It’s A Boy! | Alder Grey’s Home Birth Story | Part 2

If you missed Part 1 read here first. Contractions started to intensify and I labored on the exercise ball, walked around a bit, and did some side lunges/rocking while Neil worked with the midwives to get the birthing pool set up.
Around 10am one the midwives checked me and found I was at 7cm and I don’t no how effaced actually but I must have been getting close to 100%. She said she expected me to enter transition at anytime now. I labored through around 5 more contractions before getting into the birthing pool. Soon after that contractions picked up and started to become more and more intense. I kept going back to Edith’s birth and tried to remember to make low sounds and keep my mouth loose. As contractions intensified I suddenly felt the urge to push and I said I needed to and was told to go ahead! At this point my water still hadn’t broken and it wasn’t until I started pushing that it finally did break. I had 3 rounds of contractions, 9 big pushes, 1 time of unnecessary (and unhelpful) screaming and then a loud roar when I felt the “ring of fire” aka Alder’s head being born and then finally his body and a surge of relief once I felt his body being born. At 10:59am Alder was born. I birthed Alder on my hands and knees in the birth pool which was a position that I just couldn’t get comfortable in with Edith and Neil ended up catching him behind me. It was about a minute (which felt like forever) before I actually got to see this little baby that I just birthed but finally I turned around and got to hold him and reveal that we had a baby boy.
I held Alder while he had a quick check and then Neil cut his cord. Shortly after that my placenta was out and I was laying in bed with a new baby boy on my chest. I ended up with a small tear and had to have 3 stitches but so far things haven’t been so bad down there compared to when I had Edith. While Alder and I were getting checked the other midwives were cleaning up everything and by the time they had left, which was around 1pm, it didn’t even look like a birth had occurred. Seriously it was amazing. Side note Alder didn’t have a name until around 3pm and his name actually wasn’t even on our list of first names. Alder was a name that I had liked as a middle name and Grey was a middle name that we both liked and in the end we waffled between a few names that stuck out to us but then Neil said something about having Alder be the first name and it just felt right so that’s what we went with. Prior to this we had about 10-15 girls and boys names picked out and nothing even close to standing out as a front runner. How/where was Edith during the birth? Edith was in attendance! She “helped” Neil inflate the birthing pool at first and then we brought out a special new toy for her to play with incase the birth was during the day.  This new toy (Mega Blocks) was as huge hit and kept her happy and distracted for amount of time. She spent her time checking in on me, playing with toys and the midwives helped to distract her at times as well. While I was in the birthing pool/giving birth I was told she was curious, interested, excited and a little confused as to what was going on and she had a few moments of concern when I was having some of my louder moments. She watched her brother being born and was super excited when Neil caught him.I’ll blog more about transitioning to being a big sister another day. Neil also plans to blog about his experience of the birth so that will be interesting to read! Lastly I hope to do a quick meet the family YouTube video in the next week or so!