Christophe: Part II

Baby Christophe, about eight hours old, taking a nap beside his mommy.

Going back a few hours to the early morning, at about 1:00 am, they admitted us to the labour room, and we talked about some options. The OB was still in favour of breaking Pierrette's waters. Since neither Pierrette or I were anxious to go that route, we wanted to consider other options, so we waited for our Naturopath to show up and possibly explore other routes. She tried some homeopathic solutions and some accupuncture, and while those might have helped, they didn't put Pierrette into active labour, so after some further discussion, we agreed to go forward with the breaking of the waters, which ended up taking place around 6:30 in the morning, along with some vancomycin to protect against Pierrette's positive antibiotic-resistant 'Group B' test.

After that, Pierrette progressed relatively quickly into active labour, which around 9:30 in the morning. She spent some of that time on the bed, some time standing up, mostly in continuous fetal monitoring. Once the transition phase hit around 11:00, the midwives had enough data to suggest that the baby's heart rate was no longer a problem, and that we could probably go back to occasional use of the doppler instead.

Pushing took place from about 11:30 to about 1:00. If you haven't been through labour, I'll just say that, like mountains, it's not enough to read about a mountain and see a picture of a mountain, you have to go see a mountain. So while I had educated myself about the process of labour, it wasn't the same to actually be there. It's a pretty incredible process, and a lot of work.

All in all, I think it mostly went pretty well -- once we hit active labour, Pierrette progressed very, very quickly, and it mostly went as we had desired, almost entirely naturally. It would have been nice to do a water birth at home, but ultimately, we got the desired outcome: a healthy little boy, mostly naturally-birthed.

I'll cover the post-birth next, I guess, but not in this post. That is, as they say, another story.