Baby Dean’s Birth Story

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Baby number 9 is here! Everyone is loving him and we’re just thrilled that he’s healthy and perfect. Read on for his birth story and our first experience having a baby in a birth center!

Hey guys! I’m so, SO happy to announce our newest arrival: Dean Edward Wiscombe! He was born Monday night at 7:50pm, weighing 7lbs 6oz and 20″ long.

I’m excited to share his birth story with you all and our first experience having a baby in a birth center. I consider birth the most intense yet exciting, empowering yet humbling, nerve-wracking yet peaceful experiences that I’ve ever gone through and while every one of my births has been vastly different, each experience is soul-shaking and life-changing!

I was lucky that a sweet and talented friend of mine volunteered to come take a few pictures during and immediately after labor and I’m so grateful for them! It’s kind of hard to pay attention to your surroundings when you’re working through labor and so seeing these gives me a very interesting, objective third party view of my birth experience. I think it’s fascinating!

I had a feeling that this baby would be coming on the sooner side of things compared to some of my other births (a few of my kids made me wait until almost 42 weeks!) and so I was halfway expecting baby Dean to come the weekend after my due date (which was on Thursday). I made it through Sunday and then woke up with some real contractions on Monday morning.

I went about my day and by noon, I had downloaded a contractions timer app on my phone and was keeping track of them. Most of them were about 40 seconds long and 8 minutes apart at that point. I texted Luke and told him to come home early at about 4:30 and he said he’d leave right away.

The unusual thing was that, although the contractions were getting stronger little by little, they never really got closer together than 6 minutes apart. By the time Luke got home around 5ish, I was lying down and breathing through them while listening to my Hypnobirthing tracks. I actually kept my headphones in during the entire birth and listening to those tracks helped SO much!

We got to the birth center around 5:30 pm, I got checked in and labored on the bed for a little bit, then got in the tub for some pain relief. Labor kept getting more and more intense but I still had breaks between contractions, even through pushing!

This was a crazy twist of events for me since by the time I usually get to transition, things move FAST and I push most of my babies out in 2-3 pushes (and less than 5-10 minutes). This baby just kept taking his sweet time and even though I loved being able to breathe and rest between contractions, by the end I just wanted baby out!

And then all of a sudden he was! I felt a huge POP after one intense contraction when his bag of waters broke open, and then the next contraction I was able to push his head out. I got another big rest and then pushed his body out on the last one. You can see in the photo below that his cord was super long and he was wrapped around in it 3 times so it took us a minute to unroll him!

Some of my most very favorite pictures are the ones taken right after baby comes out. You can see the pure exhaustion and raw emotion on my face (and often Luke’s) and it’s just such a sweet, tender and mind-blowing moment.

We actually brought Juliet (age 9) and Toby (age 11) with us to the birth center because they were begging to watch the baby be born and it was a great experience! They were a little shell-shocked watching me go through transition but afterwards they were SO sweet. They came up to me, all smiles, and talked about how proud they were of me and what a great job I did. It was my favorite part of having them there.

We sat around oohing and aahing over baby Dean for a few minutes, and then my sister took the kids home, my photographer friend left and it was just Luke and I relaxing and watching our new sweet addition. The midwives were super great and we walked out just over 4 hours after giving birth to go home and (attempt to) sleep in our own bed. I’d definitely recommend a birth center birth to anyone considering it.

In the interest of full disclosure, this birth was HARD, you guys. But then again, every natural birth is hard. Some are fast and some are slow and some make you wonder whether or not you’ll survive it! I often ask myself why I keep signing up for this when it’s so stinking hard and I’m not sure I’ll ever have the answer.

But I do know that the painful and gut-wrenchingly difficult trials of our lives give us something that nothing else can. For me, my births have given me an added measure of empathy for others, they’ve helped me grow in a way I can’t fully describe and, above all, they’ve brought me closer to my Savior who (incredibly) knows ALL of our pains. That’s not hyperbole; He literally felt the discomfort of every pregnancy, the sorrow of every miscarriage and the struggle of every single mother who would ever give birth. I’m so grateful for experiences that have given me even the tiniest of glimpses into what He did for all of us!

And on that note, Happy Easter weekend!