INTRODUCING! 

Lochlan Samuel

March 23, 2019 (his due date!)

8 lbs, 12 oz (about 4 kg)

21 inches

100 percent adorable

He’s here! Hooray! Baby Lockie appeared promptly on his due date, in what turned out to be a completely different delivery than what I expected. First of all: props to all of you guys who go natural on purpose, because that is seriously intense.

I debated about sharing Lockie’s birth story here because obviously this is a travel blog, but it is also, first and foremost, my personal account of our time living overseas. And I’ve now told this story to so many people here that I can’t imagine not sharing it with my friends and family back home as well. THAT SAID: if birth stories aren’t your thing, feel free to bail on this post now! I’m not offended, promise.

Or for those of you who want to “TL;DR” version of events, here are the highlights: Contractions in the morning that I feared were false labor again, water broke in our car, Lochlan was born 40 minutes after we arrived at the hospital. We are home and doing great!

If you want the full story, see below. Standard warning: this is a birth story. There are birth details. I don’t think there’s anything too gross, but I’m not that sensitive (obviously). Another warning: there’s cursing in here. That shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who reads this blog normally anyway, but for anyone else — that’s your heads up. Trust me, you would not be getting the full flavor of this experience without some cursing in the re-telling, because there was a lot of it during.

Lochlan’s precipitous labor birth story

First of all, three things I’m extremely grateful for when it comes to this birth:

1. The absolutely lovely people we had caring for us and our children during our days at the hospital
2. That we moved away from our old home in the “Aci” area last summer, because otherwise our baby would definitely have been born in the car.
3. That none of this happened in the middle of the night, because our baby probably would have been born in the car.

So, right off the bat I will mention that my wonderful OB warned me that third babies often come quickly. Since ideally I needed to be at the hospital 4 hours before delivery for antibiotics, she recommended I not dilly-dally once contractions started — even though Owen’s birth took 23 hours and Fiona’s took 7.

THAT SAID: the problem with this was the massive amount of contractions I’d been having in the run-up to Lockie’s delivery, which on at least three occasions had formed a very clear pattern that never increased in intensity or turned into, you know, birth. As recently as four days before, I had been sitting at my son’s basketball game timing contractions before jinxing the shit out of it by telling my OB (also at the game, ha!) that I thought she might be seeing us that night.

So I was feeling pretty jerked around by this kid/my uterus at this point, right?

So Saturday I started having contractions not long after I woke up, but given they were remarkably similar to the ones from the night before, the previous Tuesday and the Thursday before that, I knew I couldn’t trust them. We decided to head to the park to walk around and see if they kicked up, and coincidentally some friends of ours happened to be headed there too (shout out to Megan and Dave, you guys rock!). Perfect!

So we passed about 45 minutes letting the kids play while I walked off the contractions whenever they popped up, and eventually started timing them. Once they finally started picking up in intensity, we decided that the time was right to head to the hospital and just get checked out (at this point I told the crowd that I put it at “70 percent” likelihood that this was the real thing). Megan and Dave offered to take the kids for us, and since they live about a minute from our house it seemed prudent to follow them back to their place, drop off the kids and go get my hospital bag from our house.

PLEASE KEEP IN MIND THAT I WAS NOT EVEN SURE I WAS IN REAL LABOR AT THIS POINT.

So, along the way Chris reminded me that I was supposed to call the hospital and let them know we’d be coming by in a bit. One of their first questions was whether my water had broken, and when I said “no” I think it was pretty clear that everyone’s attitude was that nothing was too urgent.

I hung up the phone.

INSTANTLY: Pop. Water burst all over the front seat of the car, mercifully mostly preserved by the towel we’d laid down ahead of time, just in case.

Needless to say, we called back with the update because after that happened, shit instantly got real. Real painful, real quick. It is extremely lucky that we now live only seven minutes from the base (as do our friends) because riding in the car was awful.

TIME AT THIS POINT: 10:59 a.m., according to a text message we know we sent while still in our house. My water had broken less than 10 minutes before. We left the house sometime shortly after this, once I’d pointlessly rinsed off and acquired new pants.

NOTE: At this point, I still didn’t think we were in any danger of a quick delivery because, after all, my water broke as the first sign of labor with Fiona and I still had seven hours ahead of me. 

So, we made it to the hospital and walked into what appeared to be a creepily-empty ward at first, as they had no other patients and the whole staff was in our room getting it prepped for us. Obviously there were plenty of people there, but it was just an … odd moment.

TIME: About 11:15/11:20 a.m.

I was sure that I would have made some major progress toward delivery, just based on how much pain I was in. But at my nurse’s first check: 3-4 cm. To say I was bummed is an understatement, as that was basically where I’d been five days ago at my regular checkup.

Two things that came out of my mouth then:

“WHY THE FUCK DOES THIS HURT SO MUCH THEN?*”

“WELL, AT LEAST I’LL HAVE TIME FOR THOSE DAMNED ANTIBIOTICS, I GUESS.”

Her answers: “every labor is different” and “maaaaaybe.”

*Note: I later apologized to wonderful nurse for the excessive amount of cursing that followed in the next 40 minutes.

Wonderful Nurse (shall I just call her WN?) asked immediately if I was planning an epidural, to which I gave a resounding YES. I always plan on having one, but joke that I need to get to a certain level of pain in order to be ready for it because otherwise I panic about the needle-in-my-back concept.

I was AT THAT POINT.

WN went to work trying to call the anesthesiologist, but had some initial trouble reaching him. I wanted to jump into the shower as pain relief while I was waiting, but was told I needed 20 minutes of monitoring on the baby before I could safety do so. OW OW OW. But, I was pretty much clinging to the hope of heading to the shower soon while growing increasingly frustrated that the guy with the need hadn’t somehow apparrated, Harry Potter-style, to my beside.*

*Given that I now know he wouldn’t have had time to get it in even if he’d picked up on the very first ring, I’ve gotten over this. But at the time I was having some DEEPLY UNCHARITABLE thoughts about the situation, haha.

Before the 20 minutes of monitoring were up, however, I started realizing that I was feeling … something. I asked my nurse to check again because I thought I might be pushy? Except, how could I be pushy if I was only at 4 cms?

Here’s how: because I’d already progressed to 8 cm since arriving. Next words out of my mouth:

“IS THIS TRANSITION?? IS THIS WHY THIS SUCKS SO SO SO MUCH?”

(WN answer: Yes, yes it is.)

I was not in a great head space at this point, I will freely admit. We’d learned about natural birth coping techniques six years ago in birth class, and early on I was able to talk myself through them and could remember things like finding a focal point and such. But by this point contractions were completely on top of each other and I was basically just clinging to the side of the bed for dear life while things happened around me.

At this point, I think they must have just started calling everybody in the hospital because more people — beyond WN and corpsmen who’d been there all along — started appearing in my room. The doctor from the ER had showed up and I vaguely remember him reassuring me that he’d caught “hundreds” of babies in his day and not to worry about it. I think perhaps another doctor from the ER was there too? And then in walked the OB who was on call.*

This turned out to be GOOD FREAKING TIMING. Because what felt like only a few minutes after being checked the last time, it occurred to me that I was pushing. Involuntarily.

AM I PUSHING? I THINK I’M PUSHING? IS THERE A HEAD? 

Bed was instantly broken down into “delivery mode” and my feet placed (at my protest, for some bizarre reason?) in those little foot-holder dealers and then BAM. I was pushing in earnest. I couldn’t have stopped if I tried. You know how I know I couldn’t stop? BECAUSE I TRIED.

Previous deliveries involved the whole, “nurse telling me when it was time to push and counting to 10 while I worked at it” thing. This one? Not so much. Suddenly I was pushing, and just as suddenly THERE HE WAS. Crying!

My OB didn’t even have time to put on a gown before he had to catch him, poor guy.*

TIME: 11:57 a.m.

It was only at this point that I realized there were something like 10 people in my room, but fortunately I was much too relieved to care about the huge audience. At the time there was a lot of joking about how that was the perfect was to have a baby but uh … it took me a little while to get over the shock before I could agree. Ha!

*I later learned that a road race between the two bases had slowed down traffic considerably.

In the aftermath: I’m totally fine with how it all went down now — and obviously it is kind of a funny story at this point — but it was hands-down the most intense experience of my life. Luckily, the prize was worth it!

Also noteworthy: this has definitely been the easiest recovery so far. I’m not sure if this is related to the natural labor, but it has been really nice.

We spent the next several hours trying to decide what our boy’s name was, which was a big challenge. We had our short-list, but ended up adding a few new names that seemed relevant to his manner of delivery. (And we are still trying out “Dash” as a nickname, though we rejected Dashiell as an official first). Ultimately, we landed on a name I’ve loved forever, which the kids have also been pulling for when not suggesting their own names.

Owen had a basketball game Saturday and since he is on the same team as one of his little buddies, our sweet friends Christine and Matt (hi guys!) picked him and Fiona up from Megan and Dave’s to bring them there. Afterward, they got to meet their new baby brother.

It was love at first sight! I could not be happier with how they are adjusting to their new little guy. Owen has declared him “the cutest thing in all the universes there are” and “cuter than the baby chickens in Minecraft” (huge compliment). Fiona is constantly following us around begging to help and loves to sing him songs and cuddle him. They are the best big brother and sister!

I want to close now by expressing once more how grateful I am for the wonderful friends we have out here. It was such a relief to know we could rely on Meghan and Dave and Christine and Matt, plus one of Fiona’s fabulous teachers, to take such amazing care of our kids while we had to spend two nights in the hospital. But we are also grateful for the many friends who also volunteered to be “on call” for when I went into labor, those who also offered to take care of the big kids, and everyone who has brought us food! We are beyond lucky to have all of you in our lives. And that’s all I can say about that because I don’t need to start crying on my keyboard =-)