Favorite things #24

I love labor stories! Each story is different, every mom goes through labor with their own challenges and strengths and I just love to hear or read about them. And usually at the end just like with the birth of each of my children, they bring tears to my eyes.

Since I'm talking of labor stories and  E4's birthday is on December 30th, I'll share a shortened version of my labor story for him.

E4's due date was January 20th and we were actually hoping that maybe he would come a few days later to coincide with Chinese New Year and be a dragon baby according to the Chinese zodiac. But as all parents know, the baby will usually come when he/she is ready, unless you have a scheduled C-section of course.

So when I started to feel some contractions on the night of December 29th, I wrote them off as just Braxton Hicks because I had quite a few of them with this particular pregnancy. But unlike the contractions I had felt in the past, these didn't go away and got stronger as the night progressed. I was in denial because this was 3 weeks early and my parents who were supposed to come and help me weren't here yet! By about 4 or 5am I knew from past experience that I was going to have E4 that day and needed to start making some arrangements.

Luckily good friends of ours were able help us watch the three older kids as my husband and I headed to the hospital. I cannot even imagine what it would have been like if we needed to bring them with us.  We got to the hospital around 10am and E4 arrived on 1:55pm. I was very happy to be able to have a VBAC birth with him and also a natural, non-medicated birth since I had really wanted to be able to experience that.

We were very happy to be able to welcome 2012 with our newest family member! And what a great year it has been with our family of 6. We are looking forward to a wonderful 2013 that will hopefully be filled with more great experiences as everyone grows another year older and hopefully wiser.

Do you like labor stories? Would you like to share them with us? It would be great if we could start out 2013 with some heart-warming labor stories. Throughout 2013 if you would like to share your labor story and do a guest post on Bumble of Joy, shoot us an e-mail at bumbleofjoy (at) gmail (dot) com.

Zi