I had my first cramp-like contraction at around 3am in the morning, five days before my due date. I went to the bathroom and had some bloody show, so I sent a picture to my doula, Hannah Sears. I tried to go back to sleep without waking my husband, but unfortunately that didn’t work and we both laid there with great anticipation.

Around 8am, I started to have stronger contractions, but knew I could be working through these for a while. My husband left for a meeting and I stayed at home, breathing through them.

Around 10am my husband Josiah came back to the house and the contractions were consistent and starting to get stronger and longer. I threw up a couple times, and mostly laid in the fetal position through the contractions.

We wanted to wait as long as possible to go to the hospital, so we knew we needed to wait it out for longer. Eventually though, around 11:45, I started vocalizing pretty loudly through contractions. Josiah called our doula and she told us we should probably start heading to the hospital. He tried to pack things up while helping me through contractions, which were pretty much 2-3 minutes apart at this point. Finally I yelled out, “A lot of stuff is coming out of me!” and my water broke all over the bed. He very firmly told me it was time for me to get in the car. We waddled there and I had really intense contractions for the entire 20 minute ride to the hospital—LOTS of yelling! It felt powerful!

We arrived at Patewood at 12:22. I was wheeled in, screaming, holding my doula’s hand. At triage, the nurse said I was fully dilated. They rushed me to a room to deliver. They hadn’t even checked me in or gotten my name, and my doctor hadn’t been contacted. They grabbed an OB from Patewood while they tried to get me settled into laboring. My doctor miraculously arrived a few minutes later!

I started pushing, and eventually our sweet baby girl Olivia Jane came out! She arrived at 12:49pm — 27 minutes after we arrived (and only about 10 hours from my first contraction!). Just goes to show that you can’t always count on a first-time labor being slow!

There are so many other funny details of this story (like how there were cleaners at my house when my water broke, how we pulled up to a stoplight next to Josiah’s friend who saw me screaming, and how they almost registered me in the hospital as my sister-in-law). There was also difficulty: I lost around 1.5 liters of blood, and it took the doctor a while to find out what was going on. It was very intense and painful, but I am healing up well.

Thank you SO much for all of your amazing teaching and wisdom. Though we barely had any time at all to use any of the labor strategies we learned in our Mindful Birth class, I felt so confident in my ability to labor and deliver my baby without medication, and I was unsurprised by the whole process. It all felt beautiful, natural, and powerful.