Labour? Love it!

[CanadaCalls]

Was just wondering....... Did anybody else think their labour was far from a nightmare?

I can honestly say, I thoroughly enjoyed my labour from start to finish!

You had it easy some may say, well let me explain.....

Fatty baby always measured HUGE for HUD weeks, several growth scans later and ut was confirmed....I was having a whopper.

At 40 week check up with MW, she said enough is enough, thus baby has to come out, he's well and truly cooked so booked me in to be induced......

Long story short, 2 gels later, 1 allergic reaction, 3 days of hyper contracting, a shed load if oxytocin, 12 hrs established labour, 1.5 hours of pushing, a room full of worried looking consultants (concerned about shoulder dystocia) and out comes my beautiful boy weighing in at 9lb 13oz! Not exactly the whopper they'd built him up to be but big enough thank you very much :o

I can honestly say I enjoyed the whole experience from start to finish and just wondered if there were any other labour loving ladies out there?.....

CanadaCalls lovely to meet you. I'm embarassed to say it out loud, but I too love the experience of labour and birth. I am so, so sad that aged 40 after 3 DC I'll never experience it or BF again.
Had I known back in the day what I know now I may have started having children earlier.
Fortunately all my labours and deliveries were text book, no complications.
DC1 13 hrs, DC2 4 hrs, DC3 22 hrs.
With DC3 I didn't even push, I had read prior to her delivery of women in comas deliverying baby's without c-section, contractions are powerfull enough to expel a baby without the need for pushing.
Well I tried it and it is true. I'd read that a birthing woman enters a mental primevel 'zone' and I wanted to go there so my birthing plan insisted the MWs did not speak to me, at all, if they needed to speak to DH they were to take him outta the room, I didn't want any distractions to bring me out of my 'trance'. They were a good team, never even examined me to see how far I was dilated, they just observed.
At the end they said I was amazing, they'd never seen a labouring woman utter not a single sound.
I dsperately wanna experience it again but alas its just not financialy or age viable.

That makes sense really you don't have to push the placenta out, so same with baby. Looking back I enjoyed my 2nd quick labour at the time it hurt. I loved the fact I went to hospital 10am and he was out 1pm

Yikes - Oh no. It wasn't bad, by no means. Thanks to epidural. But enjoyable - NO!

But the moment baby is born - 2 best moments of my life. Have very vivid memories of both DDS being born.

A mixed bag for me. DD1 came 11 weeks early. It started with me bleeding and about ten minutes later I started contracting. While waiting for an ambulance (took over 40 min due to all those Friday night drunks using up emergency services) I was on the floor on my side and though I was making mooing kind of noises I did feel I could manage. Was chewing on dh's croc, that helped :) It got unbearable once in hospital as they did not allow me to move at all, so I couldn't move with the pain. But apart from being distraught by the worry my baby might not make it, the labour I had at home was alright.
With dd2 it really was a walk in the park, it only took 37 min and throughout I coped fine with my breathing techniques. The mooing only started just before I wanted to push. Pain relief didn't even cross my mind :) So, wouldn't mind doing it again at all, but we are complete with the two.

Yes! Mine was amazing, an wonderful experience. I didn't push at all. But it was all over in 1.5 hours, from waters breaking to birth at home on the bed with ambulance on it's way :) so maybe mine was more of an enjoyable birth rather than an enjoyable labour as I didn't even know I was in labour for the first hour .

Me! I loved my labour and birth with DD. I had a long, difficult labour with DS, culminating in an epidural, it was just like something off the television.

With DD I prepared my mind during pregnancy and did some hypnobirthing and yoga and it was wonderful. Painful but wonderful

Whoopee do for all you lovely sensitive souls.

Yep - looking back now it was wonderful. Of course it smarts a bit but i would do it again in an instant. Shame i won't be though

Why is it not ok to admit that we loved the experience JoanTheFennel ? None of us are saying that if you didn't you did it wrong or had a lesser experience.

Like I said in my previous post, I have experienced both and neither one was more valid an experience than the other BUT surely we don't all have to have the same experiences for them to he authentic.

I love massages, my mother hates them. It doesn't make one of us right and the other wrong.

Well said TheRealMBJ. And what it's got to do with being a sensitive soul (which is something I've never been called before) I don't know either.

Treadmillmom that was me.
Started family aged 37, by choice and had my second a week before I was 40. My only regret is not starting earlier as I would have had more.
Both very fast deliveries although DS1 a little complicated.
I loved the labour for DS2. I used to feel I had a mental video of it that I would replay.
I would do it again like a shot if I could.
I'd rather have a baby than go to the dentist any day.

Treadmill, can I just ask: Didn't you have that overwhelming urge to push? It swamped me and I felt completely unable to stop myself. I managed to take the occasional breather in between (as mw hadn't even had time to examine me yet and implored me not to push yet) but in general could only watch as my body was taking over and pushing as if there was no tomorrow
If you did have the urge, how did you control iy?

Am also asking anyone else who's done it without pushing.

so people are insensitive for talking about a positive experience ? good god, what a miserable world some people live in - there are acres, and acres, and...ACRES of space devoted to labour experiences where people talk about the problems they had - the only images in the media are of negative births -and apparently people who enjoyed it shoudl shut up and keep it a HUGE secret - how dare they talk about it...

how damaging is it for women if they are not allowed to talk about enjoying birth? good god....

thank you ladies! as a 29 week pregnant lady I needed to read this !

Agree with waterrat... still pregnant with #1 so can't comment further

also - a question about enjoying labour , staying in control as much as possible etc. I am having my baby in a MLU which is supposed to be very good - so I am not worried about the support/ care there - but I am worried about the actual arrival..

How best to keep calm, stay focused, not get panicky, when travelling in a taxi (only a short journey) entering a busy unit, brightly lit, being measured, prodded etc?!

waterrat I would strongly recommend pregnancy yoga to any pregnant lady. Apart from the lovely social aspect of it, I massively benefitted from the breathing exercises we learned there, especially during my second labour. It gave me something concrete to focus on and made the contractions seem a lot less overwhelming and gave me the feeling that I was managing my labour well. (Though, as mentioned above, once I needed to push I couldn't resist the urge, but that stage I think is not the most challenging one most of the time anyway.)

thank you Jokat....I have been reading the 'how much does labour hurt' thread and found it a bit dispiriting. That's why it really angers me that people would be accused of being 'insensitive' for wanting to discuss positive experiences.

In hypnobirthing/ reading Marie Mongan/ Ina May gaskin - you are really taught the link between panic and pain / expectation and tension leading to pain - and of course I can't know till I go through it just how much I will be able to control it...But I think that all the negative discussion around childbirth - and the 'poo pooing ' of any woman who dares to say she enjoyed it - must surely make it more likely that women go in to labour frightened and tense...therefore putting their body under more strain and making labour harder work...

Jokat, strangely, I've never had the urge to push with any of my labours. In the first two MW said, 'Your 10cms, you can start pushing with your next contraction', but as they were forbidden to speak durning number 3 I never knew whether I was 10cm or not, and as I said, I let the contractions do the work.
Re not sharing positive experiences, I have never found anyone to be the least bit interested in my birth stories.
When I had DC1 and attended the post natal group the MW invited everyone to share thier birth stories, there were the emergency 999, tears, rips, C-Sections, forceps, fontuce's etc etc, when it came to mine everyone talked over me and one woman even shouted accross the circle, '...yeah, all she had to endure was missing the first five minutes of Emmerdale...', I cut my story short and no one asked me to continue. I was also the only BF in the room.
That was the first time I learnt SOME women just hate happy labour stories and successfull BF accounts.

Mine were born 16 and 14 years ago.

Not so long ago you might think but there was no internet.

Therefore no source of information (or scare stories) other than books, friends or professionals. I had no friends with children so I bought a few books and went to the ante natal classes but I was essentially in the dark.
No hypnosis, no birth pools, no judgements about "good or bad" ways to give birth.No tv programmes showing graphic birth scenes. Women over analyse and worry I think because of so much choice and information.
Ignorance was bliss in my case. I wasn't scared or worried about labour.
Whether that was a factor in my enjoyment I don't know.

interesting to see some other people didnt have to push, i never pushed for my dc3 i just felt a lot of downwards pressure and he pushed himself out i didnt do anything!
i do get what you mean about enjoying labour, its not that it didnt hurt (it did hurt for all of them!) but there is just something a bit special about it, obviously the moment when they r born is the most amazing but labour as a whole and pregnancy too is something amazing, even though it has its downsides and is uncomfy and all of that. i would do it every year but i will have to stop myself so i dont end up with about 20 kids and would be too hard to give them all enough attention otherwise i would!
my 1st labour & birth was quite traumatic and a bit scary, although i still look back on it fondly cos it was my sons birth so its special but my 2nd one i really did enjoy more because it was a more natural active kind of birth and so different from the 1st one, i found it quite empowering. after my ds1 i never thought i would cope to have a birth like that but i did and it was pretty great! - would love to have that kind of birth again, wasnt able to have much of an active birth with ds3 cos of medical issues which was a shame and i think subsequent pregnancies might end up the same way but i would love if i get to have another birth like ds2 again. he was the only one who wasnt induced so i think that made it much better, but either way i still wanna do it again!

I didn't necessarily love labour, but I was amazed at what I was able to do...I learnt about active birth and did natal hypnotherapy (though not religiously) so when the time came I was mostly calm and never felt out of control and was mentally in sync with what my body needed to do. Sounds a bit new age, I know, but it was just as well as I had no pain relief until 7cms and only gas and air which I stopped using when it came to pushing.