Malaki's Birthday!

Now that Malaki is a month old, we decided to write about the day of his birth. Or maybe, now we just have time!

As you may have read in an earlier post, we had been waiting "patiently" for Malaki for what felt like quite some time. The day before his birth, we got to the point where we figured he was going to come when he was ready, no matter what we did. So that night we figured he wasn't coming anytime soon. Scott went to play basketball and Nicole watched a movie at the church and had a lovely walk.

Scott got home from basketball at like 11:30. Usually Nicole and Scott go straight to bed, but for some reason this night they decided to stay up late and ended up watching a movie about compost. At 1 am, they finally wondered what on earth they were doing, turned the movie off and went to bed.

After a long rest of 1 hour and 30 minutes, Nicole woke up in labor. However, she was tired enough that she was confused went to the bathroom and went back to bed. At 3:20 am Nicole woke up again when she couldn't quite get comfortable in bed. She thought that maybe she needed to go to the bathroom again. After 20 minutes of first confusion, then pacing and timing she had finally realized that it was go time. During this time, she discovered that her contractions were less than 3 minutes apart lasting about 1 minute. Malaki was finally ready!

After a phone call to the doula and midwife and 20 minutes of Nicole grabbing random fruits and and things to take with them they headed out to the birth and family center. Running red lights (not because they were in a hurry, but because it was 4 am!) and telling the hypnobabies lady on the ipod to shut up along the way.

We arrived at the birth center at 4:45 with Nicole dialated to a 5. Nicole spent time in lots of different positions. The whole time Nicole had an amazing attitude. She was loving every bit of labor. She was very focused and breathed like a pro! She refused to get frustrated and did a fabulous job of allowing the midwives and doula to give suggestions.

When Nicole was in transition, she commented after a contraction that it didn't even hurt and that it was just intense. She kept telling everyone how grateful she was and how she loved everyone! She told us how labor was beautiful. This is much better than the cussing that Nicole's mom had assured us would come. However, Nicole never cussed, never said anything negative, and enjoyed her birth! It was a truly amazing experience.

At 9:37 am., after about a half an hour of real pushing and some rope pullling, Malaki was born. He was pink and healthy. He had lots of long hair, and it looked really curly. Nicole's mom was pleased to announce that she thought that his hair looked African American.

Nicole says that Scott did really well during the birth as well. She says he was incredibly supportive and made all the difference. I think she is just being nice to him. How can Scott not be supportive when Nicole had such a great attitude? What should he say, No Nicole, this isn't beautiful, birth is hard! Ok. So, Scott did hold the barf bowl. That was a little traumatizing. Scott's favorite thing he did to help was pressurizing Nicole's hips when she was on the birth ball. He enjoyed that because in between contractions, he was asleep on Nicole's back. He always woke up when the next contraction came and Nicole said, "pressure!"

Malakis birth was a splendid event. It was terrific. YES SIR REE!!