Baby Savage Has Arrived!

Robert Sikes

• May 27th, 2022

If you haven’t yet heard, Robert Rigel Sikes made his appearance and we are over the moon! As promised, we documented each trimester of Crystal’s pregnancy with a podcast episode, but we also decided to do a separate episode about our birth experience, which turned out to be a lot different than we had originally hoped.

What we talked about in this episode:

Our original desire to have an unmedicated home birth and the reasons why (3:06)
The various options for birthing in Arkansas (3:51)
The slippery slope of interventions in the birthing process (6:44)
How she took care of herself physically and nutritionally throughout the pregnancy (7:42)
Membrane sweeps and castor oil (10:53)
Risk assessment (11:14)
Realizing our goal of a home birth wouldn’t be attainable (13:18)
The emotional toll of the day leading up to going to the hospital (14:23)
Arriving at the hospital and starting the induction process (16:05)
No progress after 12 hours with Cervadil, starting Pitocin (17:19)
Intensifying pain, the inability to eat, struggling through contractions (20:27)
Ruptured membranes and increasing contractions (21:47)
Rigel’s positioning (22:27)
Nitrous oxide (23:41)
Face presentation and discussing the option of a cesarean (29:42)
Accepting the fact that something wasn’t right and knowing Rigel wouldn’t be able to be born vaginally (33:04)
Believing there was a reason that everything happened the way it did (35:07)
Preparing for the C-section (37:19)
The difficulty in placing the spinal medication due to Crystal’s muscular back (38:54)
Watching the process and hearing Rigel’s first cries (39:31)
Immediate breastfeeding and that rewarding feeling (43:25)
Announcing Rigel’s arrival to our families (44:55)
Recovery (46:00)
Vaginal birth after cesarean (47:29)
Falling completely in love with our baby (49:19)
Finding peace in our birth story (50:39)