Phew! How am I going to summarize this? I had a very healthy pregnancy with very normal (annoying) pregnancy symptoms. Morning sickness, exhaustion, and sciatic nerve pain got the best of me most days, but all in all, I can’t complain about too much. At 37 weeks I began feeling a lot of pressure in my pelvis and the pregnancy waddle was much worse than before! At my doctor’s appointment that week I was already 3cm and 90% effaced and the baby was head down and ready to go. A week later I had progressed to 4cm, still 90%. My doctor said I could literally have this baby any day- and I did. My water broke (or should I say trickled) around 2pm on July 15th at 38 weeks 3 days. I wasn’t sure if it was actually my water that had broken or just extra discharge (ew). I went in to get checked to see if it had really broken or not, and it did, yet I wasn’t feeling pain with any of my contractions. I was still 4cm and 90%. I kept not progressing or feeling any pain, so they started Pitocin at 9:30pm. They also did an ultrasound to see what position the baby was in and he was still head down. After waiting and waiting, around 4am those dang contractions hit me like a brick. I could write a novel on how they felt/ how I managed them/ how much of a support my husband was… but I’m going to focus elsewhere- just know it was miserable. Around 5:50 they wanted me to start “Practice Pushes” and to my relief they actually made the contractions SO much more manageable. It’s like pushing relieved my tense muscles. As time went on, my baby was just not descending like he should have been and I was exhausted. It was about to be shift change and I was relieved because that meant my OBGYN would be there to deliver my baby instead of the other doctor I had never seen before. The nurses had me halt on pushing until she got there but that was much easier said than done! I mean, we could literally see my baby. The nurses joked that my baby was bald and there was not a single hair on his head. Around 7:20 my body started involuntarily pushing, it was such a weird experience feeling my body completely take over to do what was so natural for it. But my doctor wasn’t here yet! Thankfully, she ran in seconds later and scrambled to get dressed and ready. She took one look at what was supposedly my baby’s head and her faced dropped in what seemed like slow motion. “This baby is breach!” She said we were looking at his booty and not his head. HOLY CRAP. So can we like push him back up in there and turn him or something?? HA. If only it was that simple. Not only was he breach, but he was booty first and folded in half. Just thinking about him coming out made me cringe. My body had another contraction and started pushing and she said very confidently that we were delivering him breach. Luckily, she just so happened to be a high risk doctor who has delivered many breach babies and actually opted for that route in many cases. She knew exactly what to do. Talk about a miracle! She said as soon as his bum and torso were out, they were going to snap the bed down, and turn him to get his shoulders to come out. It all happened so fast, and exactly how she said it would. Everett Layne was born at 7:27am on July 16th. He was all bruised up from being squeeze through folded in half, but so happy to finally be out. He didn’t even cry, just laid on my chest and looked up at me with his big beautiful eyes. I ended up getting a 3rd degree tear and felt every bit of it without any medication or epidural. But as many moms will tell you, it was all so, SO worth it.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sienna_skousen/