Malo's Marathon

I know, I have been a bit silent lately. But, as I said in my previous post, I have an excuse (hey, hey, never come unprepared). I gave birth to a tiny, wonderful, über-cute (add any over the- top adjective you may think of here, and there is 99% chance it will describe spot-on how I feel about him) baby-boy, Malo.

We have now been home for three weeks or so, but before that, I had to give birth in style. And, knowing me, you should know what "style" means. It had to be a marathon birth. Although, if, when it comes to running marathon, I am a true believer in the saying "it does not have to be fun to be fun", in the particular instance of Malo's birth, I would not have minded being spared, not so much the pain, but a bit of the drama.

I started feeling the contractions at 7pm on the 25th of August. On a side note, may I say here, pregnant-women-to-be, that you should NOT believe anything you hear about how you will just know when the "real " contractions start: this is just a whole bunch of rubbish.

As far as I was concerned, it was not painful, it was no different than any contractions I had felt for the last three months, and so I had no idea whether I was about to give birth, or not. So, just in case that was it, knowing that walking is what you should do when labour starts, and because I felt like running (surprise), Martin and I went for a two-hour walk by the lake. This did not speed up anything, so by 2am on the 26th, we were back at it. This time, it worked a bit better (sort of), and at 4am my waters broke. And it still did not feel painful at all. No drama, nothing... As a result, by 5am, Martin and I were still joking along in our living room, with me doing a bit of yoga in case things were getting tougher. By 6am, we went for yet another walk, (amazing how empty Annecy can be at night) hoping this would help speeding things up, but clearly Malo-to-be was in no rush.

By 7am, I thought it was about time to go to the hospital, so off we went.

We had time for one happy photo, before it all started to go wrong. Very wrong. To make a long story short, or rather a very long delivery very short, Malo's heart did not deal very well with the contractions, and as a result, the natural birth I wanted, without peridural, or inducement, or, obviously, caesarian, ended up being all of the above. Even more traumatic was the fact we thought for hours, hearing Malo's heart fainting on the monitoring device, that our little boy would not make it.

So an eventful birth it was, a fulfilling experience it was not. But in the end, after 16 hours of labour, Malo was born, and in good health. I just wonder if the length, if not the drama, was Malo's attempt at pleasing his mum by showing he was keen on endurance sports... in which case my son has clearly still one thing or two to learn about women, because this one is a marathon I may as well have liked to avoid...