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\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\nIt all started on Wednesday. I woke up at 1 am in the morning to go to the toilet which was pretty usual these days at 40 weeks pregnant. I then woke up again at 4 am in the morning to go pee and also poop. I tried to go back to sleep but somehow just couldn\u2019t, so I just stayed in bed and scrolled through Instagram for a bit. But while I was doing that I started to notice light cramps which made me want to use the bathroom more often. I started getting diarrhea and even though I knew that diarrhea can be a sign for labor I didn\u2018t think much of it. At this point it was already 6 am and I was a little hungry. Which is not something I usually am that early in the morning. I ended up making myself a peanut butter & jelly sandwich and good thing I did because this would be my last meal before Emma was born. My body was fueling up for the upcoming labor. I ate my sandwich in bed while Ali was still deep asleep. I kept doing something on my phone while regurarly going back to the bathroom. I was going a lot more frequently to the bathroom but I still was totally unaware that this was already early labor. Ali\u2018s alarm clock rang at 7am and he started to get ready to leave for work. I asked him if he could heat me up a warming pad to soothe my cramps, which I still thought were coming from the diarrhea. He looked surprised and asked if I thought that this was the real thing and if he needs to stay home but I immediately said no and that he can go to work. While he was getting dressed though, I noticed that my cramps were getting stronger and at this point I just wanted to lay in bed with my warming pad on my belly and I really wanted the room to be dark so I asked him if he could make the room darker which he did by clipping bed sheets on top of the curtains. He was about to leave and I was contemplating if I should tell him to stay home or not. Mostly because I didn\u2019t wanted to give him or myself false hopes that labor was starting and then it wasn\u2019t. I ended up telling him to stay home and I could tell that he was really excited even though he wasn\u2019t showing it. We were both in bed, Ali was working on his computer and I was listening to positive birth affirmations while going through what I think were my first real contractions. They felt like intense cramps but they were coming in a pattern every 8-12 minutes at first and lasting for 30-45seconds. I still didn\u2018t really believe though that this was actual labor. It was so surreal to me that it was finally happening for me. At this point I also let me my midwife know that I was experiencing some cramps just to give her a heads up. I tried to stay in bed breathing through the contractions but I really needed to keep using the bathroom so it made more sense to just stay in the bathroom. Somehow I was also able to manage and go through each contractions a lot better on the toilet than in bed. My technique was to very slowly do circling motions either by sitting on the toilet and pressing my hands into my knees or standing in front of the toilet and just rocking in a circling motion and pressing weight on my left foot and then on my right foot and so on. I kept doing those exact movements even when I wasn\u2018t having a contracion. It just really helped me to focus on something especially once the contractions were coming again. Ali also started to notice that things were moving quickly now and so he started to set up the birth pool. He knew about all the things that were important to me for my birth and so he knew exactly what he needed to do to set up my birthing space. He also kept rewarming my belly heater which I was religiously holding onto the entire time, because it was so soothing especially during those contractions. Once the contractions were starting to get closer and stronger together I changed up my technique by walking very slowly in circles in our dark closet that is right next to the bathroom. I also hated any kind of distraction, so whenever Ali would come to check on me I would tell him to leave because I was just so much better able to concentrate and focus through each conctraction by myself. It was around 12pm at this point and my midwife gave me a call to check on me. I told her that the contractions were getting a lot stronger and she recommended to take a shower to make labor progress even faster. I showered for 30 minutes and I could definitely feel that each contraction was getting more intense. I went back to the closet after that and tried to labor some more in there. I felt like I wasn\u2018t getting a break and that\u2018s exactly what I texted my midwife. She called me again to say that she was finishing up a client and would be there shortly. It was 1:30pm and my midwife arrived, I was still in the closet laboring and she asked if she could check my cervix on my next break. I agreed and to my surprise I was already 8 cm open. She and Ali both finished filling the pool with hot water and she then told me that I could make my way in there. Somehow I thought that the birth pool was the last phase of giving birth so I was kinda excited that it was time for me to go in there but the truth is that looking back at it I feel like this was just the beginning. And what was yet to come was the hardest part of my birth. I immediately noticed that the contractions were feeling a lot more intense and I didn\u2018t have a technique yet to help me go through them. I think that\u2018s where I lost myself a bit, I started to depend on my midwife and didn\u2018t take own initiative to change positions and try new things to help me. <\/p>\n\t
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