A Blog-Induced Labor

On the afternoon I was posting the entry of Jeff and Lena in the snow, I started swaying back and forth while posting and talking to my mom when I experienced the first low dull pain, and realized I actually might be in real labor. At first I hesitated and tried to make myself believe it was another round of falsies (which had been happening every few nights for a while) but as soon as I felt the uncontrollable urge to walk walk walk, and began doing laps throughout the house I knew it MUST be real. YEA! This was actually going to happen.
I called Jeff, to get him home from work, the midwife, to get her to the house, and Julie, to come pick up my mom and Lena. In the mix of everyone coming and going the contractions got a LOT more intense, so I went upstairs to try to concentrate. It was getting more and more difficult to talk through them, and I headed for seclusion in my room (and hallway because I still had the STRONG need to walk walk walk).
After saying goodbye to Lena and kissing her big fat sweet cheeks and welcoming the first midwife on the scene I was feeling great that I was truly in real labor and that the baby was going to be OUT of me in the very near future. It might have been around 6-7ish that the contractions became longer and stronger, I'm still not sure of a timetable because I yanked the alarm clock from our bedroom out of the wall around this time.
Midwife no. 2 arrived a while later and things were definitely in business. They set up shop in our bedroom and headed back downstairs to give us some privacy and space. (I feel very independent when I am in labor and don't really want anyone to touch or talk to me). This gave Jeff the important duty of siting in the room with me with a look on his face like "I'm here if there is anything I can do!" He made for a great labor companion once again.
Some more time passed...must have been a couple of hours. In the far off land of labor, time is so irrelevant. It's amazing what a different world you enter. By now my very dear and amazing midwife, Meg, came up to sit through a few contractions with me to see how I was progressing. She must have thought baby go time was near because soon the other two birth attendants followed and labor picked up by 1 million percent.
Transition was extremely INTENSE. I mean far more intense than with Lena, which during the whole labor I was comparing the two. BIG mistake. Walking around for the past few weeks at 4cm, we all thought labor would progress very quickly, but it turned out to last almost as long as labor with Lena. I didn't know the work I had cut out for me.
By about the point when I literally thought I couldn't go on anymore, (a point I barely reached with Lena's) I asked Meg to break my water. After she did, pain I didn't think could get stronger, did in fact do just that. I paced around frantically, yelling "I can't do this!, I don't want to do this", when finally I felt the urge to push. This was the difficult part of Lena's labor, this time was not easier but different. It lasted for 20 minutes or so I am guessing. Pushing began in the bathroom and moved to our bedroom where at roughly 10:18 p.m. they laid him across my chest and I looked down at his thing-like hands and couldn't stop saying "he's here! he's here! I can't believe how big he is!"
How truly amazing and powerful it was. At 8 pounds 15 ounces, (a whopping 2 pounds bigger than Lena!) 21 1/4 inches he is perfect. His name is Simon.