One of my closest friends gave birth to a baby boy on Wednesday -- my wedding anniversary! I won't forget that little guy's birthday soon -- so a lot of my free time has been taken up with helping out, e.g., grocery shopping, watching her other children, things like that.
As an interesting aside, this now makes two of my friends in less than 21 months who have had precipitous labors culminating in "unplanned unassisted" births. This has got to happen more often than people realize -- I don't have that many friends! In the first, in March of last year, the couple had planned a hospital birth for this, their second baby; his dad caught him in the bathroom of their apartment after 1.5 hours of labor, a few minutes before the paramedics arrived. My friends who had their fourth child on Wednesday had planned a home birth (and so had all the "stuff" they needed on hand), but the midwife didn't even have time to get her shoes on, let alone drive to their house, between the time they called and said "We need you to come now" and the time the baby was born. She only had about an hour and fifteen minutes of active labor.
Emergency Childbirth (a standard item in the homebirth kit -- really, I think every pregnant couple should have this on hand) says, if I remember right, that fast labors are usually uncomplicated and safe ones. Given that, I admit I'm kind of jealous! It's not that I long for an unassisted childbirth, planned or unplanned (though I believe that planned unassisted birth is sometimes the safest available choice) -- it's the idea of only having to be in labor for 90 minutes. And I'm not one of those people who really hates being in labor and loves to talk about how awful it is, not at all. But with a short labor you get to go straight to the good part, the part where the new little one is in your arms.
Comments