My littlest babe, my Baker Flynn, just turned two. They say the third baby if often a wild card, and wild is one of many words I would use to describe this sweet little hurricane of a child. I’ve been thinking a lot about his birth lately; it was quick, dramatic, and by most standards very successful. For reference, I’ll repost the last bit–the baby coming out of my body bit–here:
By 5:10am, baby boy was out. I don’t know how many times I pushed, but he came out in an almighty gush, finally breaking through his sack as he was born. I am not even 100% sure who technically delivered him—my husband says he was almost prepared to catch him himself as everyone in the room was so frantic—but a nurse who was present told me later, “he was just looking up at me, his face in that sack, like please catch me!” According to someone’s notes, the on call OB only managed to get 1 glove on by the time he was coming out and simply pulled her gown sleeve down over her other hand.
I was still on all fours as I heard my husband ask to delay cord clamping, to which someone responded “I already clamped it, we need to cut.” Someone else spoke to me directly and said they needed to take baby away since he wasn’t breathing well. At some point during these moments my midwife got there, because I remember her showing up by my side. I told my husband to go with the baby as my midwife, Jenny, helped me flip over onto my back. By the time I was laying down, baby was in the next room and out of my sight.
My husband went with baby boy to the NICU where they stayed until 8am when I was finally able to meet my baby. I have a lot of feelings about those 3 hours, about how I was treated, what I felt. But I’m not ready to commit that to paper.
I left the hospital the next day with a beautiful, healthy baby boy. Everything went right. Two years later, I am still in awe of this child and how he came into the world. And two years later I am still pained by it. I can still feel it. It is still a part of me, a part of us.
My husband and I are fairly certain that Baker is not our last child. While the thought of having four kids seems insane, it also feels more right than three. We don’t yet feel complete. And yet, the thought of a fourth birth is almost too big to wrap my head around.
Though we have never actually lived in the city together, Kirkland is home base for my husband and I. We met there, we both worked there, we both lived there separately, we have ties to the community there. When we had our first baby, we were living in Snohomish (just North of Kirkland); the drive from our home to Kirkland’s incredibly highly ranked Evergreen Hospital was only 9 miles. There was no question as to where I would give birth.
By the time our daughter turned one, we were living in Algona (34 miles South of Kirkland). I continued to see my midwives in Kirkland as we tried for another baby. Loss after loss, I continued making the drive North. When I was finally pregnant with our rainbow baby, the pandemic hit. I felt even more of a pull to Kirkland during this pregnancy; I knew the hospital, the staff, the policies. I felt comfortable there.
When I was 6 months pregnant with our son, in October 2020, we moved to Puyallup (further South, now 48 miles from Kirkland). While I was concerned about the drive to the hospital whilst in labor, I felt like I could handle it, I felt like I would have time. The drive felt worth the destination.
When the time came to deliver, the drive to the hospital wasn’t too bad. I felt grounded in my meditations and breathing (with the help of this wonderful app), and handled the drive really well. Via my second birth story:
I continued to labor fairly steadily and breathe through contractions in the car. Though I’d been dreading the hour plus drive to the hospital, it actually wasn’t too terrible. I felt really in control of my pain level and was handling things really well.
While my labor was much quicker with this baby (8 hours as opposed to 52 with my first), the distance to the hospital felt like the most insignificant part of the whole thing.
When I got pregnant with our third, very little time had passed since our second (our rambunctious boys are only 15 months apart). All decisions felt like they had been made for me already; I would deliver with my midwives, in Kirkland, once again. How could I not?
Though the “wild card birth” description of third babies was drilled into me over and over again throughout my pregnancy, never in my wildest dreams would I have considered a 3 hour labor. Equipped with the same resources as before, I anticipated breathing through contractions in the car just as I had last time. Instead, via my third birth story:
[At 4:04am, we got in the car and headed to the hospital.] The drive was a blur for me. It was dark and raining. I kept my window down and eyes closed as much as I possibly could. I know we had the first Harry Potter audiobook playing, but I could barely hear it. I continued to time contractions really only for the sake of the app I use, which gives you a breathing meditation during each contraction. With my second birth, I was able to keep my breathing pretty steady and really felt like the app really helped me through labor. This time, however, I was barely able to breathe with the app and felt increasingly like I simply needed to crawl out of my body. With every contraction I doubted myself more, I wondered why this was so hard, why I felt so out of control. We finally pulled into the hospital parking lot at 4:53am.
At some point during the drive I had a moment of just like why, why would I choose to feel this? Why wouldn’t I just go to the hospital and get an epidural? This is silly, this is painful, I don’t want this. By the time we got to the hospital, I was 100% set on an epidural. As we were walking in I told my husband, “I refuse to go to triage and be checked, I want to go to a room and get an epidural immediately.” He was hesitant but agreed, though I’m sure he was thinking “yea right, like there will be time for an epidural.”
When I sat down to write this–and renamed it countless times–I didn’t think I would be writing about the drive, about the decision to give birth where I did. But evidently that feels big to me, that feels like the precipice for a big part of the trauma I feel in the aftermath. The drive to the hospital with Baker was the most out of my body, the most out of control, that I have ever felt in my life.
Looking forward, Baker’s birth makes me consider a home birth more than I ever have before. We often joke that a home birth is inevitable because of the rapid decrease in lengths of my labors (52, 8, 3), though I would obviously prefer intentional rather than inevitable. It’s definitely a consideration.
Now that I have rambled on for an eternity about cars… I will split this into two parts.
a word on a whim 
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