Olivia Marlene (German pronunciation) was born on Saturday January 30 at 11:19am! She weighs 7,18 pounds and is 21 inches long and is purely wonderful!!
I haven't had much time to go online since she is here but I wanted to update you guys and share my experience even though I joined the club very late! I am still working on my birth because it was so extremely parted. I don't know if you remember but our plan was to labor at home for as long as we could and just deliver in the hospital. We had a doula who was supporting us at home. I started going into labor Wednesday night but contractions would slow down during the days and pick up at night. My husband stayed home Thursday and Friday and we were just kind of working through it together, taking walks, figuring things out as we went in a nice and calm pace. As my contractions picked up Friday night the doula came to our house and helped me through the now stronger contractions. I took a long bath, labored in the shower, did some hypno birth exercises (finger drops) and took contraction by contraction. So I really had this great home birth experience with my husband in my home. I am still amazed at how i was able to do this! We got to the hospital at 9:45 and Olivia was born at 11:19am. So we did manage to go in late. When they examined me in the triage I was already complete and everyone was nervous and hectic. It was a complete switch. They asked tons of questions, didn't really have time to check our birth plan and seemed overwhelmed. I was scared of the hospital environment and had my husband take me to the bathroom. I labored in there and when I came out I did one practice squat only to notice that Olivia was already crowning! Now they were nervous, the doctor rushed in, he had another labor going on. They put me in stir ups that weren't really fixed up so two people ended up holding my legs and my husband was holding my head. I was still scared and far from relaxed. For some reason the pushing scared me and I felt at the end of my ressources. I ended up having an episiotomy which I had declined in my birth plan but felt right at that moment. I felt so exhausted and just wanted to have my baby and the position in the stir ups made it so hard for me. When they broke her water it showed meconium and so a two-person-crew came in with a little bed to suction. They were waiting with each contraction and were chatting in between. It was so respectless and it still breaks my heart to think of it. We and mostly Olivia deserves so much better than this. So when she was born my husband went over to the suction and the OB did the stitches. We had about an hour in the delivery room then they were taking her to the nursery for observation because of the meconium and she also had low blood sugar. She had to be there for 4 hours and than she was rooming in with us. My husband watched her through the window of the nursery and I joined him in a wheel chair soon. She was sleeping peacefully the whole time and nursed right after wards. She really is an amazing peaceful little person. Right after birth I had this incredibly high that we made it with little interventions and finally had our little daughter. Olivia even did the breast crawl and latched right on in the delivery room. But once we got home from the hospital and I guess my hormones were changing I kept going back to the hospital birth and it is so hard to wrap my head around this extreme shift in labor. My husband thinks that part of the chaos and hectic happened because we got in so late and there was no time to establish a relationship. We basically just handed in the plan. I agree but I also think that I would have taken so much more time if I would have gotten in earlier and who knows what they would have done to speed things up so I am graceful for the time I had at home where my body figured it all out by itself and if we will have a second child I will have a complete homebirth with a midwife. I learned that you can't have a natural birth in a hospital - you can have an unmedicated birth at the most. I really didn't expect myself handling birthing so well at home. We had picked the part home part hospital route because of our insurance but also because I had thought I might want an epidural. I had no idea how I would experience birth - and it developed towards the end of the pregnancy when I had educate myself more and met other Moms. My main reason why I wanted to have an unmedicated birth was because of the side effects for Olivia. Now I know that there is so much more to a real natural birth than just "no medication". It will take me a while to come to a closure with this experience.
I haven't had much time to go online since she is here but I wanted to update you guys and share my experience even though I joined the club very late! I am still working on my birth because it was so extremely parted. I don't know if you remember but our plan was to labor at home for as long as we could and just deliver in the hospital. We had a doula who was supporting us at home. I started going into labor Wednesday night but contractions would slow down during the days and pick up at night. My husband stayed home Thursday and Friday and we were just kind of working through it together, taking walks, figuring things out as we went in a nice and calm pace. As my contractions picked up Friday night the doula came to our house and helped me through the now stronger contractions. I took a long bath, labored in the shower, did some hypno birth exercises (finger drops) and took contraction by contraction. So I really had this great home birth experience with my husband in my home. I am still amazed at how i was able to do this! We got to the hospital at 9:45 and Olivia was born at 11:19am. So we did manage to go in late. When they examined me in the triage I was already complete and everyone was nervous and hectic. It was a complete switch. They asked tons of questions, didn't really have time to check our birth plan and seemed overwhelmed. I was scared of the hospital environment and had my husband take me to the bathroom. I labored in there and when I came out I did one practice squat only to notice that Olivia was already crowning! Now they were nervous, the doctor rushed in, he had another labor going on. They put me in stir ups that weren't really fixed up so two people ended up holding my legs and my husband was holding my head. I was still scared and far from relaxed. For some reason the pushing scared me and I felt at the end of my ressources. I ended up having an episiotomy which I had declined in my birth plan but felt right at that moment. I felt so exhausted and just wanted to have my baby and the position in the stir ups made it so hard for me. When they broke her water it showed meconium and so a two-person-crew came in with a little bed to suction. They were waiting with each contraction and were chatting in between. It was so respectless and it still breaks my heart to think of it. We and mostly Olivia deserves so much better than this. So when she was born my husband went over to the suction and the OB did the stitches. We had about an hour in the delivery room then they were taking her to the nursery for observation because of the meconium and she also had low blood sugar. She had to be there for 4 hours and than she was rooming in with us. My husband watched her through the window of the nursery and I joined him in a wheel chair soon. She was sleeping peacefully the whole time and nursed right after wards. She really is an amazing peaceful little person. Right after birth I had this incredibly high that we made it with little interventions and finally had our little daughter. Olivia even did the breast crawl and latched right on in the delivery room. But once we got home from the hospital and I guess my hormones were changing I kept going back to the hospital birth and it is so hard to wrap my head around this extreme shift in labor. My husband thinks that part of the chaos and hectic happened because we got in so late and there was no time to establish a relationship. We basically just handed in the plan. I agree but I also think that I would have taken so much more time if I would have gotten in earlier and who knows what they would have done to speed things up so I am graceful for the time I had at home where my body figured it all out by itself and if we will have a second child I will have a complete homebirth with a midwife. I learned that you can't have a natural birth in a hospital - you can have an unmedicated birth at the most. I really didn't expect myself handling birthing so well at home. We had picked the part home part hospital route because of our insurance but also because I had thought I might want an epidural. I had no idea how I would experience birth - and it developed towards the end of the pregnancy when I had educate myself more and met other Moms. My main reason why I wanted to have an unmedicated birth was because of the side effects for Olivia. Now I know that there is so much more to a real natural birth than just "no medication". It will take me a while to come to a closure with this experience.
Olivia Marlene
