Simone's Birth, April 15, 2006

A few days after the estimated due date, my midwife shocked us by saying I was already at 4 cm. I hadn't been feeling contractions, so this was pretty surprising. She swept the membranes to encourage contractions. And I did have contractions the next day, but they weren't very strong and then they stopped. The following day we obsessed over trying to encourage them to pick up again. After my doula made some obvious/insightful observations, we realized we were trying to move things along because we knew I was so close, and I was quite tired of being pregnant. But the baby was not terribly late, and neither the baby nor I were having problems – it was really just anxiousness on our part. The baby was certainly going to be born soon, just not at that moment. We decided to pretend we didn't know I was at that point at 6 cm, breathed a sigh of relief, and went back to the business of waddling.


That night, I got some sleep even with going to the bathroom almost every hour or so. Around 6 in the morning I started feeling strong contractions, but tried sleeping through them. With the 3rd or 4th one, I felt some serious pressure. So I got up and that’s when my water broke. I woke up Alex, and he called the midwife, doula, and our on-call friends – Gina, who would be there to help at the birth, and Jen and Ryan to help with Cece.

I labored in the bathroom, and things were definitely getting more intense. My doula extraordinaire was there to remind my body what to do. I really wanted to use the pool for at least some of labor because I had used it a lot during the long labor with Cece. So Alex and Gina set up the pool in the living room. When it was ready, I moved into it.

Soon after getting into the pool, Cece woke up and snuggled with Alex. She understood what was going on and didn’t want to stay. So Ryan came over and picked her up. While Alex was helping Cece into the car, I started pushing. I wasn’t planning a water birth, but it was pretty clear by then that I wasn’t going anywhere – not even to the other side of the pool! Apparently, I pushed for 9 minutes. The baby came out pretty quickly, and one arm came out at the same time as her head.

She was immediately alert and snuggly. She had lots of vernix and a headful of hair. I was struck by how much she looked like Cece when she was a newborn. Of course I thought she was perfect. Soon after delivering the placenta I got out of the pool (with a lot of help) and settled into a chair to start nursing.

When Cece met her sister, she proclaimed “I like my baby.” She then helped feed me a chocolate croissant while I nursed. After a while, she went back to her friend Xander’s to get some good playing in. And we continued to hang out with our new baby.


So all in all, real labor was about 3.5 hours - she was born at 9:24 am on April 15. She weighed 10lbs 4 oz, and was 22 inches long. But she still looked like a little baby to me.

Submitted by Amy