It seems that people always seem ask the infamous question...."Where will you be delivering your baby?". It is always interesting to hear the run of responses when we answer...."we have our babies at home". Sometimes people are supportive with the "hey my sister did that!" or even the rare person who share's the love for home birth. But, most of the time the response is....man you are "brave", "crazy", or my favorite of all times was "don't you know you could have had a dead baby!".....that one was special. So I thought I would take a minute to tell people why we have chosen so long as we are considered "low risk" to have our babies at home..... It all started with a couple we worked with in Stephenville....Marc and Cara Phillips. I remember when I got pregnant with Sage for some reason I asked Cara about her birth experiences, and come to find out she and Marc had chosen to have their children at home. I truly don't remember anything about the conversation at all or even why I was intrigued by this idea but, I began to research homebirth and midwives in our area. When I shared with Von my discoveries about homebirth being a safe alternative to a hospital birth in low-risk pregnancies he was all for it! Maybe even more gung-ho than I was. So we searched and found our first Midwife.....Mollie Roe!
Mollie began training to be a Midwife right out of High School and had her own practice for about 9 years when we hired her. She was young and bubbly but equally experienced and well educated. She believed in the importance of Doctors and Hospitals but she also knew that low-risk pregnancies weren't in need of either. One of the things she taught me that I have never thought of before was that Pregnancy and Birth were normal parts of being a human. Neither needed to be considered a sickness or brokeness necesitating a Doctor who was trained in Healing the sick and broken. Her confidence and knowledge kept me at peace....as well as lot's of praying!
My water broke with Sage almost 36 hours before I actually had her. Had I been in the hospital I would surely have had my labor augmented to speed things up. But Mollie was consistently checking my heart rate, Sage's heart rate and my body temp to make sure there were no signs of infection etc. and I was allowed to let labor progress at the rate which my body desired for it to.
Contractions didn't start until 27 hours after my water had broken, and they didn't even become really intense until the last 4-5 hours or so, but boy when they did it was pretty difficult. I pushed for about an hour and Sage was born with her little hand up by her face giving a Military Salute to the world!
Was it hard? Heck yes! Did it hurt? Absolutely! Was it worth it to not have access to any pain meds or epidurals?....100%. "However I completely see the reason why they are so popular". Sage was 8lbs 8 oz and 18.5 inches long, a little chunk if you ask me.... but I had no tearing, no need for forceps, or a vacuum because I could feel the whole thing. Every contraction that I pushed with was efficient because of the fact that I could feel the power of what my body was doing and try to work with it. And after it was all over it was amazing. Sage was alert and rosy cheeked a 10 on the APGAR. Afterwards I was able to walk myself to the bath and get cleaned up with relatively little pain for the circumstances. Sage was never taken away from me and we all ended the night eating King Ranch Chicken and Birthday cake. After Mollie cleaned everything up and made sure Sage was nursing well and that I was doing well she left us all snuggled up in our own bed to begin our new lives together in the intimacy of our own home.
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