Harriet's birth story, part 1

Hattie is four weeks old today! Amazing! Life has been so full since she came. The first weekend we welcomed the kids home with us. The second weekend we celebrated Maddie's wedding. The third weekend I was down with mastitis and the forth weekend we trick-or-treated and celebrated Ivar's 5th birthday. These weeks have flown by. But here we are and I am committed to writing out her birth story...the story of the hours leading up to her arrival. This post today will be the abridged version. For some of you, this will be sufficient. But for my own memory keeping and for the few of you who love the details, I'm going to tell all the details over the next couple of days. 

There is so much suspense wrapped up in labor and delivery because you simply do not have any idea how it is all going to unfold. You just can't know. And after this last labor, I would say that it is God's good grace that you don't know how it's going to unfold.

Every phase of Harriet's labor felt a little too long and a little too eventful so that at each new stage Rory and I would think, "alright. surely now we've turned a corner. things should go smoother." But they never really did.

A quick overview by the numbers: When she finally made her earthly debut, Harriet was 10 days past her due date. It had been 54 hours since my water had broken, 37 of which were at home where I burned through a 24 pack of Depends. We ended up at the hospital where I enjoyed 17 hours of pitocin-induced contractions: 6 of those hours were the most athletic hours of my life, balancing on exercise balls, doing squats and lunges, all in an effort to get the baby to move into position. 11 of those hours were with a blessed epidural that unfortunately made me throw up 12 times. I pushed for over 1 hour and finally my 9 pound, 4 ounce baby with a head circumference of 15 inches was born.

And I was 1 exhausted mama. (This is also where a whole other story begins, but today I'm just writing about her labor and delivery.)

So you see, if a woman knew what her story was going to be before the whole shebang began, she might just cry. But you don't know it while living it, and that's definitely best.

On Sunday night of that week I stayed up late. We were seven days overdue and the birth felt imminent, even though it had felt imminent for over a week. I had posted this funny picture of me above on facebook and was getting lots of fun feedback which was good entertainment. I decided to read through Psalm 91 again, the Psalm that had come to mean so much to me and bring me so much comfort all throughout this pregnancy. And as I finished I closed my Bible, stood up from our reading chair and felt my water break.

I was so thrilled! Finally! I ran to the bathroom and then ran to Rory to tell him the happy news. This party was finally starting!