Birth Story (Part 1)

Our birth story for our baby is something I want to remember. As time goes on I keep worrying that I'll forget the little details so I am determined to record it and here seems as good a place as any.

On Tuesday 13th October 2009 and 10.50am I decided to go for a walk and put my boots on in the kitchen. I felt a sudden rush of liquid and leapt to my feet in a Jumping-Jack-type stance to avoid my waters ruining my lovely brown suede boots. All I could think was "not the boots!" Little else registered as the baby wasn't due for another 9 days so it couldn't possibly be happening.

The other side is that I had been feeling 'odd' since the Friday before when I had a sharp contraction. I continued to feel strange that weekend while I went shopping for nursing tops and bras and ran a Christmas craft party.

Anyway, when I had recovered myself I decided that I ought to ring Mr Tigerlily and let him know that things are likely to kick off in a few hours or so. No need for him to dash home and be all hysterical when I'm fine on my own. I believe the first labour is likely to last 12 hours + so there was no need to panic.

Ten minutes later and I'd had 2 or 3 contractions! Time to ring Mr Tigerlily and demand he return home sharpish!! It was quite hard to speak though so it was more like "Home! NOW!!" The next task was to get some professional assistance. I'd gone upstairs to run a bath as this was alledged to help ease contractions (I still don't know if this is true!), but this caused a few problems... how to get downstairs to get phone numbers I needed? where to place myself ready for labour??

In between contractions I managed to crawl up and down the stairs a couple of times, due to making a number of errors I had to make a couple of trips. Things felt like they were speeding up even more. Irrationally I thought that the best place to go, having rung the hospital and found out which midwife I needed to ring and rung the midwife and convinced her I wasn't imagining things, was to sit in the bathroom! I sat silently next to my nice bath, not being brave enough to climb in as I wasn't sure I would be able to get out again, and waited for help to arrive......