Kaspar’s Birth Story
By Leah Reichardt-Osterkatz Kaspar Reichardt-Osterkatz Born December 7, 2015 at 6:47am For several days, I had been telling friends and family that something different was happening in my uterus. Saturday evening I started to feel discrete contractions, but they did not feel painful. After going to bed, I was up with a contraction every 10 minutes through the night. They were not so intense that I needed to wake anyone up (wanting my support people to be rested for what was to come!), but they were intense enough that I got up out of bed with each one to lean over the counter and wiggle my hips around. They continued like that until mid-day Sunday. Once Nils, my husband, was awake, I was able to stay lying down through the contractions, because holding on to him made the pain less intense. The contractions started to come closer together in the afternoon, but were not progressing in a consistent pattern. This, in combination with the fact that I was feeling a lot of pain in my back, was a clue that his head was not in an ideal position (which my midwife Maureen had predicted a few weeks earlier). I spent a lot of time in my parents’ hot tub, which made the contractions almost painless at that point. My husband and I took a long, slow walk around the property. While we were walking the contractions were coming about every two minutes. With each one we would either hug with me kind of hanging from his shoulders, or he would hold me from behind and lift my belly up, or I would lean forward and he would rub my back. We went back to the house and spoke with Maureen on the phone. The contractions had then slowed down again, so she suggested that I try to rest however possible and we would check back in soon. I went into the bedroom, but didn’t like the idea of lying down because I always felt the need to get up during contractions. I tried resting in child’s pose for quite a while, scooting off the end of the bed with each contraction, sometimes holding onto Nils and sometimes leaning over the bed with my mom and my friend stroking my back while I swayed my hips back and forth. I also tried sitting on the birth ball. Somewhere in there, … Read More