The Birth Story

For those interested (and why wouldn’t you be?!), here is the story of Arden’s birth.  Don’t worry – I’ll spare you the gory details and just hit the highlights!

I woke up at 5:30 on Sunday morning with a mild contraction.  Several minutes passed before I felt another mild one, and I briefly considered going back to sleep because it was so early, but thought I should go ahead and start getting ready because I was already 6 days past my due date and knew this was probably the real thing.  I woke Clarke up and told him I thought I was in labor and that I was going to take a shower, and he mumbled, “Oh really?  Okay,” and then went back to sleep.  In the shower I had a few more contractions, but they weren’t terribly strong or close together.  By the time I started fixing my hair and getting my bag together, they were getting stronger and closer together, so I woke Clarke up and told him to start getting ready and to call his mom.  It was shortly after 6 o’clock at this point – maybe 6:15.  As I was packing my bag and getting ready, my contractions were getting stronger and stronger, and much closer together.  By the time Clarke’s mom got to our house around 6:50, I barely had time to catch my breath in between them.  I remember thinking that either labor was much more painful and difficult than I had allowed myself to remember, or I was much closer to delivering than I would have ever expected by that point.

Clarke finished his shower around 7 and I got a wave of nausea about that time that sent me running to the bathroom to be sick.  (Okay, sorry – that’s one gory detail).  We were in the car at 7:10, driving to the hospital which is only about 4 minutes from our house.  I was so grateful that we didn’t live far because by this point I was beginning to feel the need to push, but still trying to tell myself that I couldn’t possibly need to push yet because I hadn’t been in labor long enough.

We parked on the wrong side of the hospital and I got in a wheelchair and let Clarke push me up to labor and delivery because there was no way I was going to make it walking.  We got up to the nurses station and when I told them that I was feeling the urge to push, they all burst into action.  They got me in a gown and into a room and one of the nurses confirmed that I was fully dilated.  (She actually said something else, but writing it would make two gory details and I don’t want to push my luck.)

They kept telling me not to push yet, which was the last thing I wanted to hear.  I heard one of them say to call the doctor and I asked “Is she still at home?” and they said that yes, she was probably at home.  I knew she would never make it in time if she wasn’t already at the hospital.  Praise the Lord that she was!  It seemed like a few seconds later that Dr. Deem was coming in – I think she had just gotten into her office when they called her.  I had never met her before, but she was so incredibly kind (as were all of the nurses) that I instantly felt better.  While she got ready, they told me not to push a few more times and I thought I would die.  Then she broke my water, I pushed through four contractions, during which I could hear Clarke saying “oh my gosh…oh my gosh…oh my gosh” and Arden was born at 7:44 – a mere two hours after my first contraction and hardly more than 3o minutes after we left our house. 

I got to hold her as soon as she was born, which I didn’t get to do with Huston, and Clarke got to cut the umbilical cord.  She scored a 9 and 10 on her Apgar test – a “9” one minute after birth and a “10” 5 minutes after birth, which apparently is very uncommon.  The nurse at the pediatrician’s office said she’s only seen 3 “10’s” in her seven years of working there.  She weighed 8 pounds 4 ounces – exactly the same as Huston – thus confirming my suspicion that she was waiting to be born until she had caught or surpassed him in weight.  She seemed so calm as they cleaned her up and weighed her and she had her eyes open almost immediately, just looking around without crying, surveying this new world she had entered.

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We had lots of friends and family come visit us the first day and Huston got to come up to the hospital, too.  He was more interested in pushing the elevator buttons in the hallway than he was in inspecting his new baby sister, but he must have been observing more than we knew because Clarke’s mom told me that later in the day he said, unprompted, “Baby Arden say ‘aaaah’” while flailing his arms around, imitating her crying noise.  He really enjoyed pushing the buttons on my hospital bed when he came up for the second time later in the evening, and drinking from the big straw in my cup. 

There’s lots more I could write about our first week home with Arden, but it’ll have to wait until later.  Stay tuned!