Sonday

Last Saturday night I had be asleep about an hour when the phone rang. I must have been in a deep sleep fog because until I looked at the clock I thought it was around 4am. It was 10:45pm instead. This was a birth that I was very excited to attend. It was my first homebirth!

I quickly got dressed and got to the family's home about 11:30. We'd already had a "dress rehearsal" earlier in the week, and I was a little concerned that the mom might wait until she was definitely sure labor was in order before making the calls. My concern was that the midwife from Tallahassee's Birth Cottage was over 2 hours away. From listening to the mom on the phone I could tell that contractions were more serious this time and when I arrived they were getting fairly close together at around 4 min or so with good duration.

The contractions had picked up to 2-3 minutes apart when the midwife called to say that she'd been stopped for speeding. With homebirth not being quite so common here, the police officer was a bit confused as to why a midwife was proceeding in the opposite direction from the hospital for a birth. We found out later that she had held the phone up to the officer so he could hear the mom in labor in the background to which he replied, "Just go". The midwife arrived at 1:30am. A healthy baby boy arrived at 1:59am! It was nice that we had all met each other a few days prior since we got so little time for introductions before the little one introduced himself.

It was wonderful to see how relaxed things were even with how rushed the midwife had to be to get all her precautionary stuff set up. The labor and delivery had several little quirks that as you read the medical studies you see that the typical hospital reaction isn't always necessary or even helpful. All these quirks (including the labor stall earlier in the week) were allowed to play out and everyone was healthy.

One of the neatest things is that the mom said she should have known that things weren't going to pan out earlier in the week. All her sons have been born on Sunday!