the weirdest/funniest part of my delivery happened. My nurse set about giving me a catheter immediately after the epidural and I guess I was tingly down there. So the second she touched me it tickled. Like REALLY tickled. As in my face turned beet red and I could not stop giggling until she finished the procedure. I could barely breath from laughing. My nurse was amused and said she wished all catheter placements could go that way.

The machine continued to show my contractions even though I couldn’t feel them and they were solid, consistent waves. The epidural didn’t slow anything down in the slightest. In fact, a couple hours later when they came back to break my water and check my dilation I was ready to push: Fully dilated and they could feel the head. I was in disbelief. The best we can tell, my water must have broke after the epidural and I didn’t feel it? Honestly I’m still not sure. But, anyways, the doctor came in and I pushed through 3 or 4 waves of contractions and she came right out, perfect as can be! I still can’t get over how lucky I was to have such a smooth labor and delivery. Husband basically just canceled all his appointments this week and moved them back a week. Hopefully pictures of the cute baby will minimize any patients angry about having their appointments cancelled.