I’m so excited for these next few weeks to share with you my experiences with both a hospital and home birth! I’ll also have Kayla, my guest writer, share her experience with having a birth center birth! Hope you’ll join me for the next few weeks to hear our stories!
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My husband and I found out we were expecting our first baby when we were 23 years old. Like any new parents, we were both extremely excited but also realized that we had no clue what to do next! Having a natural birth was always something that I wanted to do but with not knowing how my body would handle labor I wanted to labor in a hospital there wasn’t even a question about it. After deciding on what hospital I was going to go to, I started looking into birthing classes. At this point in time I had already told family and friends that I planned on birthing naturally. Most were very encouraging but a few had no doubt in their mind that I couldn’t do it, and of course I had to make sure to prove them wrong. With both my mom and sister suggesting it, we went with The Bradley Method for our birthing class. I found Liza who teaches at Baby’s in Bloom. It was truly eye opening! We not only learned different relaxing techniques and the stages of labor, we also learned about what can happen with each medical intervention, which we wanted to keep at a minimum. While going to the The Bradley Classes we realized that with the way I wanted to birth, it would be best to change hospitals to one with a lower c-section rate. So towards the end of my pregnancy we switched. PINIMAGE
Finally, at 41 weeks and 4 days my labor started. My husband and I headed down to the hospital and got settled in. It definitely wasn’t what I was expecting! Being a first time mom in labor, I didn’t know if what was going on was suppose to happen. My midwife came in every once in a while, but other than that my husband and I were alone. When my water finally broke, my midwife saw that there was meconium which meant that I needed to be transferred to the labor and delivery floor where the on-call OBGYN was. I was hooked up to both internal and external monitors and I could no longer move around. I wasn’t given the option to say no, they just did things. I was asked to sign papers towards the end of my labor- to this day I have no clue what I actually signed. My birth plan was completely out the window.PINIMAGEWith 16 hours of labor and narrowly escaping the use of the vacuum and a c-section, we welcomed our daughter into the world at 10:24 AM on the 24th of May. She was my little angel that got rushed across the room to get the meconium suctioned out. After what seemed like eternity I was finally able to hold my baby girl. 
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Even though I was able to do a drug free birth and was finally holding onto my healthy baby girl, I felt cheated. I didn’t experience the birth I wanted. With everything that had happened I knew that for my next baby something was going to have to change.
Join me next week for what all I changed with my second pregnancy!
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