The Afflecks: Happy (Belated) Birthday David

Sahra's labor started at like 2 AM (lucky her), and many-an-hour later her still hadn't broken, so I went to work to finish up a project I was working on. I ended up handing everything off to a co-worker to take over and we went home for a while. Since Sahra had already had a baby we were pros at this and knew whso at to expect. With Joey we had the baby in a hospital and had a fairly good experience there, but we wanted something a little more comfortable away from the whole hospital scene, so we went with a birth center that was like 5 blocks from our house.

The difference between the two was HUGE. At the hospital it doesn't seem like they generally mistreat you, but it does feel like with a lot of the staff you're just another patient/number. And it seemed like they have their preferred way of doing things or standard procedure, and they don't really tell you what all of your options are unless you've done your homework first and created a birth plan, and speak up they will go ahead and do those even if it's not in you or your baby's best interest.

Sahra laboring in the slow dance position.

In the birthing center on the other hand it seemed like their standard procedure is to do things that give the mom the most freedom and are in your best interest. After we arrived, and the midwife and student did a test or two on Sahra to see how far along she was, they checked us in and Sahra got to go spend some time relaxing in the bath tub. After realizing this was actually slowing the pressure waves (hypnobabies lingo for contractions) down, and was prolonging labor they told her that she'd probably want to get out, but they left the choice up to her. She then lied down on the bed and had a few more pressure waves, and I did my best to help her relax through the whole process, and it seemed to drag on a bit. So they allowed her to stand up, and walk around and have me support her and we did a slow dance position (her arms around my head) swaying from side to side (felt like I was 14 again at a stake dance), then we tried a few other positions and it seemed like nothing was really working to get her labor to progress.

One thing that really helped out was Sahra chose to hire the services of a doula (seen in above picture), who throughout the process offered lots of suggestions on how to help get the labor progressing faster and things that would help alleivate a lot of the pressure and pain during the pressure waves. I think we'd both use a doula again in a heatbeat.

The midwife and students then began encouraging us to let them break Sahra's water for her, and it was kind of funny because after some serious deliberation we finally said ok because Sahra was getting more and more wiped out as the clock ticked on. The student and midwife then went to get the stuff to do that procedure then whoosh Sahra's water finally broke and within about 15 minutes the baby was finally there, and was born at 7:52 pm.

After upwards of 18 hours of labor we had our little bundle of joy in our hands, and they didn't even whisk him away to do all of the obnoxious measurements like weighing and measuring his height and huge head size like they do in a hospital, they just let Sahra and me stay with the baby for like 45 minutes and bond with him before doing any of those things.

Another nice thing was the fact that we got to the hospital at like 5 pm (if my memory serves me) Sahra's labor progressed somewhat slowly, but we didn't have to deal with a doctor saying lets get this labor progressing, time to shoot you up with pitosin (which goes through both the mother and baby's system). Sahra was able to let nature run it's course and she made it through all of labor and delivery without an epidural (we've learned about the health risks they don't really tell you about with those), and she did a great job, and we got a handsome little baby as a reward for it all.

Now for everything you've been waiting for: pictures of little Dibdib as Joey briefly called him (click pictures to super-size them):