Saturday, 30 July 7:05pm. A sense of reality starts to return a bit and the midwife mentions the placenta and having to wait for it or taking drugs to get it out sooner. L says she wants it to come out on its own. So they bring in a birthing stool (a chair with a hole in the seat) for L to sit on. I ask about weighing and the Apgar test. They say they can wait for the measurements and she's clearly fine so doesn't need poking or testing.
We look at the umbilical cord, which is a pale organic-looking tube – reminds me a bit of a pulsing sausage or something. It's nice to finally see it, having been so dependant on it working for so long. I wonder what it's providing to the baby now. Is it just topping up her air and nutrients? I mean, it was working full force just a few minutes ago, and it's clearly still running. The baby can't go long without oxygen, so it must be providing at least some of it, just in case the birthing takes a while. I'm just curious what it's doing and how the mechanics of it shutting down work.
L tells the midwife to wait for it to stop pulsing before cutting it. I've no idea if the midwife did or not, but she eventually clamped it in two places and asked me to cut it. this couldn't have been more than 10-15 minutes after the birth. I specifically mentioned in the birth plan that I had no desire at all to cut the cord, but there I was, handed the scary scissors and in a state of massive suggestion. (now I know why the neighbour named his 3rd child after two of the midwives). So I cut the cord, and a splatter of blood comes out and onto the towels on the floor. The midwife asks if she can take the cord blood for testing. Again, yeah, whatever. It's there. Help yourself.
So the baby is finally free and her own entity for the first time since she was a bouncing ball of a few dozen cells trying to find a nice place to attach to. She doesn't seem to notice, so we don't make a big deal of it. We're just staring at her and smiling.
She's this wee tiny thing with an elongated misshapen head and greyish blue skin with a fine down of dark hair on her arms and back. Her head has dark hair with drying bits of goo in it. It's lighter than mine and L's, but not a lot. She's got a V-shaped widow's peak line of light-coloured hairs at the edge of her hairline which I still don't know what's going on with. Her nails are long and rather sharp. I guess she did get my nails in the end.
Her eyes are still a bit bulged out. She favours her right eye, and is not opening her left much. The blood vessels in her left eyelid are quite visible and I wonder if she scratched it in the womb or hurt it on the way out (turns out there's no persistent problem – she's using both eyes just fine now). She has golden eyelashes. Far blonder than the rest of her hair. Rather odd – normally people have dark lashes and light hair, not the other way around. So I can't tell if her hair's dark and going light or light going dark. With that combination people might think she dyes her hair :)
She has L's nose – I was right about the 22 week scan. (turns out, looking back at the 22 week scan, it looks just like her. We couldn't guess what she looked like at the time, but looking at the scan now, it's clearly her forehead and nose and lips and chin). Her cheeks and mouth and nose look a lot like a baby picture of L taken when she was 5 hours old. She's much thinner in the face, but the resemblance is clearly there (and has been getting stronger as her face fills in). I love the fact that she's me from the side and L from the front.
Around now, the original midwife comes back from her break. She's rather surprised to have missed it all: Wow. That was fast. I'm glad it was so easy. You should consider doing a home birth next time.
After some more gazing at the child the midwife points out that L's feet have turned blue, and asks if this is normal for her. No. No it's not. So she goes to sit on the toilet instead. They take this time to finally weigh the girl. I stand next to her while they put her on the scale. 3180 grams (7 pounds) and 49 cm long. They put a nappy on her (she's already passed some chocolately-looking meconium) and hand her back to me wrapped in a hospital towel. I hold her and stare at her and smile and walk around. She's soooo light, and the first baby that I ever held that didn't melt down after a few minutes.
I say she's very light, but I weighed over a pound less when I was born. L weighed over a pound more. So my family thinks she's a large baby and L's family thinks she's so very small.
I hear a plop from the loo and L says that the placenta has fallen out. This is 40 minutes after the birth – another textbook figure which encourages me. L comes out and picks up the camera and starts taking photos of me holding the baby. It's the first photos of the child and I'm beaming at her in all of them.
L convinces me to give her the baby back. I use the lull to tell a few people about the birth. I send my inlaws an SMS saying It's a girl, but of course you knew that already
– what else could I say as tersely? SMS the sister-in-law to let her know she's an auntie. And I phone my parents (curse their lack of GSM phones) and am finally able to say yes, you are grandparents now
(the answer to the first question out of their mouths every single time I've called them for the past month).
Meanwhile they check L for damage. Turns out she has class 2 tearing, which the midwife explains that class 1 is minor, class 2 is deeper tear and could need stitches. Class 3 is a nasty tear, and class 4… you don't want to know.
Given how nasty she described class 3, I really don't what to know about 4. They initially want to stitch up L, but the midwife who comes on after 8 (when they change shifts) says it's better to just leave to heal as is – which L is fine with.
Things start to quiet down a bit. Around 10pm I start telling non-family people about the birth. I completely forget that we made a list, and just pick a few seemingly at random (a few days later I find the list and realise that I can't be trusted to do this from memory, since I'd still not told them). I joke with L that we should call the people who gave us a lift to hospital and ask if they could pick us up on the way home from the party.
I finally turn to the bag we brought. Three bags, actually. One an insulated bag of food. Still full of all the frozen smoothies we'd planned to keep L going though the long labour. I give her one – may as well not go to waste – and put the ice coffees I brought into the kitchen fridge. I try to eat some of the emergency rations I brought. Turns out they're terrible. Note to self: don't make emergency rations in a hurry, just make your usual tasty food.
It's cold in the birthing centre, so we dress up the baby in pyjamas and a hat and gloves and socks. L is very cold due to the loss of so much mass and fluids, so we wrap her up in blankets so she can doze off. Around midnight I take a picture of the baby and try to upload to Facebook, but the phone fights me and refuses to do so. L goes to sleep on her bed-thing, I lie on the fold-out futon and we put the baby in the cot between us, all wrapped up. I keep a hand on her while I sleep.
Stuff happens with L and the midwife during the night. Something about breastfeeding. But I am oblivious to it while I "sleep".
I wake up at about 5am, and finally get the other phone to upload the baby's photo (I've been carrying around two phones for a couple of months, with SIMs from different operators, just in case one has no reception or conks out or something), though it required ages of fiddling and some annoying app updates to finally get it to work (grrr).
We realise later that, while it's cold in there, we've probably overbundled the wee lass. So we remove the overlarge clothes and just plunk her down on my chest, skin on skin, and I put a towel over us. I have the cutest sweetest most precious thing in the world sleeping on my chest and I am in bliss. I lie there with her for hours.
