Finally, on November 14th at 11pm, we had baby Edie Sarah Katherine, 7lb 14oz.
It wasn't exactly the birth we'd envisaged - she was 13 days late, so induction started on the Monday, and even that wasn't swift - it took three doses of prostin before anything started to happen on Tuesday afternoon.
But once it started, boy did it start. I went from nought to eight cm dilated in two and half hours, and went onto the delivery suite with everything steaming ahead - and half an hour later was ready to push. And then continued to push for an hour and a half with absolutely no result (felt like 20 mins to me though!). She was still very high, and not moving at all. At this point, I was only having gas and air, but the pain was getting pretty severe, and they were also getting a bit worried about her heartbeat, which was dipping after each contraction. So the decision was taken to go for a spinal in order to try a ventouse, and if not go straight to a c-section.
The spinal was frankly a relief, and I went from a gibbering non-co-operative wreck to someone who was, apparently, nearly doing a stand up routine for the benefit of the theatre staff (I have to confess that all of this is a bit of a blur for me...). Anyway, the ventouse didn't work at all, and Edie was born by c-section ten minutes later.
It may all sound like a bit of a roller-coaster, but we're not at all upset at the way it ended out - all of the midwives and doctors were very concerned about consulting us rather than ordering us about, so we felt very much that we'd done everything we could to have a natural birth, and the most important thing is that we have a lovely, healthy, beautiful baby.
I spent almost a week in hospital as she had some feeding problems at the start and lost a fair bit of weight, and the combination of all that pushing and a section has left me a bit mashed up too, but she's more than making up for that now, I'm much better and we're at home and absolutely delighted. I wish someone had told me how delightful babies can be, I would have done this years ago!