Birthday boy

Someone make me a cup of tea - we're just back home from celebrating Mark's 6th Birthday - you know how it is. The kids had a ball and I feel as though I've been hit by a truck. Not so different to the way I was feeling six years ago then!

Mark's birth was not the easiest. If I had known him then as I do know, I would have expected him to approach the business of being born in an unconventional manner! After being in the perfect position for birth, he got edgy during a long car trip we took about a week before his due date and flipped posterior. Believe me - if you are nine months pregnant and the baby decides to turn, you know about it. No amount of hanging around on my hands and knees would encourage him to move back, so I was in for a posterior labour. And what does that mean? In a word - LONG. Thirty-six hours long.

Now I need my sleep - I'm a 10-hour-a-night girl in an ideal world, and having lost 2 nights sleep prior to his birth was no joke. I was, by choice, in a midwife-led birthing unit with no facilities for epidurals, ventouse, forceps or any other high tech interventions. Not that forceps are hi-tech. I mean have you ever SEEN a pair? Medieval or what. But I digress.

There I was, plodding on with my student midwife and beloved gas and air for company, feeling shattered. The chief midwife popped in and casually suggested that I seemed very tired and should transfer to the main hospital because I wasn't going to have the energy to push this baby out. At which point I rallied and shouted loudly at poor old Andy "I did not go through all this to get shipped off to the bloody hospital! Get me some sugar NOW!" And I lied like crazy about feeling the urge to push and squeezed that little monkey out. There's nothing like being told I can't do something to make me determined to prove otherwise.

And Mark? He's still looking at the world from an alternative point of view and given the easy way or the hard way to do something, he'll never opt for straightforward. Happy Birthday lovely boy - life may not always be simple for you, but it will never be boring!