Sam’s birth and the subsequent drama, largely detailed at Choicywhiteboy.com, taught me a lesson that apparently I am still not done learning in my 35 years: things don’t always go the way I hope, plan, or expect. I had an easy, trouble-free pregnancy and yet it turned out that my baby was IUGR (Intrauterine growth …

Read More

The entire atmosphere of the room changes. Nurses and support staff come out of nowhere. Two large bubble lights in the ceiling come on. Someone adjusts the bed so that I am sitting up, and there is a birth platform below me. In all the commotion I am dimly aware of a small cart being wheeled in–the isolette–where the …

Read More

Over the next few hours I lost all sense of time. All that remains in my memory are snapshots of intense sensation and emotion. But this was the labor AC and I had prepared for. At last. The contractions are getting stronger and I need to lie down and be quiet for them. There are definite peaks and valleys too. I had …

Read More

September 30, 2005 Around 6:00PM We check into Nason Hospital in Roaring Spring. Room 167. It's an LDPR (Labor Delivery Postpartum Recovery) room that is trying very hard to look like a hotel room: tv wardrobe and drawers, writing table and chairs, and of course the infamous recliner, aka "papa cot." took one …

Read More

The sun was bright and warm when we left the midwives office. I wanted to freeze that moment. Three hours was not enough time to stare into AC’s eyes, to hold hands, to walk up the leaf-crunchy trail on Wopsy Mountain, to sit and breathe in the enormity of what we had done, and what we were about to do. It was, …

Read More

Mother- and Father-to-be sat there stunned. A baby this weekend? Now? It was as though they had failed to understand that a baby was the usual outcome of nine months of pregnancy. Then what was the point of all the morning sickness, fatigue, weight gain, oh yeah and the kicking, fluttering, heartbeating being inside? …

Read More

It seems to be fashionable nowadays for new parents to write a birth story, just as it’s become de rigueur for parents-to-be to compose a birth plan. A birth plan is supposed to help keep everyone—mom, dad, nurses, doctors, midwives—on the same page as far as what the pregnant lady does and does not want done to …

Read More