The night Tate was born…
It was a Tuesday. I spent the day running errands and the afternoon waddling around at Phillips Farm with the girls. I decided I needed to do something fun with them before the baby came. I picked Yani up early from school and everything. We had a super fun afternoon frolicking in the sun and we bought home sunflowers!
That night, as I was getting ready for bed I decided I should take a selfie every night up until my due date, since I wouldn’t know when it’s my last night with my belly.” I was 38 weeks pregnant. It was 12:15am, on September 23rd, when I took my last belly picture. I went bed shortly after.
Around 2am, I woke up to tinkle… with back pain. At the farm, we’d rode on a tractor train ride, so I figured I just knocked something out of whack. I waddled to the bathroom and back to bed. Matt woke up and asked if I was okay. I reassured him that I was fine and told him back to sleep. He did. About 20 minutes later I woke up again… this time I thought it was a matter of incontinence, so I changed clothes, but my back pain was stronger. I laid back down, but I thought to myself, ‘if THIS is it, I better get up ‘cause I got shit to do.’ So, in true Shanika fashion, I got up and got to work. I cleaned up the guest bedroom, cleaned up the living room and kitchen, and typed up a new daily schedule.
In the midst of my cleaning, organizing, and typing…. Yani woke up to potty. At this point, I’m having sporadic contractions that feel like really strong Braxton Hicks and I keep “leaking.” In my mind, I’m probably in labor, but I refuse to acknowledge it until I get what I need to get done. So, I accompany Yani to the potty and have a contraction that brings me to my knees. I explained to her that it was just Braxton Hicks (we’d had a previous conversation about them). I loved on her and put her back to bed, but fifteen minutes later, I heard her little voice again. “Mommy, are you scared down there by yourself? I keep trying to go to sleep, but every time I close my eyes I think about you. I’ve tried to think about something else, but I just can’t.”
Obviously, she knew, so I told her to come hang out with me. She and I watched Fraiser together, “that grown up show,” as she called it. By now, I’m sitting on a washable underpad and I’m naked from the waist down because I kept leaking on everything. I figured I was in the early stages of labor, but I refused to wake Matt up, until I got my stuff done. Around 345am, what felt like the floodgates opened and it was game on!
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Yani woke Matt up and I called my Mother in Law. While Matt packed the car and Yani watched Doc McStuffins, I decided, I needed a shower. All the sweat from those contractions had my left armpit stanking and I knew I wouldn’t be able to shower after giving birth, so I went for it. The only problem was, my contractions were about 2 minutes apart. By the time I got upstairs, they were a minute apart! Before I could get in the shower, I would laid the upper half of my body across the bed to wait out the contraction and Matt would magically appear to place his hand on my lower back, which seemed to alleviate the contraction pangs. I finally got in the shower, but I ended up bent over beating on the walls and shower doors, because…. PAIN!
Matt showed up again and I told him I couldn’t stand up anymore and asked him to run a bath so I can sit down, at least. He starts about how he needs to clean the tub first and I cut him off to tell him, ‘we don’t have time for all of that.’ So, he runs a bath. As I’m easing into the water, I tell him he should call 911 to get further instructions, just in case.
He responded with a question , “uhhh, you don’t think we should try and get to the hospital? I think we should really wait until we can get to the hospital.”
‘We can’t wait. He’s coming… NOW.’
So he picks up his phone and starts dialing but he definitely dials more than 3 numbers.
‘Who are you calling?!’
“The OB.”
‘Honey… the OB is going to tell you to call 911. Call 911.’ It’s after 4am.
As he FINALLY dials 911, the contractions come on even stronger. He says something like, “hi yes… my wife is in labor.” I let out a blood curling scream, as confirmation, and he leaves the bathroom AND CLOSES THE DOOR BEHIND HIM! I remember screaming, ‘WHERE. ARE. YOU?’ until he reappeared, with his phone and maybe towels, but I’m not sure. Another contraction steam rolls me and as I start screaming he leaves again, closing the door. This time I crawled to the other side of the tub and start beating on the side, screaming ‘DON’T. LEAVE. ME!’ He reappears, talking in a rush to the dispatcher. The contraction subsides and I’m sitting on my knees. They ask him if he can see anything, I’m holding the baby’s head in my hand, but he says, “no, I don’t …..” I interrupt, by lifting up a little. ‘He’s right there,’ I say pointing. Matt corrects himself and they tell him to have me lay on my back.
In my mind, I’m freaking out because there’s part of a baby’s body hanging out of my body, I’ve never done this before, and the help keeps leaving. Yani walks in and my body relaxes so that I can be calm, for her sake. I don’t remember what I said, but it was soothing enough that she felt reassured and went back to watching Doc McStuffins. On the phone, they told Matt to push down on the top of my vagina to keep me from tearing. I’m not sure if it was hand placement or what, but it HURT (and there wasn’t a contraction happening). I screamed, ‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING?’ Startled, he screamed back the directions he’d been given. I told him he was hurting me, I didn’t care about that, and made him stop. Another contraction came. Yani walked into the room, watching intently. I screamed. Pushed… hard and finally at 4:37am, he was out!
My Mother in Law walked in just as I was holding him in my arms and we were trying to get him to cry. He started crying and then the Cary Fire Department showed up, with masks on like the guys from the movie E.T. They helped Matt cut the umbilical cord. My MiL wrapped the baby in 50 million towels and sat with him, while Cary EMS showed up and started checking me out. I asked how we get the placenta out and they said it would come out on it’s own. It did. At this point, Cary Fire Department and Cary EMS have both seen me stark naked but I held casual conversations with all of them like I was fully clothed. Maybe it was the adrenaline, but I didn’t seem to mind.
Once the placenta was out, Matt helped me out of the tub and back into the shower to rinse off, before throwing on some clean clothes, and heading off to the hospital. Before I sat down in their stair-enabled wheelchair thingy, I snapped a photo of everyone. Special thanks to Christian of Cary EMS for making our home to hospital transition a smooth one.
If Tate’s entrance is any indication of how life will be with him, we’re in for a wild ride!
