Never before have I ever wanted a baby out as badly as I did with Peter. When our due date was given as being in July, I told the midwives I felt it was wrong, and we were probably looking at the beginning of August. Boy, did I wish I was wrong. :-)
At our appointment after our due date had come and gone, we started discussing natural methods of inducing labor. We tried the pressure points (for a full week), with no noticeable effect. A week after the due date, one of my midwives agreed to strip my membranes. She was surprised to find me mostly effaced and a very "stretchy" four. That should have started contractions and labor that day, at the latest by the next morning. When I woke up the next morning, I proceeded onto the castor oil method. It was so stinking gross. And still no baby. My mom was due to leave in a couple of days, and I was really sad that she would not get to meet this little guy she had come such a long way to see. That Friday my mom informed me she was staying for an extra week, and I immediately felt relieved. We decided to drop Ben and the boys off at the theater while we went shopping with Luci. It was a very relaxed, fun evening, and we were all so pleased my mom would be staying extra with us.
I woke up on Saturday morning around 6 needing to use the restroom as usual. I started to feel mildly achy and crampy but decided to ignore it and go back to bed. It got a little worse as I lied there on my bed, so I decided to get in a hot shower to see if it would either a)stop the pain if it wasn't real labor, or b)help labor along if it was real labor. When I couldn't lift my leg to get out of the tub, I figured this was probably finally it. I woke Ben up to let him know, and he told me to call one of the midwives immediately. I did, and told her I thought I was in labor, could I please take some natural remedy to stop making it hurt? This was about 7 and she said she was heading out right away. I went to sit with Ben who completely aggravated me by saying I was almost done. How dare he say such a thing when I still had hours to go? I guess past experience gave him a different perspective and he could tell how close I was. (Sam and Luci both lasted 4 hours and David was 5, so I fully expected to be about that long again.) I told him I was feeling pressure like I maybe needed to push, so he should take a sleeping Luci to my mom. By this point, I was lifting myself off the bed trying to keep from pushing. Ben had just picked Luci up from her crib and was heading towards the door when my water broke. Hearing the commotion, my mom walked in just in time to see Peter's head and then his body slide out. Ben was just coming back into the room at this point, so he immediately jumped into action by placing the baby next to me and wrapping him up in a blanket to keep his warmth. He had called the midwives to let them know my water broke and again to let them know Peter was born. They figured he was born at 7:19am. Once he decided to come into the world, he was in a hurry to get out. :-)
Once we realized (basically I came to terms with how ludicrous it was) that we couldn't drive to AZ to deliver with our wonderful midwife again, I tried to talk Ben into an unassisted labor. The laws here in AL are screwy and we would have had to drive up to TN to deliver if we wanted to have a midwife present. He was of course, completely against the idea. Like I said, Peter had different plans of how his birth was going to work out. I am glad he did things the way he did. :-)
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