Zatera Ul

Sometime I’ll write out the whole birth story, but for now I’ll just throw out some snippets.

1. Natural childbirth advocates aren’t kidding when they talk about endorphins–I felt just great after the birth, even with some extra blood loss and a nice jagged tear. For my stitches, I wanted all the drugs they would give me, but for the labor and birth I neither wanted nor needed them. Not that it didn’t hurt, but it was an entirely different kind of pain.

2. One thing that helped a lot in labor: a 10 cm paper circle that MFH cut out and colored for me. The idea is from a woman who told her birth story to our childbirth class–she used the circle to visualize how far she had to dilate. According to MFH, she went on to say that she found it discouraging to look at during labor, but I don’t remember that part. For me, it helped a lot to look at the circle and think, “I just have to get to 10 cm, then I can push the baby out,” and relax as much as I could to let the contractions do the work of getting me there. Afterward, we compared the circle with OLC’s head circumference, and they were pretty close.

3. Next time, we are going to have to get the labor tub set up faster; I was almost at the pushing stage (without knowing it, although I did notice that some contractions were coming without a break in between, which was transition, I guess) before it was full. I spent pretty much all of active labor sitting on my sweater trunk, with one elbow on the bookcase and the other on the bed; not what I had expected, but it worked well enough, while I was waiting for the tub.