Birth Story: It All Started When...

After my 39 week check-up I had another acupuncture and massage appointment to try and loosen up my back and make it feel better. During my massage session I started having contractions, but they were super easy to ignore. I mean I was being worked on and really relaxed. Actually I was a little annoyed that my body wanted to practice contractions during my session. That was in the afternoon. By about 7pm that night (10/17) my contractions started to become a bit more intense, but super irregular. They still didn’t feel like real contractions, but Braxton Hicks contractions. There were a few I had to breathe through, but nothing too bad. So we went to bed. Kayley and Andrew slept great! As for me, the intensity of my contractions increased, though they still remained irregular, and made sleep quite hard to obtain.

At around 2:30am (10/18) the intensity increased. I tried changing positions, getting up and walking a bit, but none of that seemed to help. My breathing through them woke Andrew up and he tried to help me through them and rubbed my back to help me relax. That sadly didn’t help either. So I told Andrew to go back to sleep and said I’d distract myself by watching Tangled. I was able to watch half of it before fatigue finally started to win and sleep seemed inevitable. Well, I did get some sleep, but only a few minutes here and there before a contraction would wake me up (they were 5-20 minutes apart, and lasting 30 seconds to 1.5 minutes).

First thing in the morning I gave my mom a call to let her know what was going on and to ask if she’d come be with Kayley, and to tell my sister what was going on too so she could be prepared to go to the hospital if needed. So my mom got up and came over and Kayley was excited to have a playmate.

We also decided to call the midwives and go in and get checked out. Since contractions had been going on for so long, and at first Shilo was super active and then became very quiet and still, I started to become worried for her well being. We saw H at 11am and found out I was 4cm dilated and almost 100% effaced. It was such a relief to know that all those contractions had been prepping my body!  That was not how it was with Kayley. I took a non-stress test to check on Shilo’s well being, and to track my contractions too. We found out Shilo was doing great, and yup, contractions were strong, but irregular. We thus decided to go home and relax.

Non-Stress Test: The squiggly line on the left is Shilo's heartbeat. The line of the right shows my contractions.