Birth Story - Barrett Alexander

{Barrett Alexander Powell - 8lbs 2oz - 22in}

Barrett was born on Saturday, October 26th at 9:18am, just one day before my birthday. My water broke 3:26am in bed. And luckily like last time I was able to get to the bathroom and the bed stayed clean! I had only been asleep about 3 hours. Love starting a new life already behind on your sleep.  Mom came here to sleep and get the kids up.

Got to the hospital at 4:15 and was checked in.  I was only a 3cm and at my last appointment I had been a 2.  I was able to get moved into a room, watch a lot of news and get my epidural at 6am.  The nurses kept asking me about my pain because my contractions were huge but my pain was only about a 2-3.  They told me I could do it without an epidural.  I gladly told them I had no interest at all in doing that.  Pain meds all the way!

My contractions were hard and but not super steady.  I would have the mountain range thing going on instead of peaks.  So I would have super long contractions and not up and down. I got pitocin around 7am to help with that because I was only 4cm.

Barrett's heart rate dropped at around 7:30 and they turned off the pitocin. The nurses did a wonderful job controlling that (as opposed to when it happened with Milam) and rolled me over and gave me oxygen.  The nurse said she wasn't worried and since she knew I labored fast it just meant Barrett was probably being moved into the birth canal pretty quickly and we just needed to find a better position for me.  It worked and he was fine.

At 8:20 I was 10 cm and positive 2 station and the nurse told me Barrett had hair. They called the doctor and she was about 20 minutes out so they decided I was ok to wait on her.  They had me do a practice push and immediately told me to stop and close my legs.  The nurse said if I coughed or laughed he would come out. She ended up taking longer because the parking lot was blocked and she couldn't get into the hospital.  He probably would have been born around 8:30-8:40 (making all my labors literally the exact same length) but because my nurse wanted to wait he was born after two pushes (one big push and one small push) at 9:18 am.  They had another doctor on standby but my doctor was the on call doctor for my practice that weekend so I really didn't mind waiting since I had already had an epidural.  We just talked and laughed (not too much) while we waited.