Birth story: Perseverance pays off!

Prenatal yoga teacher Corrine Gernes calls Elspeth, one of her prenatal regulars, a “total rock star.” Read her birth story and find out why! Welcome to the world, little Lucy, and WAY TO GO, Elspeth!

Love,

Alisa, Sarah & the women of Blooma

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Hello Corrine!

So it finally happened; I won’t be making it to class tomorrow!

Andalucia Beatix was born on Sunday (Aug.) 14th at 6:43 pm weighing in at 8lbs 1oz and 20.1 inches long.

So our birth turned out to be nothing like we planned but still we have a beautiful baby girl and that is all that matters.

My contractions started at around 4 pm after going to yoga last wednesday and were about 25 minutes apart and very bearable.  By 10 that night they had picked up to about 5 minutes and were becoming more painful so we decided if this was going to be it we might as well try to get some sleep.

At 2 am I was awoken with contractions 2 to 3 minutes apart and Andrew started to get things ready.  They stayed this consistent for almost 3 hours but by 5nam they had slowed back down significantly and we decided to go to sleep.

This pattern continued on Thursday night and on Friday night they became even more intense to the point where they were one right after the other so we called the midwives.  I had not progressed at all from my check the day before and so everyone went home then on Saturday it happened all over again and by 10 pm I had still not progressed at all so we finally made the decision to transfer to Regions.

After what seemed like a never-ending car ride we arrived and I was exhausted.  We decided to try to use just morphine and benedryl at first so I could sleep.  This worked great for a few hours but again I was woken with consistant contractions and was still not progressing.

At around 6 am I made the decision for an epidural and it was in place by 11 am.  At this point I had only dilated to a 5 so they decided to start pitocin to speed things up.  After the epidural and pitocin things went very quickly.  After an afternoon of sleep I was ready to push at 5:45 and after an hour of almost silent pushing Lucy decided to arrive.

Although we did not get to have our natural home birth, it was completely worth it in the end.  After 5 days of labor I do not think I would have had the strength to birth at home and the price may have been an unhealthy baby.

We were able to come home less than 24 hours after delivery and everyone is doing great.  It is nice to be home again.

My words of advice for all the other mothers is to expect anything and know that no matter how far away from your birth plan your birth actually is we are all still so incredibly lucky to have a healthy happy baby in the end.  Don’t be disappointed by what doesn’t happen the way you want when you are in the moment because it will all be forgotten once you meet your babies.

I will see you all at BYOB!

Elspeth

Tags: birth announcements, birth story, blooma, blooma minneapolis, blooma st. paul, Blossoms, Corrine Gernes, prenatal yoga minneapolis, prenatal yoga st. paul