Hello! Daisy Yuexin Li (李悦昕) was born on Sunday, October 27th at 11:05am (39+4 weeks gestation). Rachel labored for 7 hours and pushed for 7 minutes. Daisy was born under the skillful and compassionate care of midwife Zee & nurse Katherine at Lifecycle Wellness and Birth Center in Bryn Mawr, PA.
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39 weeks
I was doing pretty well (I think) in late pregnancy. I learned to make sourdough bread and picked up knitting. I walked in the morning most days. I was feeling calm and positive about labor, birth, and postpartum, and very grateful that I had decided to stop working around 36w. I started listening to birth podcasts and watching Bridget teyler videos.
My parents arrived late at night on October 22nd (38+6) to help and I wondered if this event would signal to my body that it was now safe to give birth.
Sourdough English muffins
I told the nurse practitioner at my appointment that I was feeling “crampy”. The truth was, I had been feeling what I thought might be mild contractions and was lowkey getting a little excited. We had sky cafe for lunch and joked about kickstarting labor with sambal. I made sourdough English muffins and a pumpkin pie. After p went to bed, I noticed my contractions getting stronger. I told Karl casually that we might be going in that night and he completely freaked out! I think it was the first time his body really registered that one way or another, we were going to birth a human soon. He went for a quick walk. We threw some things (mostly clothes and snacks) in our duffel bag, and decided to watch Kiki’s delivery service and then go to bed. About 30 minutes in, I told Karl I wasn’t able to focus on the movie due to the contractions, and that he should just go to sleep while I worked through them. “I think there’s a 30% chance this is it”, I told him. I knew labor could come and go. Thanks to my first experience in labor with Phillipa, I was also aware that prodromal labor (cruelly termed “false labor”, probably by some non-laboring male) was a thing — aka truly painful and actually regular contractions that unfortunately don’t help to dilate the cervix. Secretly, though, I hoped that this was the Real Thing. I was, after all, a second time mother. This time my body knew how to not faff around. I was ready! Baby should be ready!
Sadly, baby was not ready, and my contractions petered out when I lay down to rest around midnight. I tried willing them back into existence to no avail. To add insult to injury, phillipa woke up ballistic around 5am and required extensive soothing. Not that she came remotely close to falling back asleep. But Thursday morning found me exhausted, discouraged, and extremely constipated. "Please... she really needs to nap today", we told her teachers. "Stay busy but stay chill", I wrote in my notion page that morning. I decided on the thrift store. A visit to the thrift store signals the ultimate luxury of time and energy: you hunt for some unknown treasure that you don't exactly need from a very large pile of items with a very low success rate. As I had hoped, the minute I stepped into Goodwill, I felt the need to poop, and hobbled over to the grocery store to do so. I was cunningly hoping that the same hormones that allowed me to relax enough to poop would allow me to go into labor. I did start to feel the mild contractions again, but they weren't regular or strong enough to make me think anything definitive of them.
The rest of the day was uneventful. I made chai tea concentrate, picked up some books from the library, and tried hard to ignore my supposed contractions. I kept myself busy with books + attempting to knit an adult-sized sweater (managed to complete the neckline ribbing, but that's it).
Another thrift store
Crunchik’n
Short on ideas, I decided to go to another thrift store, and my body once again immediately pooped (this time I went to a fancier thrift store with a bathroom in it). I found a new-in-box baby bath thing, an item I actually had in my amazon cart! Met Karl for lunch (crunchikn - disappointing). Still with the ignorable contractions. I think this is when I started acknowledging that I was mentally and emotionally not feeling good, even if I was doing okay physically. Through journaling and talking to a friend, I reached a couple of insights. I let myself admit that this liminal space was hard. It was making me remember all the long, unhappy seasons in which I did not feel I could trust my body to do what it needed to do. I felt faked out by my own body. I was anxious to get to the many unknowns on the other side of labor&birth. I was bored. I wanted phillipa to know that ten months of telling her about her baby sister was not all a lie. I was preemptively grieving the ambiguous loss of potentially never being pregnant again. I was scared but also excited to close a very long and tiresome and draining chapter of our lives (trying to build our family). I felt nervous that I wouldn’t connect with a new baby after three whole, FULL, years of loving her big sister.