Lucy's big debut

I'm not exactly sure when labour started.  My water may have broken about 48 hours before she was born, but not very definitively.  I went to see Dr Bill on Thursday and we started talking about inducing labour, since the risk of infection in the baby goes up once the mom's water breaks. We decided to hold off for one more day and see if labour started on its own.  However, I seemed to be 'leaking' more by the end of the day, so once work was done at the hospital, Dr Bill stopped by with a tiny, innocuous-looking quarter of a pill for me to take to induce labour.  That was about 5pm, I was in the middle of making a cheesecake, and hadn't even gotten dinner going yet.

6pm and my sweet and infinitely practical neighbour Steph stopped by to see how things were going.  And bring a delicious pot of soup for dinner so we wouldn't starve while I was baking dessert and neglecting to get actual nutritious food on the table for my family.  Contractions weren't strong enough at this point to really notice.

By the time dinner was over at 6:30, the contractions had started but were still pretty easy.  By the time Bill called around 7 to say that he and Marsha were going to head our way soon, I was definitely having to stop and breathe through each one, but didn't feel anywhere near ready to head to the hospital.  Good thing Mark didn't relay my message to Bill to not rush over quite yet.

 When Bill and Marsha arrived at 7:30, contractions were about 2-3 minutes apart and hard work to get through.  My sweet children were putting on a dance show to distract me from the pain, I definitely did not want anyone touching me or talking to me while I was contracting, and focusing on relaxing was getting tougher with each one. Bill checked me to see whether I'd started dilating yet, and said I was 3-4cm.  This made me not want to go to the hospital yet; when I was induced for Levi, I was 3-4cm when we arrived at the hospital and he wasn't born for another 8 hours.  However, Bill in his wisdom told Mark to gather my hospital bag and get the kids situated with Marsha so we could drive the less than quarter of a mile to the hospital - "I think this is going to happen quickly, guys."

I had one contraction in the car, and a couple on the walk to the labour room.  (There is one private inpatient room at the hospital, on the labour and delivery ward.  This is where the missionary mamas go for their deliveries, rather than the less-than-private 'bays' adjacent to the ward.)  Our nurse Staci met us there, and as she and Bill prepared for the delivery Mark helped me through another half-dozen contractions - each noticeably more intense than the last.  That Cytotec is truly something else.

At 8:20pm Tiny Baby made her appearance, Mark burst out laughing and said "She's a girl!!" (he'd been pretty confident we were having a boy), and we finally got to meet the person who makes our family five. Labour was over 3 hours and 20 minutes after I took my quarter-dose of Cytotec.  Heaven help any woman who gets a bigger dose than that!




I tore quite badly and had some fairly heavy post partum hemorrhaging.  Having experienced one epidural and two medication-free births, all of which involved a good hour of repair for tearing afterwards, I am appealing to the world of medical research to come up with some form of post-delivery pain relief that is more effective than local Lidocaine!













After a couple hours of recovery and getting settled, Bill offered us the option to go home rather than spend the night in the hospital. We gladly took him up on that, and he drove us home around 11pm.  Anna got up to come out and see us, and was delighted by Uncle Bill's news that she had - as she'd been hoping for - a baby sister!

 Although having such a short induction made things just a liiiittle intense, we are so thankful that Lucy was born when she was.  Bill and Marsha were leaving PNG a few days before my due date, and while any of the other doctors here could have very capably delivered her, Bill had been taking care of me since we arrived here.  Also, he and Marsha have been close friends with Mark's family long enough that Bill was in the delivery room when Mark and Luke were born.  So it was very special for us that he was able to deliver Lucy before leaving.


We are settling in and getting used to being a family of five.  Lucy figured out nursing much faster than either of the other kids, and is gaining weight well. She's starting to stretch out her night-time feeds so I'm getting three whole hours of sleep at a time now :) Mark has just gone back to work, although he's able to take extended lunch breaks and be home for a couple hours in the middle of the day.  We love our little Lucy girl (despite the fact that we deliberated over what to call her for so long that she remained Tiny Baby for four days after being born), and are enjoying this new season of our lives.