Skyler Marie Has Arrived! - Full Birth Story!

I know, I know, I haven’t written anything for a long time, and for that I apologize.  It’s been hard to motivate myself to write another post because It takes a lot of time, and I know that my mom, and my wife will probably be the only 2 people who ever read it.  I think the only person following this blog is, well, me.  But, I promised a lot of people to post our birth story.

Skyler Marie Phillips was born on February 23, 2014 at 10:19 (Or something) a.m.  She weighed 8 lbs 13 oz. and was 21 Inches long. 

  I suppose most of you want to hear the whole story of how everything went down.  So, here it goes. *Deep Breath*

On Feb. 22^nd my wife woke up feeling crampy.  Of course this caused me to become giddy as a school girl, hoping that it would get worse, and that we would get things going.  Why was I in such a hurry, oh, well, probably because Shelby was already 1 week overdue.  At 41 weeks mommy was as uncomfortable as a whale in a kiddy pool.  She wasn’t sleeping, and was just all around really miserable.  So, when the pressure waves (Word for Contractions in Hypnobabies) started on Saturday, I was elated.  Not only because I was anxious to get Skyler here, but, because I had felt like a failure the night before.  You see, we tried to induce labor naturally.  In the only way that a male could possibly contribute to this task, doing the thing that got us here in the first place.  Having nothing happen that night made me feel like I had failed my wife.  But, luckily, obviously that’s why my wife went into labor the next day. (Or so I hereby claim that’s the reason).

We went about our day normally, running errands, etc.  Well, that night we were going to Michaels to get some yarn so my wife could knit while she was in the hospital. (Yeah, you’d think I was married to a 90 year old woman). Well, in the parking lot, all of a sudden, my wife grabs my arm and says, “Wow, I’m peeing my pants, woooowwww….” And we thought to ourselves, let the games begin.

My wife has wanted to do a natural birth her entire life, which is convenient because my entire family makes a camp full of hippies look like business men in suits, when it comes to birth.  So, we started the intense journey of doing this natural birth. Shelby’s Pressure waves started at around 6:30 pm Saturday night, and lasted ALL FREAKIN’ NIGHT!  These things weren’t just like every 10 minutes apart.  Once her water broke, she started having them like every 4 minutes apart, then 3 minutes, etc…  Let me just say, my wife is a fricken’ birth monster (2^nd Cousin to the cookie monster)  She went into labor mode and I didn’t know who this woman was anymore.  It was totally different than I was expecting, she was like tromping around our apartment all night, walking back and forth from our family room to bedroom and back again.  She did labor in the bathtub for a while, and that was okay, but basically, there’s nothing you can do kids.  I don’t care what classes you’ve taken, videos you’ve watched, people you’ve talked to, whatever, you will labor however you NEED to labor.  There is absolutely NO right way to do this.  You do what you gotta do.  And she did.  I’ve never been so proud of anyone in my entire life.  I’ve also never felt more helpless in my entire life.  There is nothing I could do other than pour warm water over her in the bathtub; or walk back and forth with her in our apartment.  I couldn’t take the pain away, and that was hard for me.  But I did my best in the capacity that I was assigned, and it was exhausting, but somewhat fulfilling, because every pressure wave meant Skyler was a little closer.  My sister Megan who is a Doula, helped a lot during this time.  She made it a lot easier for me, if you’re thinking of using a Doula, I highly recommend using my sister.  If you want her website address, just let me know in the comments.

TO THE HOSPITAL

At around 4:00 a.m. Sunday morning, after a long night of laboring, we figured we MUST be at like 9 of course, right?  Well, we got there, and Shelby was a 2.  Yeah, a 2.  I wanted to scream.  All that damn work for a 2?  Luckily, since her water had broken, the hospital didn’t make us go home, but admitted us.  We labored for about 4 more hours, and she moved to a 5 1/2.  I’m not gonna lie, when our midwife told us she was a 5 ½, I started crying.  I don’t know why, I guess it was partly exhaustion, and relief that this was actually happening this night.  And I was also just so dang proud of my wife for doing this. Then, my wife went into warp drive, and her womb opened up like the black hole at the end of Avengers, you know, the one where all the aliens come through to attack New York?  But I digress.  She went from a 7 to a 9 in like 30 minutes.  What was alarming though is that her body started bearing down at 7 1/2.  And it was hard.  I haven’t heard that much intense pushing since my last trip to Tucanos meat bar.  The midwife was able to kind of mold Shelby’s cervix around Skyler’s head to speed things up.  We didn’t love this (Cause we’re hippies) but, a lot of that went out the window when we were in the moment.

We had some bad news at this point however, and it added some stress to the situation that I really hated.  We wanted to do Delayed Cord clamping, and immediate skin to skin; but, because Skyler was 41 weeks, she had taken a crap in the womb, and had most likely eaten it.  Kids are gross.  So, they would have to clamp and cut the cord quickly to then take her to a little table to “pump” the Mekonium (poop) out of her lungs.  This was horrible news, but we were hoping she wouldn’t have any signs of Mek which would make it so we didn’t have to do that.

We were finally at the point where Shelby could start pushing.  This was insane.  I kept looking at the secret passageway that my daughter had to fit through, and I was convinced there was no way she was going to fit through it.  However, my stud muffin of a wife pushed for about 30 minutes, maybe, I don’t know, and amazingly Sky’s head came through, along with her arm, haha, she always keeps her hands at her face, even in the womb.  And she basically came shooting out, along with a lot of green liquid, which meant Mek was present.  They took her to the table to start working on her, and of course, I’m like quietly crapping my pants in anticipation for her to make some kind of noise, after a couple minutes, they did indeed pump some mek she had aspirated, and I was able to take her to her waiting mommy.  Well, the second I turned around from the table, I see my wife, hemorrhaging on the bed.  At this point baby was fine, but I had a new set of worries, where I was sure I was going to be raising this child on my own.

When it really got bad was when the midwife was yanking on the umbilical cord, and it snapped off.  I wanted to head butt her, but she is a she.  Then she said “Can someone go get the doctor” in the kind of voice where you know she’s trying to stay calm but inside she’s taking a massive panic dumb  That’s right when I turned to her and said, “Is my wife going to die” 

Luckily Shelby was able to push the placenta out, and we got all of it out luckily.  We were able to stop the bleeding, and get her all sewn up.  She tore internally, but she’s doing much better now two weeks later.

After all this, even though the birth didn’t really turn out the way we had planned, it wasn’t as glamorous and calm as some of the hypnobaby videos we had seen, and we even had to have some interventions that we never would have wanted before, we had a healthy, perfect little human being in our possession, and it was glorious.

Since this is so freaken long, I’ll post another blog soon on the weeks after the birth, I’ll leave it at this for the birth story portion of our adventure.

Please comment if you actually read this, I’d like to know that I’m not writing these blogs in vain.  It helps motivate me to blog more often if more people are actually reading what I write.

Thanks, and stay tuned for the next blog soon!