Our Birth Story - Mom's perspective (Part I)

So, the little guy made us hold out a good three days past his due date. The day before, the 13th, I had some strong contractions but I was still able to do our daily dog walk without any problems. We relaxed at home most of that day and, in retrospect, we'll have to thank the little guy for giving us a nice weekend off before coming to stay.

The morning of the 14th, I woke up at 2:30 with a fairly strong contraction. I'd had one or two the evening before but they were really spaced out. Between then and 5:00 I had four or five more contractions where I definitely had to focus on relaxing and breathing through them. At 5:00 AM I decided I should probably start timing them. They were varying from 5-10 minutes apart and a good minute long each. We got up and had breakfast. I had oatmeal...Daddy had chicken curry - boy did it smell good while I was contracting! (please note the sarcasm - it was a horrible smell!) We gave the midwife a call and she recommended taking a shower and seeing how the contractions did. While I was in the shower they were a steady 3 minutes apart. They say you should go into the hospital when your contractions are 5 minutes apart and last for 1 minute long, for at least an hour to two hours. We talked to the midwife again and we discussed what our options were. By then it was 7:10 and Houston traffic to the med center isn't the best. They also say that most women's labor slow when they get to the hospital, so we figured we could wait a little bit.

**woops - little Vincent's hungry - I'll write more later!!