It's gonna be a long one.

On Friday 7th October we went into hospital with reduced movements. I was hooked onto the monitor and typically little man instantly started wriggling like crazy. They also checked my blood pressure a few times which was high so I had to go back the next day for profiling. Everything was fine and I was offered a sweep and then sent home. After the sweep I lost about half my plug but nothing else happened. Over the next few days I had pretty irregular pre-labour contractions and every time I thought yes this is it, it's finally starting they stopped. Like when you're trying to start a car but it's just turning but not catching.

My due date of 12th October came and went. It was one of the most uneventful days of my life. Except that my uncle's wife kept pestering me every single day to ask if we'd had the baby yet.

On Tuesday 18th October I had a sweep at 2pm. My blood pressure was high again so they sent me into hospital to be checked. By 2:30pm I started having stong tightenings every half an hour or so but didn't think anything of it. My blood pressure was fine and the tightenings increased in frequency, and by 6pm they were every 5 minutes. This is when I knew things finally started happening.

We put Isaac to bed as normal and at 9pm I rang the hospital as the contractions (by this time quite painful) were every 3-4 minutes. We inflated and filled the pool which was surprisingly quick. I used my Tense machine for the first hour or so but after that it got annoying and the pool was so inviting that I decided to get in. A minute later at 10:15pm the midwives arrived, 3 of them! They brought a student midwife with them and all were really lovely. The senior midwife (Chris) has seen a few home births but the second midwife (Rachel) and the student (Gill) had never seen one so they were really excited. They looked like they were moving in with all the stuff they'd brought.

We chatted and I was breathing through my contractions. Isaac woke up so hubby had to put him back to bed.