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The Day I Met Mataya

This birth story was much smoother and bit more predictable than the first birth story. But, it was still full of surprises.

The whole pregnancy, I had been trying to convince myself that this baby would be late. Joash was 10 days early, but I didn't want to get my hopes up too much that baby #2 would also be early.

On Thursday, May 16th, it was the last day I was planning on tutoring a student that I had been working with at the local Christian School. I felt really "off" when I got up. Nothing to really indicate labour, but just a bit funny. But, I really wanted my student to have closure and to say good bye and stuff, so I just pushed through and got myself ready and went to school. By the time I got there, I felt fine. The rest of the day I felt fine too and even cleaned some random stuff and baked a batch of cookies. That's right. I was nesting.

I woke up around 1:40 am Friday morning to go to the bathroom. I stood up and my water broke. No question in my mind this time, it was clear that my water broke. I woke Wilbert up and we cleaned up, called his mom to come over, called the hospital, ate something, packed up and headed out. I was having mild short contractions about every 10-15 minutes or so. 

We arrived at the hospital around 2:45 am and got all checked in and the nurses did their normal checks and hooked me up to monitors and stuff. Once I layed down, my contractions slowed way down too. The nurses asked if I wanted to labour in the hospital, or go home for a bit. I decided to just stay because while the contractions were further apart, they were making me more uncomfortable. I just really wanted to get up and walk around. Finally, around 4:30, they were satisfied with the printouts from the monitor and said I could get up and walk around. The nurses had not checked how dilated I was yet, and I asked why. They said they don't do it unnecessarily to reduce the possibility of introducing infection. Fair enough. I got up to walk and they said to walk around for hour and the come back. But to also come back if contractions really picked up or I felt pressure.

Well, we walked for 10 minutes and I was back. The nurses were a bit skeptical when I said I was feeling pressure, but they checked me anyway and discovered I was 9 cm dilated. Then we had to hurry to the delivery room and Mataya entered the world at 5:24 am. 

We were super surprised we had a little girl! While we did not want to know the gender of our baby, we had convinced ourselves that it was a boy. We had 3 ultrasounds during this pregnancy and all three ultrasound techs said "he" during the course of the ultrasound. And Wilbert, who has seen a lot of cow ultrasounds this by this time, thought he detected some boy parts on the ultrasound. So, we were pretty much planning on a boy. We love how God surprises us!


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Comments

Mary said…
She is beautiful!
May 26, 2013 at 10:47 PM
Tam Velderman said…
Just precious~so happy for you.
May 27, 2013 at 12:16 AM
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