At the end of 2019 we had moved from our tiny trailer to a bigger double-wide with 3 times the square footage. It was just around the corner, so the move was quick. In December of 2019 I experienced an early miscarriage. I had planned to tell everyone at Christmas. The holiday was hard for me.
2020 was a crazy year for everyone. So in March, I decided to stay home full-time, to give myself time to focus on the kids. The quarantine hit a few weeks later. Thankfully, in rural Michigan the quarantine didn’t have a huge effect on very much. There were masks at grocery stores and doctor’s offices, but they didn’t last long. So, we just stayed home more. I found out I was pregnant with a rainbow baby a few weeks after that. I was the sickest I had ever been. So much sicker in fact, that I was convinced that I was having twins until the anatomy scan at 20 weeks. There was in fact only one baby, but I stayed sick for the entirety of his pregnancy.
In July, we found out that a long-time friend of my family was looking to sell a house only three miles from where I grew up. They were willing to do a land contract with us, and we were so thankful for the opportunity to buy a house in the crazy housing market. The house needed some work before we could move in, so we temporarily moved back in with my parents (this time as a family of 5, almost 6). We signed the papers and got the keys to that cute little house in September. It was on three beautiful acres and had a flowing creek at the back of the property. We worked on the house in the evenings after the kids went to bed. I painted walls and installed flooring while enormously pregnant and sick. But it was worth it.
We were finally able to move in right before Thanksgiving. We travelled to be with family and then came back to settle in. We put up our decorations and scrambled to get ready for Christmas because my due date was December 18th.
Early in the morning (from around 3am to 6am) on the 15th, I woke up to hard contractions that felt like the ones I woke up to when I labored with #3. I tracked them, they were close but not consistent. My midwife recommended trying to rest so I went to sleep and they stalled, I slept until 8am without any interruption from contractions. When I woke up, I had another hard one, but they had spaced out. I was discouraged but we went about our day, ran some errands, and had an appointment. The contractions continued to come occasionally.
We came home, had dinner, put the kids to bed and put on a movie. I only got through the first half hour of the live-action Aladdin. At about 10pm I could no longer lay down through the contractions; they were so intense! We started tracking them around 10:45pm and they were already right on top of each other. Sam called my midwife at 11pm and she said she would head over. At 11:37pm I went to the bathroom. These contractions were super intense, and I was worried about my stamina. I lost some mucous plug and I told Sam, “That’s good, that means I am progressing!” My mother had arrived from down the road and checked in with us in the bathroom. Within the next minute I had another contraction, my water broke, and as I stood up from the toilet to cope with the contraction, I experienced what is known as ‘fetal ejection reflex’, basically I started involuntarily pushing super hard. I grunted to Sam, “I am pushing and I can’t stop”. I felt him crowning. I was literally still holding the toilet paper to his head that I was wiping with. I got to my hands and knees quickly. With a few pushes his head was born, and I told Sam, “He is here” He had stationed himself behind me, then said, “Wait he’s here?!”… “Yes Sam, he is here, his head is born” Sam got ready and with the next contraction and two good pushes later he was out. Sam caught him and passed him through my legs back to me. #4 cried loudly, breathed normally, and calmed as I held him. My mom, who was in the bathroom door passing towels and trying to call the midwife, called out the time “11:46!” (9 minutes from the time I went into the bathroom). She saw headlights in the driveway and leaned out the front door to tell my midwife he had arrived and was breathing and doing well. I sat back against my washing machine in the middle of my bathroom. I literally laughed out of per shock. I kept apologizing to him for shooting him out like a rocket-ship.
My midwife came in and helped me into the bed for the placenta delivery and the rest of the postpartum care. She was irreplaceable once again. A midwife’s care is so much more than just the delivery. He was 7lbs1oz and 21 inches long. My smallest baby by a wide margin at that point. He was born 1 hour and 45 minutes from the time I knew I was in active labor. It was crazy and shocking, but fulfilling and beautiful all at the same time. This birth gave Sam so much confidence in the birth process. We did it and that was so reassuring to him.
He was born one year from the day that I miscarried the baby before him. He was my favorite Christmas present. There was also something lovely and reverent about being in recovery with a brand-new baby at Christmastime.
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