Desmond Jay Sweet was born on May 31st, 2010, at 5:28 p.m. His due date was June 14, but he thought he'd beat out his sister in arriving earlier than she did (he was 2 weeks early whereas Aislin was 11 days ahead of schedule)! Thankfully I had already reached full term and it was Memorial Day, so my family was able to drive up and meet him the day he was born :)Now for the labor story! According to my labor nurse, I wasn't really in labor. I could've finished out the early stage of labor from home, and it could've been days or weeks before anything changed, but this is how it happened:
My contractions started coming every 3 minutes for about an hour and then about every 2 minutes the following hour, so we called the doctor-on-call (it was near midnight) and she said, If this is your second child, you need to get to the hospital. So off we went with our little suitcase and Aislin, who was happy as can be to get out of the house.
When we got there, we learned I was indeed having contractions every 2 minutes and was 4 cm dilated. Since 4 cm was kind of the minimum requirement for being in labor, the nurse wanted to check me again an hour later to see if I progressed. At that time she said I had gone to 5 cm (although my labor nurse said it might've just been 4 1/2 at most), which was all the proof she needed to admit me. After that, my contractions reeeeeally slowed down. They had me walk around to get them back up again, but they were still very erratic. It was only because my contractions lasted a long time (in spite of being 8-10 minutes apart) that the doctor saw fit to start me on petocin.
Petocin goes up to level 20, which was what I ended up with after hours of sitting around and waiting for my contractions to hold onto some sort of pattern...but when that didn't happen, the doctor came in and explained that I could go home and let my body do its thing naturally or I could have my water broken--either one being perfectly fine with her; but first she needed to check me for dilation. Apparently I had gone from 4.5/5 to 6, which ruled out going home...so we broke my water!
About two hours later the contractions were grrrreat. It wasn't just back labor this time, it was all-over labor--back, front and even legs! So when squeezing Tim's hand and staring at the hospital floor stopped being effective, I requested the epidural...which turned out to be a total failure until the very last minute! Instead of removing the pain, it just relocated it. I ended up feeling sore under my left leg and a burning on my right hip. After they upped the dosage a bit and the numbness finally kicked in, it was time to push! I could still feel the contractions in my lower abdomen but it felt more like dull pressure, so I pushed as hard and for as long as the doctor asked me to and, about 12 pushes later, Desmond popped out and was placed on my chest :)
Thus was the birth of our second child!
