Ryland

Ryland was born at a quiet little hospital in Xenia, Greene Memorial. We hoped there would be no tornados, as is fairly common in that area. The last birth we attended there was right in the middle of a tornado..

Anyway, it was a quiet night that I went in to labor. I had all these fears during the pregnancy… and fear just isn’t good. But I couldn’t figure out how to let go of it at all. One was that the baby would be born via c-section. I’d decided I’d almost, but not quite, welcome it, as I was truly dreading the pain of labor. This in and of itself was very stressful for me. Pain in labor. I just couldn’t figure out how I was so willing and ready to have babies at home, unassisted when this time I was so afraid of the pain. I was pretty sure I’d end up with an epidural.

Late in the pregnancy.. maybe 37 weeks or so, I started realizing how much the baby was facing out, the ‘wrong’ way. Though he was head down, his back was towards my back and could potentially cause lots of back labor.. uh oh.. more fear kicking in? I asked the midwives about it. Babies move so much we were sure that even though he spent so much time in that position that by the time labor kicked in, he’d get into position.

Pain… I mentioned that right? Pain.. I can’t even tell you how much this was playing on my mind. I was so not ready for labor.

Each day would go by that labor had not started and I knew by evening that day was not “the” day.. though I also knew, just plain new, labor would start at night and I’d have this baby on a Wednesday. Just one of those things. I really didn’t want to leave Teigen at night, where he could wake up scared and wondering where I was. I felt that could be traumatic. Wednesday… of all days I really didn’t want to go into labor, a Wednesday. Seems silly to want to plan our baby’s birth around our homeschool activity, which happened to be our Wednesday activity, I know. But the girls were really wanting to do this activity, see their friends, etc.

Of course, almost everything I didn’t want to happy, or expected to happen, did, in fact happen. No c-section, but otherwise…. Back labor was horrid. No, not really, I didn’t wait long enough. I was so not into the pain of this labor. I didn’t want to move. Because Ryland was facing the wrong way (so much for turning), I would only have regular contraction if I was up walking around. The contractions this causes hurt, period.. they just plain hurt. So much so that I didn’t want to move. I knew I HAD to move to get the labor going, but I sure didn’t want to. Nothing was happening.. so sporadic. After hours, maybe 4 or 5, I finally got an epidural. It’s what they call a “walking epidural”, but there was no walking. From there, things were slow.. still up and down.. I might have 5-6 contractions close together, some hard, some not (wasn’t feeling them so it didn’t matter to me much) and then nothing for 20 minutes or more.

Finally started a small pit drip and got things going. I was doing just peachy, enjoying the whole thing.. laughing with Bob, my mom, chatting with the midwives… it was fun.

Close to 11, the midwives suggested I start pushing. I was able to get into a squat and push and pushed. I think I pushed longer with Ry than I did any of my others. I’d blame it on the epidural, but I really think it was more his position and maybe because he wasn’t quite ready yet. Didn’t really matter much what was going on.. he and I, we worked together. The midwives instructed Bob on what to do.. My mom was there trying to get pictures, but unfortunately we were all crowding the bed and she couldn’t get in close enough. When Ry was head out, they had me reach down and help pull him out. He was stuck and I hooked my fingers under his arms and Bob and I managed to pull him up to my belly.

His cord was short so they clamped and cut it quicker than I’d have liked, but it was really less of an issue to me than I’d thought it would be..

11:35 a.m. born, in hands.. beautiful little boy. By 7 that evening we were home, the rest of the family meeting our newest addition.

In the end, an epidural, a hospital, midwives, push-push-push… no nursery, headed home in 6 hours.. happy, healthy (besides a bit of jaundice, which we were instructed to do “sunlight therapy” just as we’d done with Teigen 3 years before)…

Ryland's birth story is "as written" by Judi on Mom's Little Garden. To read more, or view pregnancy pictures, visit Ryland's pages there. Story and images copyright Mom's Little Garden.