James Katherine's Birth Story
When our daughter James Katherine was born, I didn’t speak to God for a week.
Although I had every reason to be thankful and thrilled that we had a successful homebirth and healthy baby, I wrestled with sadness, anger, and confusion in the days following James' birth. So much of her birth didn’t make sense to me. I thought surely she would arrive sooner than her older sister did and that this labor would be quicker, too, but I was wrong on both accounts. Despite both my body and heart feeling so completely worn down, I carried a baby beyond 41 weeks (again). She was ten days overdue, beating Tessa by one day. When I finally did go into labor, it took almost twice as long to get her here. Those seventeen hours felt like an eternity compared to my previous ten-hour labor.
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Annabelle's Birth Story
At 1:30am, my water broke in a few gushes, and I started having irregular, and occasionally strong, contractions. After one of the strong ones, N decided to call his mom in case things got more serious.
Around 10:30am, N and I left the kids at home with Grandma, and we went to my sister’s house so I could nurse her newborn. I had good, strong, regular contractions (~3min apart) for a while. Went to Panera to pick up lunch, brought it home to eat, still having contractions... but things calmed down by about 1:30pm. Later that afternoon I took a nap.
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Caleb's Birth Story
We started this pregnancy with See Baby Midwifery, but at our first appointment at 11 weeks, both the midwife and Dr. Bootstaylor mentioned we would be great candidates for home birth. While we have friends who have had homebirths, we hadn’t ever considered it for our family. We researched and met with Constance for a consultation, and we decided that home birth was our new plan! I loved the long and personal prenatal appointments. I loved getting to know Constance and Debbie and the student midwives. I was blown away with how peaceful and loving our home birth was.
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Joanna Elise Gabriella Birth Story
Our precious little girl is such a miracle! She is our sixth baby, but the first that we have been given the gift of bringing into the world and shepherding. Part of me cannot believe it has been almost a year—I had planned to do this much sooner—it has actually been written since May, but alas! ☺). However, the gift of learning the art of surrender with which Debbie and Claudia blessed me with has proved a more challenging lesson than I thought—which serves to prove how much I need to focus on embracing surrender. I am realizing that part of the reason that I could not write this until four months after her birth really had very little to do with having not watched the video all the way through (although it was enlightening—there were a few things that did not remember and that I was surprised by—namely that I was actually pretty sweet to everyone, even funny at times, that I called out to The Lord for help when I needed it most, and that I could transition so quickly to being this little one's mama—more on that later), but that I still feel I'm in the birth process.
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Charlotte Jean's Birth Story
The night before my guess date, I had some quality time with James, my husband. I had convinced him that we needed to take advantage of every opportunity to be intimate since we wouldn’t be able to for weeks after the baby was born (a much more enticing way of asking him to insert some prostaglandin-rich semen near my cervix to soften things up). I fell asleep to a hypnosis track like I did every night and woke up when I felt something that was a bit different than all the braxton hicks I had been having. I looked at the clock--it was 1:50 am. I felt it again and decided to get up and go to the bathroom. The second I moved, I felt a trickle down my leg--pretty sure I had just leaked some amniotic fluid. I was giddy thinking that this was probably going to be the day--and on my guess date none the less. I knew I should get some sleep. I decided to do a fear clearing session since my water was leaking, and I didn’t want to worry about infection or worry about labor not really starting for a long time. I was still awake when that track finished, and then I listened to Birthing Day Affirmations.
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