First-Timer

This quote comes to me from a girl who's expecting her first child in July. We were at a girls' night get together with some other moms that I know from here in town, i.e. not from my own parish moms' group. There were the four of us, and the one lady J had just had her third. We were talking about J's labor and delivery: how getting ready to leave the house for the hospital she had felt the baby's head come out, and ended up having her husband deliver their child on the living room floor. The baby came that fast. And it's not unheard of esp with subsequent children.

So then the talk shifted to how I almost had BB in the car on the way to the hospital. (Stop me if you've heard this one before.) I recounted how I labored comfortably at home until the contractions were steadily five minutes apart for two hours as the doc ordered and then made my way over to the hospital. Because of the icy conditions, about three blocks from the hospital, there had been a car accident and traffic was just starting to back up. As we were passing through the intersection, I started to feel what I would later find out/remember was the need to push. I was in the delivery room less than 30 minutes before BB was delivered. I laugh (now) to remember how the nurses were yelling at each other down the hallway when they realized that I was ready to deliver – and with no doctor on hand. (Mine was stuck in the traffic behind the accident coming from his house.)

As I finished up my story and we talked about other peoples' "unplanned" labor and delivery stories that we'd heard (like the emergency C-sections I was told about at our birthing class), the first-timer gives a little laugh and says, with utmost seriousness,

"I don't plan for any of that to happen."