Ira's Birth Story

Ira James Sandberg arrived on Thursday, October 17, 2019 @ 7:42 pm. Weighing in at 8.5 lbs and 19.5 in. His birth was a little different from Ames & Soren as I had to be induced. Towards the end of my pregnancies I always tend to have elevated blood pressure, but it always tended to be high right when I got to my appointment, but if they took it again at the end, it would go down significantly. It was no different this time around. At my appointment on Tuesday, October 15th, the same thing went down, except the second time they took it, it hadn't dropped as much as usual. The doctor asked me to come back in Thursday just in case to have it rechecked. So I showed up Thursday fulling expecting it to be normal - I wasn't nervous about it at all for some reason, but both times they took it it was elevated in the 140's.






The doctor over the midwifery group I go to came in and told me I'd be having my baby today! I was shocked! I never expected to have to be induced and was super nervous about it as I've had non-medicated births with my first 2 boys and planned to with this one as well. I was nervous about the extra pain from being induced and the extra risks with being induced as well.

Well it just so happened that the on call midwife that day was my very favorite of them all (Leah Moses) and the one I had hoped would be delivering Ira. She came in and talked to me - told me to go home and get my hospital bag, eat something, and tell Landon to head over. (Landon's office is literally a block from the new Layton IHC Hospital so it wasn't a far drive)
I bawled the whole way home and back to the hospital. Landon was already there when I got back  and he got in my car and gave me a priesthood blessing before we headed inside. It was so weird for me to be heading into the hospital to give birth and not be in any pain or labor yet ha ha.

By the time we got in, registered, settled, and hooked up to the wireless monitoring, it was about 1:00pm. And of course my high blood pressure was then back in the normal range ha ha, but the up and down of it all made the doctor nervous and it was better to be safe than sorry.

They started me on a VERY low dose of Pitocen and increased it bit by bit, every hour. I felt NOTHING for the first couple of hours, then I started having a little period-like cramping, but still nothing horrible. The nurses kept saying how crazy it was that I wasn't feeling much and yet my body was still dilating. I couldn't wrap my head around it either because the main reason I didn't want to be induced was because I was afraid of a long painful labor.

 Landon and I walked the halls, watched Matilda, and I bounced on a birthing ball. When we got to the hospital I was dilated to a 4 and slowly got up to a 6 or 7 by 6:00pm - at that time Leah came in to try and break my water. As she worded it, Ira was like a cork in a bottle and all of the fluid was up behind him so she wasn't able to get up around his head to break my water without the risk of injuring his head. So she came back an hour later - I hadn't dilated any more but had softened a bit so she was able to get up around his head and break my water around 7:00pm. After that was when I finally started having painful contractions. And man were they painful, much more it seems than with my other 2 boys, probably because the Pitocin hit. Well 42 minutes later he was born after just 2 pushes. He came out so fast and wasn't in the birth canal very long so he had this cute little perfectly round head that all the nurses said made him look like a c-section baby.

I couldn't have asked for his birth to go any better. It was definitely a new experience for me and I was really proud of myself for being able to go through with it unmedicated
. People often ask me why I would want to put myself through that pain, and I usually have a hard time explaining it, but I recently came across this quote on instagram that says it up perfectly...