blusher and brownies: Welcome to the world Isla

In my last post I said there was a few things I wanted to recap on, but I’ve had countless sleepless nights since then and I actually can’t remember what I was talking about!

But one thing I did want to talk about was my birth experience this time round, as it was a lot more positive and drama free than with Rosie’s.

Isla was not on time. She was 10 days over due and I was not in a good place mentally. I was uncomfortable, tired, huge and fed up.

Here I am all chirpy at 40 weeks expecting my waters to break any second as they did with Rosie. But no. That did not happen.

Here I am at 41 weeks, looking slightly less chirpy. I had a full 3 more days to go before she made her grand appearance!

What I must add is that I put on a lot more weight with Isla than I did with Rosie. And I didn’t weigh myself after 40 weeks. And I think in that last 10 days I put on a hell of a lot! (I’m now working on rectifying this damage, that’s the problem of having 2 babies in quick succession, I got fat!)

Anyway, back to the story. On Thursday 27th October 2017 at around 2am I started getting contractions. At this point I perked up a bit, I’m going to have to go to hospital in an hour and have the baby I thought oh so positively. But no. By 9am the bastard contractions had stopped. They restarted at 3pm but they were so sporadic. No rhyme or reason to them. They were coming every 10, 7, 5, 3 minutes, really randomly but they were bad. The real thing, I couldn’t breathe or talk through them and I couldn’t sit down as it hurt so much. So I was standing pretty much from 5pm.

At 6pm I phone my Mum and said could she come and get Rosie as I think it’s happening! Better than a call at 1am! So Mum and Dad came and got Rosie and I carried on with my sporadic contractions. At 9pm they still weren’t regular, and I hadn’t felt the baby move for a while. As I had an anterior placenta, I didn’t feel her much during the pregnancy and espically when I was standing. So at this point I got myself all worried and call MAU and they invited me down.

The car journey to the hospital was horrendous! Every bump hurt like hell! And we love about 35min from the hospital! We got to MAU and I was seen within 10 mins. I got hooked up to the monitor to see how Baby was and she was fine. I was there about an hour. When I arrived I was measured and I was already 6.5cms dilated! I was then transferred up to the Midwife led unit as I really wanted to try and have the baby on my own with no drugs and I wanted to go in the pool. I managed a period of time up there with just gas and air but I was struggling big time. My local midwife has since told me that I wasn’t mentally in the right place and if I had known. The midwife i probably could have carried on. But I couldn’t. I needed that epidural. So I was measured, 8cms. We had to act quickly!

Before I was transferred down to delivery suites I needed a wee. And as I was sat on the loo the midwife said to me Jo are you pushing? I didn’t know if I was or not! She then said if you’re pushing we can’t do the epidural. I said I’m not pushing I’m not pushing! ;)

Oh what sweet bliss the drugs are! Sod trying to be brave, drugs are the way forward man! I even managed a snooze! Eventually I got to 10cms and was told to start pushing. As with epidurals you can’t feel the contractions so you rely on the midwife to tell you when to push. My midwife was fantastic. So supportive and just wonderful. She held a compress on me when I was pushing to help prevent me from tearing. The only intervention I had was the midwife had to break my waters, but after last time, that’s brilliant.

I can’t remember how long I was pushing for but at 4:49am on Saturday 28th Octoberweighing 9lbs 3ozs, my second little princess, the last piece of our jigsaw, Isla Grace Reynolds arrived.

From that first moment I loved her fiercely.

We stayed in hospital just one night as she did a little poop on the way out and her cord was wrapped round her neck- now that boy was scary when the midwife said to the student midwife, can you press the alarm and call paeds as Isla wasn’t breathing. Thankfully she got going but it was the longest scariest few minutes of my life.

We were really lucky and were given a private room on the midwife led unit, I couldn’t believe my luck! A lovely lovely midwife even took Isla away for a few hours in the middle if the night so I could get some sleep! As she wouldn’t settle apart from on my chest and I was exhausted.

Jamie and Rosie came to visit us the next day and took us home after all our checks.