Baby #2- The Birth Blog- Two Births In, Two Major Pool Fails (Part 2 of 3)

If you haven't read Part 1 you can do so right here

Upon leaving the hospital around 1:00pm and heading home, we did not even make it one floor down in the hospital before Colleen started having contractions. This caused our daughter, Squishy, to become quite stressed and while she may not be able to form sentences and still craps her pants, she did understand that her Mommy was in pain. Squishy felt that she could help her Mommy by rubbing her arm and holding her hand, which was super cute. Although, I speak from experience when I say that that would probably only work before so long as shit was about to get real! On the way from the hospital to our house, the contractions only intensified as did the sound effects emanating from my wife. Ever the parrot, Squishy took this as her cue to copy her mother and the next thing I knew I had my wife with her very real contractions happening in the passenger seat and my toddler in the back seat letting out equally terrifying sound effects as she mimicked her mother. Naturally, I took this as my cue to stop at the McDonald’s drive-thru on the way home because who doesn’t want a little Rotten Ronnie’s if they are going to be buckling in for a possible afternoon pregnancy?

Once we got home, we quickly put Squishy and her newfound contraction sound effects down for a nap and gave our doula, Kelly, a call. We then headed down to the basement where we had set-up the inflatable birthing pool in the middle of our living room along with candles and other accessories that made it feel like a cross between Dracula’s castle and a cheap airport rub-and-tug.

Background update: In regards to the pool, anyone who is familiar with the first birth story know how that played out last time and what a fucking disaster it was. This time around, we made sure that the hoses were hooked up properly (ahead of time) to fill the tub and that there would be no hiccups. Well, that was the plan at least. The day prior, Colleen and Kelly had noticed that there was a small hole along one of the seams in the tub and that it was leaking air. We had brought it to the attention of Sabrina, our midwife, at the hospital that morning and she stated that she would try to procure a patch for it. Alas, it did not appear that it would be too big of an issue as it looked like a really slow leak.


Anyways, getting back on track…as we got set-up in the basement reality started to set in pretty quick. Our doula Kelly arrived, and we were quickly on the phone to our midwife explaining to her that shit was getting real in a hurry. Sabrina arrived shortly after 2:00pm and by this point I was already filling the pool with water. Unlike last time, most of the water was managing to find its way into the pool, although there was that one problem of the leak. What seemed like a small/insignificant leak with no water or pressure was quickly escalated by adding water to the tub. In true Moreau birthing fashion, neither our midwife nor us had a patch kit. As the tub was being filled and Colleen was screaming/agonizing through her contractions, I frantically searched for anything that could be used to patch the tub. Not surprisingly, we all discovered that I am the only male over 18 in the entire world who does not own duct tape, and the only patch kit I could find in our garage was for an inflatable raft and it took 12 hours to properly work. Judging by the sounds my wife was making, I was not sure we had 12 minutes, let alone 12 hours. All we had in the patch department were some larger Band-Aid’s, which worked about as well as one might imagine.  

Husband, Father, Rubber-Armed Pump Boy.

Upon realizing that the pool was not going to stay inflated, I was quickly given the job of “Pump Boy”. In between contractions and almost having my arms ripped off by my wife, I was tasked with re-inflating the walls of the pool with a manual hand pump that qualified as the closest thing to working out I have done in the last five years. Yes, there was a good chance that by the time my daughter was born I was not going to be able to hold her because my noodle arms were too gassed out from pumping up the tub. Around this time, I probably prayed that this baby came quick because if this was going to be a long birth there was a good chance that we were going to have to hire a backup “pump boy” on Indeed.






Oh Man, it's about to get so real! (Or she is thinking about all the sleep she is not going to be having)

NEXT TIME....PART 3, MY CHILD WHO DOES NOT LOOK LIKE MY CHILD IS BORN!