Happy Birthday Zach!

Hello Ladies and Gents :)

It's been about 34 hours since little Zach was born. Crumbmum has ducked into the bathroom to have a shower and freshen up, so I thought I'd post the birth experience I had (as the cheer squad).

If we spin the clock back to about 11pm on Monday night we find Crumbdad and Crumbmum at home. Crumbdad was fluffing about on his computer reading some random website, and Crumbmum was in the bedroom, putting on a Miss Marple DVD she wanted to watch part of before going to sleep.


I'm sitting at my computer when Crumbmum comes up to me.
"I've just felt a pop!"
"A pop? What sort of  pop" I say.
"Down there, a popping sensation, it was weird".

"Hmm" I think, we hadn't heard of that in the ante natal classes. So "clickety click" on google and the first hit - membrane repture/waters break - aha!
"I think we should give the hospital a call"

So we call the hospital and they tell us to come in and that there is no rush.

"Great", we think. So both have showers and get dressed in some comfortable clothing. As Crumbmum was getting ready for her shower the waters managed to find their way out. No doubt at all what the popping was now.

As the hospital bags are already in the car (I like being super prepared) we grab some last minute things and head to the hospital. No contractions at this point.

We arrive at the hospital about midnight and the lovely midwives put Crumbmum on the double rubber band monitoring do-hickey and we waited. Crumbmum has what she describes as period pain type cramps.

Time passes.

The midwives check the printout from the machine and explain that they expect to see the foetal heart rate change with the 'contractions'. It appears the little tacker is snoozing, so cold sweet drinks and some prodding of the stomach is applied and after a while the results show what the midwives are expecting. The time is now about 1 or a bit after, not much appears to be happening apart from the ocassional 'cramp'.  The midwives explain that we'll be staying the night and the ob will be in in the morning to help things along.

So Crumbmum gets a panadene and a sleeping tablet and we try and get some sleep.

More time passes.

The cramps are getting progressively worse. I covertly time them and find they are about 10 minutes apart. About 3am and Crumbmum is having to move about to get on top of the pain. We put her TENS machine on, and it helps a bit. Half an hour later and the pain is now enough that I call in one of the midwives.

The midwife decides an inspection is in order and finds that Crumbmum is at 5cm. That happened a lot faster than we were expecting. Not sure why we expected it to be slower, but there you go. Crumbmum is making a fair bit of noise at this point, something about being in pain she was saying, so the midwife offers pethadine and gas. Crumbmum wasn't so keen on the pethadine option when she put her birthplan together, but was easily talked around when the midwives told her it would be about another 4 hours until she would be fully dilated, and the drugs should be worn off by then.

The drugs, gas, TENS seemed to help a bit. In what felt like no time at all a further examination was done and Crumbmum was asked if she felt like pushing, to which the answer was 'yes'.

Meanwhile, whilst all of this was going on, Crumbdad was standing at Crumbmums side. Offering a hand to hold, using a damp washer to cool her forehead and offering water after every hit on the gas. My jokes about watermelon and eyes of needles were not being received well, in fact, they weren't be received at all as Crumbmum was deep in concentration. Not knowing what else to do, I kept offering water, my hand and saying random comforting things.

In what seemed like a blink of an eye Crumbmum soon had one foot on the hip of a midwife, and the other on the hip of the ob, and was being told to push, to which she replied "ARHGHNNNNNNNGGGG AAANNG!"
which I thought was a fairly reasonable response.

My finely tuned movie watching mind expected this bit to go on for hours, but after what was probably a dozen pushes suddenly there was a flurry of activity and a bluey-red alien looking thing appeared on Crumbmums chest.

Some other stuff happened, which I don't actually remember much of (shock had set in at this time I suspect) but I do remember someone putting some scissors in my hand and saying "cut here" pointing at a very odd looking sausage. By twisting myself like a contortionist I managed to not stab my wife, or what I suspected to be a shape changing alien (it was beginning to look human) and cut the sausage. Then some more stuff happened where I ended up holding the alien that had transformed into a baby. You can tell I was in awe of it's shape shifting capabilities from the look on my face here.

Someone in the delivery room must have been Scottish because a haggis appeared (or something that looked like one). Maybe it was another shape shifter! It was fairly large too, I would expect a placenta to be smaller.

After that there was pretty well all the stuff that the Ante natal classes talk about. Zach got a feed from Crumbmum and they're both doing well. :)

Happy 0th birthday Zach!