Dash’s Birth – Part One

January 4th, 2010

My pregnancy was normal and enjoyable. I had a better appetite and more energy than I’ve ever had before. I felt only mild nausea during the first trimester, and when I told my ob/gyn that I threw up twice, she laughed and said that throwing up only twice doesn’t count. I continued to work throughout my pregnancy, and I even went camping and hiking a month before my due date. I had no reason to expect that giving birth would be anything but natural and routine.

But when my due date came and went and my ob/gyn scheduled an induction for a week later, I started to worry. All of the books and blogs that I read warned that many inductions are premature and result in emergency c-sections. I wanted Dash to be born when he was ready, and I wanted him to have a natural birth with minimal medical intervention.

So we had one week to try to induce labor naturally. Hoping to avoid the risks associated with being induced at the hospital, I tried everything: eating lots of spicy food, taking a warm bath, and going for long walks. It rained all week, so we had to walk at the mall and at other stores. One night, while we were at Costco, my contractions got down to four minutes apart despite walking around. My husband started to worry that I was in labor and hurried us to the check-out counter. Just as we left the store in the pouring rain… the contractions went away.

It finally stopped raining on the day before my scheduled induction, so Eric and I went to Maymont Park with a picnic lunch. We walked around nearly the whole park, stopping to watch some of the animals along the way. We saw a peacock wandering freely around the petting zoo and a black bear pacing hungrily by the gate to his cage. When we reached the buffalo, the sun had started to set and we sat on a bench for a few minutes before leaving. One of the buffalo wandered over to us from the other side of his field and we named him Benjamin.

The path we walked at Maymont Park and some of the animals we saw.

But like my previous efforts, walking around the park didn’t cause me to go into labor either. So we prepared ourselves to go to the hospital the next morning for the induction.

To be continued…

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