Backstory

When I talk about what's going on with Elijah these days, I feel like some of what I say needs a lot of explanation for those of you who don't know us in real life. But I never have time to give the explanation. What can I say, it's a long story. So here's the first installment, for those of you who've wondered what I'm talking about. I hope the rest of you don't get too bored reading it again.

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I started having contractions on a Friday evening, about thirty minutes after Dan left to make the three hour drive to the armory for a drill weekend. After an hour and a half, they were becoming steadily more frequent, so on our midwife's advice, I called Dan and he turned around and came home. When we woke up in the morning, I was still having regular contractions, so we trooped in to the hospital for some monitoring. "False labor," they said. We went home.

***

For most of my pregnancy, people had been commenting with surprise on how small I was. Six weeks before my due date, I wasn't gaining weight and the midwife felt like the baby's measurements weren't changing, so we went in for an ultrasound. It showed a single umbilical artery. The first thing you realize, when you jump on Google and look up SUAs, is that babies who have them also have a higher incidence of things being wrong with them, and a greater chance of being born prematurely.

***

By Sunday night, the contractions were strong enough to keep me awake during the night, but the frequency and intensity continued to vary during the days. I spent Tuesday on the couch, frantically trying to finish up a pile of student evaluations, but by the afternoon, I felt lousy enough that I had Dan, who was in the middle of finals week and was home studying, take them in to the office for me.

I'd been staying in touch by phone with our midwife, and I called her again. She told me to take a bath with lavender oil in it, then call her and let her know how I was feeling. It didn't seem to make a difference one way or the other, so she asked us to come by and let her check on things.

By the time we got there, I had decided that if this was still false labor there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell that I was going to survive the real thing. Fortunately for me, our midwife said with some surprise that she could already feel the baby's head.

***

When I got pregnant, we weighed the pros and cons and decided to plan a home birth. We also wrote a birth plan and started packing a bag in case we ended up in the hospital, but our goal was to have the baby at home. Even after the ultrasound showed up the two-vessel cord, we were still planning a home birth: The ultrasound hadn't showed anything wrong with the baby.

When we went to the hospital Saturday, I was expecting to be admitted. I thought signs of premature labor with a small-for-gestational-age baby was likely to make people nervous. But not only did they not admit me, they didn't seem particularly upset by the idea of me going into labor at thirty-five weeks.

So Tuesday evening, our midwife asked us what we wanted to do--drive to the hospital, or drive home. She has decades of experience under her belt, and she thought that, given all the circumstances, either decision would be reasonable. We went home.

***

Elijah James was born just after eight o'clock that night, December 6th, 2005, a month before his due date.