Baby Ava’s entrance into the world.

At exactly 38 weeks I woke up around 3am October 5th with contractions, I didn’t think they were contractions at first as they weren’t very intense and I hadn’t really had any braxton hicks yet this pregnancy so I just assumed as I was only a week off from my due date that what I was feeling was braxton hicks.

Over the next 2 hours I tried to get some sleep but the contractions were every 5-10 mins so as soon as I’d start drifting off to sleep the next contraction would wake me back up, at 5 am I rang my midwife and told her I’d be having consistent contractions for the past 2 hours but she said to go back to bed and ring her once they got more intense, closer together and lasted longer.

At 7am they were starting to get quite painful so I rang my husband and told him to get home from work as today was definitely going to be the day! (We are dairy farmers so he was only 5mins away from home milking the cows).

I starting packing a hospital bag for myself and baby, then I packed a bag for my 9 yr old son because he was coming to the hospital with us. My husband got home and both had showers, meanwhile I’m still getting fairly intense/painful contractions every 5-7 mins that last a good 1min each.

Around 9 am I rang my midwife again and we decided that I should head into the hospital because we live an hour away from it and we didn’t want to leave it too long and have the baby in the car.

When we got to the hospital my midwife checked my dilation and I was only at 3! 😑So she told us to go get some lunch at the hospital cafeteria and walk around for a while to try speed things up, I tried but I couldn’t handle the walking around so we went back to the birthing room and I ran a big hot bath in the hopes it would ease some of the pain I was getting in my back during the contractions (it didn’t 😂) so I got out of the bath and as I did my water broke and gushed all over the bathroom floor 😅 I cleaned up, got dressed and then all of a sudden the contractions got 100 times worse, after what seemed like a lifetime but was actually only about 15-30mins my midwife checked my dilation and I was at a 7 👌🏽

Within 5 mins of her checking I felt like I needed to push so as I was contracting I pushed, each push was insanely painful and the only thing that got me through was counting how long I pushed for each time.

After about 6-8 pushes I felt her head come out and I was told to just do little pushes after that but I was in so much pain and I just couldn’t help it but I done a big push and baby was out. 🙌

I went all natural and pain relief free and it was single handily the most painful and tortures thing I’ve ever done. I had a very, very slight tear but it didn’t need any thing.

Baby was 3.7kg, 43cm long and has a full head of dark brown hair.