Well, my pitocin started around 11pm on Sept 16th. My stomach hurt like crazy and I could barely sleep at all. Great news-it was just heartburn and gas! Haha. Dang it!!!! They increased my dose every 30 minutes. After midnight (yay! It's the 17th!) still not much was going on. Daniel slept through the whole thing :)
But by 2:30ish I was having steady contractions every 2-4 minutes. Or so they say. I was just trying to sleep. It didn't hurt that much, and I know one of the stories I read in Spiritual Midwifery said something like "a bunch of women at the farm slept through early labor, so I decided to try that too" LOL. So, me too. I just tried to relax and let the contractions do thier job, not fight them. Also, it still wasn't back labor, so much better than Michael or Sophia.
By 6am I was having good contractions, but only about 4cm. Ugh. Baby was not fully engaged is why. So some contractions were easy, some were terrible depending on how far down he would be.
Daniel was still sleeping :)
The nurse suggested that I get up and sway/hula/walk around so gravity could help his head engage. I did that and in the hour the contractions got way worse. I couldn't talk or move or sit during them, just had to stand up, brace my arms and breathe. Our nurse had said that I could try Fentinol to take the edge off so when she came back at 7am I asked if I could do that now, see if it was enough, and if not maybe get the epidural. She said sure, but she would a heck me first and they were about to switch shifts, so lucky me, Joan, one of the previous midwives from Molokai who I actually saw when I was pregnant with Sophia was our new nurse! She's great! So, Joan checked me, I was 8cm! She went to get the midwife on call. Louisa came in and rechecked me. 8 cm and a bulging head. She said I better get the epidural now or I wouldn't have time, or I could do it without if I wanted because the baby would be born really quickly, within the hour. So I took the Fentinol AND the epidural and basically got all loopy and almost passed out for the next hour. It was actually great and nice to relax and rest since I had basically been up and doing stuff for the last 26 hours with only a couple of cat naps.
Soooo, I was kind of out of it, but I felt his head pretty low and asked if I should push. They said "yes!!!" Pretty emphatically, but then I got scared. Hahaha, so I didn't. I waited for the next contraction, pushed and it hurt!!!! I wasn't expecting the pain, so I stopped pushing agin. Then they said I just had to. No going back now. So I pushed as hard as I could with the next 4 contractions and it was still incredibly painful and I cried, but that was it. His head was out. Then Louisa asked Daniel if he wanted to catch, so he caught the body on the next push. The body was almost as bad as the head. His chest was actually wider than his head, but I guess I was already stretched. Then we were done. They laid him on my chest skin to skin and rubbed him with a blanket. He cried immediately and turned a nice rosy pink. He's a fat baby with a double chin, huge arms, a barrel chest and tiny legs.
Later when they weighed him he was 8lbs 5oz. And only 20 inches long. His hair is really dark, maybe even black, but his eyebrows and eyelashes are white...or they haven't grown in yet. I don't know if that's possible. His eyes were wide open and I was surprised that he looked a lot like Daniel/Mike. From the ultrasound we all thought he was going to look just like Michael.
And the placenta was cool. It was way darker than Michael's and it really does look like a tree of life.