Alabama Tracks

If you’re ever had children you know very well that it can rapidly turn this

into this

in the space of, oh, 6 hours. In short, things go crazy quick, except that in birthing, you’ve already planned carefully for all this. Or so you think.
If you remember, things were especially chaotic surrounding Ruthie. Erin’s water broke abruptly and Ruthie was born 24 hours later. Our plans went out the window quickly. Our birth plan? Left somewhere at the house and pretty much ignored except for a few points. Our help? Had to rush down here some 6 hours away on a moment’s notice.

This time we were ready. I pulled out the big white catch-any-barf bowl VERY early. We had our birth plan refined and we were ready to fight for it. No more uphill purple pushing for us! Car seats loaded, bags packed.  I had signed up for iTunes and downloaded a few songs and Erin created a calming playlist so we could just turn the laptop on and let it repeat music over and over instead of changing CDs all the time. We were READY.

I’ve often heard that everything you learn with child #1 is typically not applicable to child #2 for the most part. So far, it’s proven true. Where Ruthie was quick, Samuel was slow. We went to the doctor two weeks ago and he said Erin was at 3cm. So we figured it was about time. We called Tia and told her to come NOW, anticipating a Ruthie-like quickening any moment. So we got her entire immediate family and mine here. We live in ~1500 sq ft and we had 12 people, including myself, here.

Carefully planned craziness.

The hallmark of this birth will probably not be the birth itself but the two weeks prior, where we had Erin’s parents come from Florida twice. Don’t get me wrong, they were good times.

But 10 people in a house still can get crowded. And with Samuel teasing at labor it drags on and on. Many tears were shed. But Ken did fix the eaves of our house in the meantime (thanks Ken!) and we did have family time on Erin’s side, something that hasn’t happened on this scale since November. Sadly, Ken and Chris had to return home and they were unable to be here for the birth. We did have Chris on speakerphone at the end, though.

God has a funny way of reminding you about His timing and I suppose this was our reminder. We were going to wait until Samuel and God decided it was time but yesterday the doctor had concerns in the weekly visit. We knew Samuel was larger than Ruthie but the sonogram was putting him well north of 9 pounds, a point where diabetes can be a concern. So with Tia and the doctor in agreement, we decided to go ahead and have her water ruptured. At around 1pm her OB did the deed and the water (I’d estimate at least a pint and a half, maybe more) came rushing out.

Labor onset pretty quickly. Unlike last time, we had Erin’s friend Meg in the room to take pics which freed Tia and I up to focus more on Erin. We kept her breathing structured. We knew about the odd 0.5 cm “flap” that made her cervix seem less dilated. We moved her to a chair for part of the birth. Best of all, the hospital staff were VERY accommodating.  We didn’t have to fight over anything and they assisted us in our natural childbirth. Every nurse (and there were at least 4 there at the end) commented on how strong Erin was to keep herself that focused towards the end. No screaming, no regrets at the lack of an epidural, just natural bodywork, a sight to behold. Words cannot express how strong my wife is and I would do her injustice to try.

With Tia and I coaching, and Tia massaging, Erin let her contractions do the work. Ruthie had to be shoved down the canal. Samuel, on the other hand, was crowning without Erin having done any focused pushing. The doctors and nurses raced in to get set up so that when Erin did push, they could do their part. The pushing lasted all of 5 minutes. There was a major pause for me at the end when his head popped out and the cord was around his neck. The doctor immediately clamped the cord and cut it so we could get him out. One more major push and the rest of him came. He was blue for a good 3 minutes until he was rubbed down and started nursing. Yet another difference from Ruthie because she had trouble nursing at first.

We’ve picked 1 Samuel 1:20 as the verse for him because it fits so well

So in the course of time Hannah conceived and gave birth to a son. She named him Samuel, saying “Because I asked the Lord for him.”

“In the course of time”… how little we knew that would apply here. The Lord knew the day of his conception and the day of his birth. He has richly blessed us indeed.

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