May 21, 2018 will forever go down as a beautiful day of redemption, faithfulness, goodness and deep deep love in the Smith household.
I loved everything about my pregnancy with Emsley, and look back on her birthday with even more love. I would relive it again – all of it, every moment of her entrance was saturated in His love, grace, joy and peace (and who wouldn’t want to experience those things over and over again, am I right?!?).
Just to give you some background about what Josiah and I prayed & prepared for when it came to Emsley’s birth – let me give you some of the highlights of our birth preferences:
- I desired to have a completely unmedicated birth
- I desired to have a low-to-no intervention birth
- I desired to allow my body to go into labor naturally (no induction)
- I desired redemption for my OB – I deeply deeply desired to have him deliver E
- I desired to labor at home and only go to the hospital when truly ready
- I desired a room with a tub once at the hospital
- I desired for Josiah to be my coach and support throughout my labor and delivery, with the help of our doula
- I desired to use certain essential oils during the birthing process to help minimize tearing, infection, etc.
- I desired to have a couple hours of uninterrupted skin-to-skin time with Emsley from the moment she was born until she first breastfed
- I desired to ENJOY the entire process – even though I knew it would be painful and hard
Now let me also preface and say – while these were ideals that we prayed for, prepared for and deeply desired – above ALL else we wanted a healthy baby! We knew our OB understood our preferences and trusted him to provide the least invasive options should something not go as planned!
May 21st was a Monday, and the day before I had no indications that the very next day we would welcome our precious girl into the world. Sunday was truly “business as usual”. We got up and went to church in the morning, swung by Costco on our way home to pick up a couple more items I wanted to have on hand before baby arrived, came home and made lunch, spent the afternoon doing a little yard work (Josiah mowed the lawn, and I raked up the plethora of fallen leaves our 2 magnolia trees constantly leave behind), and funny enough one of our neighbors came out as I was raking and bagging leaves and jokingly asked “are you trying to work that baby out of you?”. That evening we joined our community group for the last meeting of the spring until a short break for the summer! I felt fine. Normal even. I had been experiencing Braxton Hicks contractions for a while, and because I knew what real contractions felt like from my labor/delivery with Caden, they never made me question whether or not I was going into labor. We spent the evening relaxing and gearing up for what I had hoped would be my final week of pregnancy (I was so eager to meet our precious love).
Memory is a wild thing! Isn’t it so fascinating how certain triggers can send you right back to a particular moment in time? Like for me, the smell of chiclets gum and vitamins will take me immediately back to time with my Nana growing up. Or the smell of Turkey roasting in the oven, transports me to Thanksgiving morning in my parents house with jammies on watching the Macy’s Day Parade! Or the sound of the song “Get Higher” by the Paper Tongues immediately takes me to my first rock festival with Josiah where he officially stated his desire to date me. I also know that memories, in a lot of ways, remind us of what we’ve walked through. They often remind us of both the good & bad, the delightfully easy & the brutally hard. But whether the memory triggers something looked back on fondly or something painfully hard to remember – one thing it serves to remind us is that we were shaped by it, and we’ve since grown from it. The morning of Emsley’s birth was one of those memorial moments for me. Knowing I was having my first real contraction, reminded me that I had been through this once, I had learned a lot from my first experience and had changed because of it. So I knew in the depths of me… I can do this!
Like most mornings when you’re 9 months pregnant, I woke up at around 4:30am to pee! And that’s when it happened, I felt my first real contraction. It wasn’t intense and it didn’t last long, so I wasn’t nervous and knew it was probably just the beginning of labor. As I crawled back into bed, Josiah asked if I was ok and I casually told him – yes, but I think I just had my first contraction. I wasn’t concerned, so I think that allowed him not to be concerned – which let us both fall back asleep! We finally got up some time around 6:30a to start our day. I was still having contractions, but they were infrequent and very irregular. Josiah started to try and time them, just so we’d have a baseline of information to give our OB & doula. I went about life as usual that morning, except I will admit that I did have an overwhelming desire to “clean my house” one more time before baby arrived. So I spent that morning vacuuming, dusting and tidying up the place. Looking back I can see my mama instinct knew what was coming later that day – it’s so fascinating to me how we’ve been so intricately designed…
At about 10am, we decided to call our OB & Doula just to give them a heads up that our precious girl would likely be making her debut soon! One of the things I was most nervous about in anticipation of my delivery with Emsley was the labor. Would this labor look anything like my first one with Caden? My doula was convinced (and thus treated me as such) that I would progress like a first time mom. But I had always had reservations. I knew my body progressed VERY rapidly with Caden, and you hear that your second, third, fourth babies can be faster. But I also know my situation with Caden was complicated, so I wasn’t sure if that same pattern would apply to me with this pregnancy. And of course, no one can give you a concrete answer – you must prepare as best as you can, and then wade into it clinging to the hope that God is faithful and always present. Our doctor was excited to hear that things were ramping up and he just said to keep him posted with how I was feeling. Our doula mentioned that we were likely in the very beginning stages of labor, so to live life as normal, try to rest/nap that afternoon because I’d likely be in active labor through the early morning hours of the following day. We checked in again at noon, and my contractions had certainly become more frequent, but nothing I couldn’t handle. My doula recommended that after lunch we go for a little walk to help things progress, and to check back in with her about 3 hours later (3pm). And that’s when it all changed…
I tried to stay pretty active for the majority of my pregnancy. Thankfully I was still able to get to the gym even that 39th week of pregnancy. Another piece of God’s redemption, because I could barely take short walks with my first pregnancy. The community where live has hundreds of miles of paved trails – it’s amazing and one of our favorite things about the area. We have a 2 mile trail around our neighborhood that is one of our favorites to walk. So after lunch we headed out, tennis shoes on and I literally couldn’t even make it .25 of a mile before have 4-5 contractions that were intense enough to make me stop, lean on Josiah and breathe through them. After the 4th contraction, I knew things were ramping up and told Josiah that I didn’t think I could go much farther so we decided to head back home. Josiah was timing my contractions still and they were 2-3 minutes apart and increasing in intensity. We got back to the house and called our doula again. She still thought that I was in the beginning stages of labor, but I remember feeling differently – I was convinced I was in active labor but also scared because my limited labor experience was from an anomaly of a situation. I kept thinking, if this is in fact only early labor, I don’t know if I can do this naturally. The pain was already extremely intense. I labored at home for another 2 hours, and the only position I could find relief in was sitting on my birthing ball, hunched over the backside of our couch rocking back and forth. Josiah was amazing the entire time! He wrapped up loose ends at work quickly and was with me through every contraction! He kept our families updated with texts/phone calls about how I was doing. He’d stay close, but not too close – giving me the space and air I needed to make it through each wave. He made sure I was drinking enough, giving me sips of coconut water often. In short, he was my rock and I couldn’t have done it without him.
**Side Note to any pregnant mamas – do yourself a HUGE favor and buy several cases of coconut water when you’re expecting! They were SO helpful in giving me the energy & hydration I needed to be able to endure labor naturally and really helped my milk come in well right from the start!
At about 3pm, we gave my doula another call but this time her response was different. Josiah called her but she asked to speak to me. So he put her on speaker phone. She asked me how I was doing, and broken up over the course of several contractions, I tried to tell her I was ok but in a lot of pain. She told us that she was going to pack up her things and head to our house. She could tell I was progressing faster than she anticipated and she wanted to be able to observe me as I labored. She lived 30 minutes from us, so I knew it’d be about 4pm when she would arrive. She sent a text when she was leaving, and it wasn’t 10 minutes later that I told Josiah we couldn’t wait any longer. I needed to go to the hospital now, and we needed to just have our doula meet us there. Thankfully the hospital I was going to deliver Emsley at was literally a 6 minute drive from our home. As I tried to get my shoes on in between contractions, Josiah grabbed our bags/supplies and loaded up the car. He came back and helped me into the car and off we went! So much of this drive to the hospital was completely opposite of our drive with Caden. This drive was quick, Caden’s drive took 35 minutes (and that was with forcing Josiah to run a couple red lights). This drive was during the day, when it was still light out, Caden’s drive was in the middle of the deep dark night. This drive was peaceful, Caden’s drive was chaotic and fearful. This drive we were prepared for. This drive was our redemption!
Stay tuned for part 2 – Emsley’s Grand Debut!
Sweet Smith Stories 