Layla’s Birth Story: Part 1

In case you missed it: Introducing…

I can’t believe it’s been over a week since our beautiful daughter was born–I thought I would share her birth story with you, but it went a little long, so I’m going to have to break it up.

Part One: The Pre-Story

On Monday morning I settled in to do my kick count with Layla (after breakfast) and she was moving really slowly. She normally did her count in 20 minutes or less– but it was taking forever, so I ate a piece of dark chocolate, read her a story, ate a cupcake, and then played music on my stomach. She finally got 10 kicks but it took 40 minutes, almost twice as long as normal. So I was a little concerned, since it was atypical and called the labor and delivery nurse to talk to her about it. She told me that as long as Layla did it in an hour, they weren’t concerned, but if I was concerned and wanted to come in and check it out on the fetal monitor they were absolutely supportive of that. So I talked with Nate and he definitely felt like we should go in. So we did. And Layla had good movement on the monitor so we were there just for a little while and then went home, feeling better.

On Tuesday, (my due date) I had my appointment with my midwife for my 40 week check. We got all checked and then were put on a monitor again for 20 minutes to evaluate Layla’s heart rate and fetal movement. The nurse kept coming back in to check on us and asked me to move onto my side because they weren’t seeing the movement they were hoping for—her heart rate was still strong, but she just barely made the number of fetal movements they wanted to see in the allotted time. So my midwife came in and talked to us and said she wanted to have us do an ultrasound to check and make sure everything else was good and evaluate Layla on a prenatal Apgar Score. She also checked my dilation which was at a 3. So we left to eat lunch before the ultrasound. And we got some froyo which I topped with all the sugary goodies hoping to increase her activity for the ultrasound. *The sacrifices parents make.*

We went in to the ultrasound and after the tech finished she went to get the our midwife to review the results with us. Basically Layla’s uterine fluid was also low and combined with that and her barely skimming in on the fetal activity our midwife recommended we go ahead and begin an induction. I could also go home and wait and hope to go into labor naturally, but I would need to come in and be monitored every 24 hours. It was such a surreal moment as she asked us what we wanted to do—it was not a decision we had planned on making for ourselves! We decided to go ahead and do the induction.

We left the office and headed straight to the hospital.

Not what we had planned by any means, but we felt peace about moving ahead and excitement that this surreal thing was actually happening soon!

Layla’s Birth Story Part 2