To start off my birth stories page I figured I’d share my birth story to get the ball rolling!

My son was born on September 27th 2023 and I had the best home birth experience I could ask for. I didn’t start out my pregnancy journey knowing I wanted to have a home birth though. Like any other typical woman when they take a test and find out they are pregnant I scheduled myself an appointment with my local OBGYN and went in for a confirmation of pregnancy appointment at about 8 weeks. By this time I was already in the thick of the morning sickness and food aversions. I brought this up at my appointment and my OB assured me this was normal and “If all I could stomach was a popsicle that day, then thats all I needed to eat”. I really didn’t think anything of it and did the ultrasound, peed in the cup, filled out some paperwork and was on my way.

We had our second appointment with our OB at 12 weeks and we waited in the waiting room for an hour and 15 minutes only to see the OB for 15 minutes that appointment. I again brought up that I still had awful morning sickness, vomiting so forcefully I had blown blood vessels in my neck, and couldn’t stomach any food, I was sleeping 15 hours a day and just not feeling good or healthy at all.

Honestly the whole pregnancy experience was not feeling to great and I started to wonder if I ever wanted to do this again. Again I was brushed off and told it would get better.

I had my third appointment with my OB at 16 weeks. Again I waited in the waiting room for an hour and saw the OB for 15 minutes. By this appointment I had lost 30 pounds even though I was almost halfway through my pregnancy. Big surprise I was brushed off again when I mentioned the sickness, the weight loss and lack of appetite. I was told its normal and that my son was still getting everything he needed from what my body had stored up.

On the way home from this appointment I told my husband that something just didn’t feel right in my gut with the path we were going down in this pregnancy. I felt like I was being gaslit, I lost the color from my skin, I lost 30 pounds, I had no energy and I overall felt sick, but I was being told that’s normal. I thought the second trimester was where I was supposed to feel my best?

After some thought I mentioned to him that as a photographer, I’ve seen birth photographers post photos of home births and I thought it was cool. The idea of home birth was still so foreign to me, I didn’t know women could even birth at home, despite seeing photos of it, it never really dawned on me that I could birth at home. My husband didn’t immediately shoot down the idea so I took that and ran with it and started researching midwives.

Along Came Ashley

To fast forward, I looked at a ton of midwives and had a phone call with Ashley Bennett from Staying Home Birth. Ashley was incredible from the get go, and had my weary husband convinced on this whole home birth thing. Even just on the phone she had such a trusting presence. We decided to book her as our Midwife and things started to feel like they were falling into place.

At our first appointment she spent over an hour with us in our home (this is how every appointment was) and she listened to me and took note of all my history so far in my pregnancy and immediately got going on a game plan with me. I mean this woman was giving me meal ideas working around what I couldn’t stomach, and making me log my food every day in a shared notes file with her so she could see how much protein I was getting in. When she got my records from my OB she found out I was pretty anemic, did the OB tell me this originally after drawing my labs? no.

Ashley had me go to the ER around 22 weeks because I was having a high resting heart rate and she had done my blood labs to see where my iron was and I was still anemic so she wanted me to be prescribed iron pills (my labs from OB were when I was 8 weeks and they never checked again, which is why at 20 weeks my midwife did her own CBC). The ER decided to run their own blood panel and saw my iron levels themselves and told me my iron was in fact low, in the anemic range, but that its normal for pregnant women to be anemic and I shouldn’t take any action about that. I insisted on the iron pill prescription and they wrote me one. My Hemoglobin level was at 7.2 and a healthy level is 11+.

Fast forward through the rest of the pregnancy and my appointments with Ashley were amazing, she stayed in the loop on my eating, and vitamin intake, which with her help got much better. I was able to eat anything and everything again , and knocked my vomiting down from 5 times a day, to every other day or so through the rest of my pregnancy. We also got my hemoglobin up to 11.2! I also want to add that I was able to text Ashley any time I had concerns or had questions. She may not have responded right away each time because she does have her family and her own life but she was very responsive anytime I needed her. I didn’t feel like I could do that even once with my OB.

I’m 39 weeks, it’s baby time!

Its funny to think about the days leading up to labor when you have no idea when the day is going to be the day. Two days prior I slammed a Chicken strip basket at Champy’s with friends, the day before I threw up so hard I peed myself and actually thought my water broke, but quickly learned I in fact just peed.

But alas the day was here on September 26th at 5am I woke up to some light cramping, and went to the bathroom and saw I had lost my mucous plug and there was a bit of blood in it as well. I took a picture of it and sent it to my midwife (could you do that with your OB? probably not lol)! This whole day consisted of early labor, random contractions, nothing close together. Early in the day I went to Walmart to get food for my birth team and every different kind of food I could think of to snack on so I had options. I started to get discouraged this wasn’t actually happening soon by the time evening rolled around so I took a shower and prepared to go to bed. Just in case though me and my husband put the waterproof cover over our bed, got my birth supply cart ready and got the birth pool set up.

Active Labor Starts

I decided to go to sleep around 10pm while my husband stayed up to around 12am playing video games since he wasn’t tired. Maybe 30 minutes after he came to bed I woke up and woke him up because contractions got INTENSE. I started timing them on an app at this point and grabbed my yoga ball to labor on and contractions were roughly 45-60 seconds long, and 5 minutes apart. My best friend Cecelia showed up around 3am as my support person and photo taker, with supplies for homemade lasagna and homemade cinnamon rolls in tow. At this point contractions have been steady, and have gone to every 3 minutes, lasting about 90 seconds and I am in the birth pool as its filling up for relief. I had Andrew and Cece texting Ashley letting her know things were starting to move quickly. Ashley ended up getting to my house at roughly 8am.

Ashley started by listening to baby with the doppler, checking my blood pressure, and pulse. Everything sounded good and she kept letting me do my thing. Laboring through the night into the morning was intense, hard and tiring. We just kept switching positions every 30 minutes or so, pool, bed, standing, toilet backwards, repeat. At 10am I started to really run out of steam but was sure I was close so I asked for a cervical check….bad idea. Ashley checked me and let me know I was maybe 4cm. FOUR CENTIMETERS?!?!? I thought. How could I only be 4cm. I said alright I’m throwing in the towel, I want to go to the hospital to get an epidural, this isn’t for me.

Andrew and I decided to take a shower together and have a heart to heart moment together before going to the hospital. This is where I asked Andrew if this was the right decision, all this work, all of this just to end up at the hospital getting the interventions I wanted to avoid and the money I didn’t want to spend. Andrew told me that whatever I wanted to do, he would support me and wouldn’t judge me, but he also reassured me that I can do this. He then read me a bible verse which was the verse of the day on our bible app. Psalm 30:5 ” For his anger is but for a moment, and his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.”

This verse felt like a sign, and gave me the motivation I needed to try the birth pool one more time

A shift in a positive direction

I got back in the pool around 12pm and labored in the pool for about an hour, at 1:08 I stood up to get out of the pool and felt a lot of pressure and felt something fall out of me. Before my brain could comprehend anything I quickly tried to catch it thinking it was a baby, when trying to catch it I basically knocked it sideways to the edge of the birth pool, and it then bounced off the birth pool and into the water. All of this happened in a split second and I then realized my water had broken and my amniotic sac had fallen out.

This gave me more motivation because I had again been losing steam a second time, this is when things progressed more quickly and I labored in the pool and on the bed for a while. I started pushing around 3:50pm. My son Benjamin was born at 4:24pm at 8lbs 7 oz and everything felt worth it. I was no longer in pain and I was high on adrenaline. After my son was born I got out of the pool and laid in bed. Andrew cut the cord and we waited for my body to be ready to birth the placenta. After the placenta was out my midwife gave me a placenta tour and showed me all the different parts of my home grown organ and then I kindly asked her to throw it in the garbage (lol).

My midwife and her assist cleaned up while I got baby snuggles, she then stitched me up (I had two very superficial tears, honestly I’m impressed considering my sons head was in the 91st percentile for size) and we did the newborn exam. Dishes were done, birth pool was taken down, laundry was done and my house was clean by 9pm when my Midwife and her assist left my house.

Conclusion

Boy I know that was quite the read so if you stuck around this long, I hope you learned something or at least enjoyed. Overall my pregnancy was a crazy journey and I’m so glad I switched my care to Ashley and had a home birth. I had no complications in labor or postpartum and was up and out and about by a week pp. I learned so much, including how to advocate for myself and as long as I am not high risk I plan to home birth all future children. I’ll add some more random birth photos below to give a look into the 14 hour active labor. To read more birth stories like mine, be sure to check in on my Birth Stories page on my blog and thank you for reading my birth story.