Birth Story of Tamara Plomp

Tamara Plomp, we will call her Tara
Tuesday June 11, 23:27 at home in the bath tub :-)
3175g (7lbs)
53cm (21")
40 weeks and 3 days
caught by daddy!!! (the midwives didn't make it in time .....)

She is here!!!! Our first daughter and our first American baby!

Last Friday or Saturday I started losing my mucus plug. Monday night light, irregular contractions (5 to 10 minutes apart). Nothing exciting yet. I could easily sleep through them (until Timmy woke up at 4am and decided it was morning time and wanted to get up. He fell asleep around 6am. I was still having light contractions)

Tuesday light, irregular contractions during the day, I run some errands. Around 8pm the contractions started to get stronger and I needed vocalizing to get through them. Looking back, this is where the real' labor started, although I didn't realize it then. 8.45pm Sander started timing and they were between 2 and 3 minutes apart and about 30 seconds long. I didn't really trust it yet, I thought it might be pre-labor since they were so short, even though they were strong.

Around 10pm I called the midwives and told them that things might be going on , but I didn't need them yet and I would call them when I would. One of the midwives said to get into a warm bath and see what that did to the contractions.

Into the bath (after Sander took out all the kids toys and scrubbed the tub :-) The contractions got a little bit farther apart, about 3 minutes and were around a minute long now. 11.10pm I couldn't handle them as well anymore and I asked Sander to call the midwife, who said they would be over. They are almost an hour's drive away from us..

A few minutes later I totally lost it, screaming, yelling and panicking during contractions. They were so strong. Between contractions I was still fine. I also was a little bit nauseous, so I suspected transition, but didn't really dare to hope for it. I still thought that most likely the midwives would arrive to find me at 1cm or so, although I hoped I would at least be 4 or 5 :-)

Then I got this incredible urge to push and there was no way I could get out of the bath tub to do that anymore. So I just went ahead, first some poop and then I felt the baby coming. I got into a sitting position and we saw the head coming out. Sander felt for a cord around the neck, but the neck wasn't out yet. Then we decided to let the water drain and I pushed a little bit more and she glided into Sanders hands so easily and he put her on top of me. He put a dry towel on top of her and I peeked beneath it, totally expecting to see a little penis. But there wasn't one, she had a vagina!!!!!

When she was born the water still was in the tub. Sander later told me that he saw my bag of waters break while she was coming out and he also could see her turn around like she was supposed to do, all by herself! :-)

The water was out the tub by now, I bled quite a lot in our opinion (it turned out later that it was not too bad) and we waited for the placenta. About 10 or 15 minutes later it came out and we moved me, baby and placenta to the bed (which was a pretty comic sight, with Sander holding the placenta in a bloodied pie pan next to us :-) The bathtub looked like somebody had been murdered in it :-) We just left it that way, so the midwives would be able to assess the amount of blood I had lost.

I nursed Tara, called the grandparents, and about 40 minutes after the birth, the midwives arrived and everything was fine. They checked me, just one little tear that didn't need stitching and they checked Tara and she was fine too.

My older boys, Cees (4.5yo), and Tim (2.8yo) slept through all this! Pretty amazing, since I was really LOUD the last 10 minutes before I started pushing :-)

So our birth was a little bit more alternative than we had planned for. We had planned a home birth and got an unassisted home water birth :-) In hindsight we are glad it happened this way, it was really special to do this together and this was our best birth of the three we have had.

I really liked having a water birth. I had always thought that I did not want a water birth. Laboring in water sounded OK to me, but giving birth in water seemed kind of strange. Well, I have changed my mind :-) and now I am even considering to have a planned water birth next time!

The picture at the top was taken about 20 minutes after the birth, before the midwives arrived.