Baby Nate’s Birth Story: Ready Or Not, Here I Come!

Baby Nate’s birth story actually starts with this poor forgotten blog. Because the one night I decide to finally stay up and write, he decides to make an appearance too!

I’ve not been writing much in this space over the past year. I guess after blogging for 12 years, I’ve lost a bit of the desire to write. But because so much of my life has been captured here in this space, I had the nagging feeling all through my pregnancy that I had to make a note of it before it was all over! 

Taken on 24 April 2017 at 38 weeks. I delivered 2 days later!

So on the night of 25 April, with my EDD of 8 May looming, I sat down to finish off my post on Baby #3 — this post: Having Baby #3. I’m not sure why I had instinctively felt like I had to finish the post that night. Maybe my body knew that it was really now or never!

I was feeling good. (Relatively speaking, of course, since I was feeling like an aching beach whale 24/7, but you get the drift.) Streaming videos while writing, I was up till past 1am finishing off my post. At around 1.30am, I got out of bed to pee before retiring to sleep.

At least, that was the plan. Baby unfortunately had other ideas.

After peeing, I stood up… then felt a familiar ‘click’ followed by an immediate trickle of warm liquid. It was very similar to what I felt during Noey’s birth and I realised with a sinking heart that my waterbag had broken.

My immediate reaction was dismay and denial:

“My water can’t have broken!”

“It’s still April! He’s supposed to wait till 2 May!”

“Argh, I haven’t written the big brother and big sister cards for the kids yet!”

“Maybe it wasn’t the waterbag…?”

I tried to keep calm while wandering around the house, grabbing last minute items like the nicer pyjamas that I had just bought and chucking them into my half-packed hospital bag. As I walked, I could feel little trickles of water leak, but STILL I hoped it was nothing.

Eventually I realised that I had to wake the husband to tell him that we probably had to go to the hospital. He had only gone to bed just a bit earlier but he was awake immediately when he realised why I was waking him. Even so, I was still wishy-washy about whether baby was really arriving. Until I got off the bed I had been sitting on to wake the husband and… WHOOSH! The most undeniable gush of water streamed down my legs, forming a big puddle on the floor and leaving no doubt that THIS WAS IT.

We moved faster after that! DD left a note for our helper to let her know we were heading to the hospital, I checked that I had my essentials, and off we went with a thick towel for me to sit on in hand. I jokingly told the husband that Baby was making sure that we got our money’s worth by making his impending arrival known after midnight so we’d get the benefit of nearly a whole day of our 3D2N hospital stay!

We arrived at Thomson Medical in a short time, and being more experienced this time, I made my way to the delivery ward while DD went to park the car. The hospital seemed surprisingly quiet and dark from the outside but the delivery ward wasn’t quite so empty. I was warmly received by the first nurse I saw and moved briskly along once they heard that this was my third baby. Very quickly, I ushered into an available delivery room to changed into hospital garb. 

I had the unavoidable VE and the result — 4cm dilated. Already! That was more than I expected. So my next question was whether there was still time for an epidural and thankfully there was.

As I waited for the anaesthetist to come, I started getting more and more nervous. It’d been a while since I’d had a baby! I prayed hard, and got a bit stressed when the anaesthetist was preparing the shot and couldn’t find the right spot for a while. But it got done, eventually. As the pain relief set in, the husband and I settled down to catch some sleep and wait it out.

Lying on my side post-epidural as the delivery of the painkiller seemed uneven, with more flowing my right leg.

Time passed quickly and mostly uneventfully as both the husband and I tried to get some rest. I told DD I didn’t know why all our kids had to give me no sleep the night before their arrival! While the epidural dosage felt higher than I had with Mei and I lost most feeling in one leg, I could feel the increasing pressure below, as well as loss of water, both of which indicated to me that labour was progressing.

When the nurse came to check on me again around 6am, she declared that it was nearly time to push! By then I had spent only about 4 hours in the hospital and I was quite pleased that things were moving along quite quickly. I started getting nervous again, so I quickly grabbed my phone to text my friends (whom I knew would be up to do their school runs) to tell them that Baby was on the way and to ask them to pray for me.

6.20am — Just before the action started!

Time check: 6.20am.

I got set up and got down to the business of pushing the baby out. This time, my nurse was very calm and she coached me through several pushes before my doctor breezed in to continue with the process. It was all very smooth. So smooth that Baby Nate came out, arms crossed and looking slightly displeased, at 6.38am. Yes, in just 18 mins! I was still getting replies from the friends praying for me when I gave them the happy news that Baby Nate had arrived. Praise God!

He’s here!

All cleaned up!

Thereafter, I passed the rest of the morning in a happy adrenaline blur. The only dampener was the fact that I didn’t get to nurse Baby Nate in the delivery suite. He was whisked upstairs for a look over by the paediatrician as she was just making her rounds at that time. Thereafter he was popped under the warming lights so it was a good 2 hours later that I got to cuddle my baby. And still later in the afternoon when the whole family was able to gather together to welcome our new addition.

Just like that, we became a family of five!

First family photo!