Wyatt Elisha Kirton

And there you have it, my babies birth stories have been told.

I mean, I'm about to tell you the last one- I haven't typed it just yet- but the story has happened and I have nothing else to worry about from the births of my babies.  Yeah, I'm all but certain that that was my last go.

But back to the man-child of the hour: my Wyatt.

As far as pregnancies go, it was a quiet one.  He measured bigger than my other kids, but we were

Cartagena - (Zika)

never really sure of the due date, so that could have meant anything, or nothing.  I found out I was pregnant on my birthday, which was fun, and we knew he'd be due around Christmas.  We had waited to try for another baby because we had gone on a trip to an area where people and mosquitoes were carrying Zika, so when we knew baby 4 was on the way, we were excited.

The most influencing factor in this pregnancy was Gemma.  Gemma hadn't breathed for several minutes after she was born and it had been a scary thing for everyone.  I decided to go off of my medication and started taking my Plexus products to clean up my body, in order to be as healthy as I could be for this delivery.

Because of Gemma's birth, I decided to go up to the U hospital and talk to the midwives there to plan for a hospital birth, and they were wonderful.  But I hated every single other thing about being up there.  I really like the U.  I worked there, and I loved it, and if I had time and flexibility, I'd still work there.  But I'm a lousy patient I guess, because I couldn't make that nonsense of parking and waiting rooms and nurses I've never met be part of my life or my pregnancy.  The thought of delivering at the hospital induced such anxiety that I secretly began to plan to have the baby in car before we got there.  When I admitted this to myself, I decided it was time to look for another option, and I got back in touch with my wonderful midwife, Melissa, who delivered all of my other kids.

So Christmastime came, and then Christmas came, and then it went.  I had hoped to have Wyatt a bit early so his birthday wouldn't be too too close to Christmas, but he wasn't ready yet, and that's just fine.  At a company Christmas Dinner earlier in the month, one of our friends said, speaking of Hyrum's dad, "I think think you're going to have that sweet baby on Randy's birthday."  I said something along the lines of, "oh I think he'll come before the 27th", and cute Christie, with all the wisdom I have ever seen, looked right into my soul and said, "No, I really think he's going to be a wonderful birthday present for Randy."

So anyway at 3:55am on Randy's birthday, I woke up with a really hard, long, contraction.  That late in pregnancy, that just means you need to use the bathroom, so I maneuvered my large and awkward self out of bed and hobbled over to the bathroom, but about 8 minutes later, there was another one.  I tracked the contractions on the app that I have for such things, and even though the contractions weren't closer than 6 minutes apart at the closest, I timed them for an hour and they weren't stopping so, I woke Hyrum up and said, "Welp, Christie was right.  It's baby day."

I don't like to admit dissension from my plans, but I was really scared.  I asked Hyrum what it would cost to go to the hospital, and we talked through the logistics of what would have to happen if we went down the street to Alta View hospital and shook hands with people we had never met and said, "we'd like to have a baby here, right now, would that be alright with you all?"

You see, I've done this before- somewhat recently- and I remember what it feels like.  Oh, you thought I was afraid of my baby not breathing?  That was there, too, but my main concern was that part about how it hurts.  We talked for a minute, and I asked Hyrum for a blessing.  He suggested that I say a prayer, and I did and I cried because I was afraid, and then he laid his hands on my head and blessed me to know that my body knew what to do.  We called Melissa, they set up the tub, and Hyrum took a limp little Superman back to his room to sleep through the delivery of his new little brother.

Each delivery has called for different styles of contraction management.  This time it was jiggling.  Who knows why, but when I would have a contraction I just wanted to hang the baby off of me, like he were in a hammock hanging off of my spine and jiggle him down away from me.  So before I got in the tub I was standing on the floor and laying my face down on our bed and sortof wigglewigglewiggling him away from the back pain.  Then after I got in the tub I was doing that on my hands and knees and only blithely concerned with whether I were splashing water all over the place.

I've done this for a total of 17 hours at this point in my life- labor, that is- and thought about it a great deal more than that.  What I've learned is that when this thing feels like that thing, then your baby is about ready to come on out.  But when that thing happens, I'm so focused on getting through it with as little pain as possible that there are no words for alerting my team to these happenings.  So even though my contractions had slowed down and that could be a sign of slowed labor OR transition, I knew we were pretty close to the big moments- but nobody else did.

Oh, except God.  You see, I was praying in these moments, saying, "Father, I know You're here, and I know You have helped people with this before.  You have to help me now.  I can't do this- You have to remove the pain and help me."  I don't normally speak to Him this way, but of any of the bigger moments in life, I feel like I can be forgiven for being demanding.  I was pretty scared, and I knew He didn't HAVE to help me with a darned thing.  But I knew He could, and decided that He would.

I was able to just let my body do what it knew it needed to do.  I let go of trying to control it, and loosened my mental grip and it didn't hurt anywhere near how it has hurt before. This is hard to explain without being graphic, and I'm the sort of girl who doesn't like to use words like "cervix" even in a blog post about birth, so I'll resist the urge to share all of what I've learned over 17 some hours of natural labor and delivery.  But the miracle is that I made it.  I demanded that God help, and He did.  I demanded that it not hurt as much, and it didn't.  And I ached for my son to be born quickly and without so much pain, and he was.

I let his head ease out, and waited for the next contraction for his body, and I pulled that sweet squishy sticky little body up in to my arms and wept with relief- he took a big breath and squealed at us immediately.  We have a video, and the excitement of seeing him is crushed instantly by the relief in the room that he breathed and cried.

I cried, too.  Every time a baby is planned for, there are innumerable worries.  With pregnancy comes a lot of pain, and struggle, and this last one was over, my son was here, and he was perfect.  Plenty of worries follow, heaven knows, but those were over.  My son's birth story had been told, and he was wonderful.

Others in the room wondered if he looked big- I couldn't tell.  Coming from where they come from always clouds my perception of their size, but he was 8 lbs 11 oz- 2 and half pounds bigger than Russell (6 lbs 3 oz).  I couldn't help checking for 10 fingers and 10 toes, and checking to make sure he was a boy, and then I just rubbed him and held him and kept him warm.  He was born at 6:23 am and all of the other kids had slept through it.  Georgia came in after she woke up and wanted to make sure I was okay.  She didn't want to leave me and was so worried about me (the contractions that follow are horrific, if I'm being honest).  She's too little to be so worried- but it made her feel like my best friend in the whole world.

The combination of hoping that he would come early, and the fear of all of the things that could go wrong made the relief of his birth the biggest feature of it.  I hope that in the years to come, if I have moments when I miss this part of my life, I can remember that I really did it.  I gave up medicine when I was sick, and I took such good care of us that the amniotic sac was like a swim cap (very  strong) and the placenta like a thick cut steak (also a good thing).  I was scared of the pain but believed I knew the best way for us to get our baby, so I found a way to get him here that way.  I hope that if I long for these days again someday, I can feel proud of myself that even though so much of it hurts so much, I did it, and was happy to for our kids. I hope that what I've given is enough.  I hope that its enough for the me that will come later.  I feel like I did a really good job- that I did it the way I should have, for us.

And with that, all of my babies birth stories have been told.