Our Crazy-Filled Life: William Douglas Jacobson

So, I thought I would type up a quick recap of Liam's birth. He was pretty much the fastest and easiest labor and delivery I had. I went to my OB for my 40wk appointment on Tuesday August 20th, and was still stalled out at 2-3cm and maybe 50-60% effaced. The week before my OB had swept my membranes, which did nothing other than cause me some very uncomfortable cramps that whole day. My OB tried to sweep my membranes again that morning, and in the process she thought she had accidentally broken my water. After a quick test, and no leaking, she said she hadn't but that she thought I was probably pretty close to going into labor. That was at about 10am. I'd been having braxton hicks contractions off and on for a couple weeks, and was definitely having them more after my appointment, but I wasn't holding my breath.

It was Evan's second day of school, and he got out early that day. I can't remember now, but I'm pretty sure that my parents picked Ev up from school that day-Stella was napping. And it was about 5pm that evening that I kind of thought the contractions were amounting to something. So I made sure everything was ready to go to the hospital if we did need to go that night. I took a shower. I made the kids an easy meal, but I couldn't eat because I was feeling too uncomfortable. Josh got home and I told him that he should probably shower and eat quick because we would probably be headed to the hospital. I called my parents to come over with the kids until Sandy could come to stay overnight and we were off.

We left home about 7-7:15. I remember getting to the hospital around 8 and I'm pretty sure the nurse at the check-in desk thought that I was going to have the baby right there in the hallway. I wasn't in a ton of pain, but the contractions had definitely picked up. They were cleaning out one of the labor rooms so we had to wait a little bit. But I was fine pacing back and forth in front of the desk. Once I finally got the room, things moved a little bit faster. They checked me and I was at 4cm and 90%, so I was officially declared to be in labor. The nurse told me that even if I hadn't officially been in labor yet, they wouldn't have let me go home since I was 40 weeks.

The OB who was on-call from my practice wasn't my favorite, however she ended up being awesome during my delivery. She waited until I had my epidural to come see me, and I was up to 5cm. She asked if I wanted her to break my water, I said sure. If I remember right, that was around 10:15-10:30. Things went really fast after that. I should add in that my epidural was only working on my right side, and the anesthesiologist was in a surgery so he couldn't come back to fix it until he was done. Within about 30-40 minutes it was clear that the epidural was not going to get fixed because I was progressing too quickly. We thought that we would have another 21 baby, but by about 11 we were pretty sure that he wasn't waiting until the 21st. After about 3-4 contractions, so only about 10-15 minutes, our baby boy was wailing on my chest. Up until he was born, we still hadn't settled on a name-which was a total first for us. But we also weren't expecting a baby to actually be born on his due date-barely-but he was born at 11:27pm.