Birth

HE'S HERE! and he's a he. On 22nd October at 1.30pm Percy Samuel Jones arrived into "the outside" weighing slightly over 8lbs.

I know mother's have the like biased hormonal thing which makes them think their own children are beautiful, but he is lovely right? (if you don't agree it's probably best not to say.)

So birth....that was less beautiful. Here's a photo of me not looking my best but I wanted to include it because it's what the face of a real life woman is like after birth.

Compare and contrast with this one that was taken after a makeover when I was 21.

 It should be like a warning to all men on the pull (if you can't cope with a woman looking like this then stop trying to pull her)

Anyways back to birth... In my last blog I wrote how I was imagining birth to be the pain of when I dislocated my elbow with the endurance of cycling 70 miles through mud. So how did it compare? Lots of people say you forget the pain when the baby is born, well I haven't forgotten it yet!

It was horrendous. I don't want to scare you if you're pregnant though. I think I had a worse than average experience. I spoke to my friend Steph today who gave birth the day after me and the only pain relief she had was paracetamol!

Warning skip this paragraph if you don't want to know the gory details.

So for me once I got onto the delivery suite after about 14 hours of having contractions on the induction rooms, I was shown how to use gas and air but I did it wrong and it had no effect on me. Then everything started happening really fast. The baby's heart beat was dropping, the midwife called in another midwife, who called in a doctor who called in another doctor.  I started pushing even though they told me not to because I wasn't ready yet and it would hurt.  But you can't control that, no one in their right mind would push when they've been told not to but I just couldn't help it. They had to cut me, and use the suction thing on the baby's head to get it out. Then they put the baby on me while they stitched me up.

People say 'once they put the baby on you the pain is gone and you're just so relived and in love with the baby that you forget everything' That was not the case for me, I was still lying with my feet in stirrups being stitched up, just in less horrendous pain.   But I do remember in the middle of that looking down at the baby and saying "who is it?" Then I moved the umbilical cord stump and said "it's Percy!" (which was our chosen boy's name.)

I would say the love for him came a bit more gradually over the next 24 hours.  But it's safe to say that we are now both completely besotted with him.

The only final thing to say for today is that Dan was an absolute legend and I have a overwhelming fresh new love for him too.