Everyone blathers on about the miracle of childbirth. They never mention all of the not-so-miraculous things that happen if you deliver a baby at home. By accident. My first kid was an accidental home birth. Here\u2019s what I learned on that memorable day:<\/p>\n
*Renting movies induces labor<\/strong> *Contractions can masquerade as other things\u2014misleading things<\/strong> *Every pregnant woman should own a drop cloth<\/strong> *Never borrow a cheap shop vac<\/strong> Since I have a faulty memory bordering on amnesia, baby #1 was soon followed by other offspring. I never ended up having a kid in a hospital, but we never had to scrape the Miracle of Childbirth off the curtain rods again, either, thanks to our brand-new shop vac\u2014and enough drop cloths to cover most of Arizona.<\/p>\n Did you enjoy this post? Subscribe to my blog and you\u2019ll never miss my once-a-month updates! It\u2019s easy: Just enter your email address in the upper right corner of this page. I\u2019ll never sell, share, or rent your contact information, because I hate it when people do that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Everyone blathers on about the miracle of childbirth. They never mention all of the not-so-miraculous things that happen if you deliver a baby at home. By accident. My first kid was an accidental home birth. Here\u2019s what I learned on that memorable day:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-funny-bits"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":285,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278\/revisions\/285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nWhen I started to suspect I was going into labor, I waddled up to the store and rented six new, full-priced movies. That seemed like a reasonable number, since I was going to be in labor for 76 hours (according to my mother-in-law). Uh\u2026nope. As soon as I started the first movie, I felt an odd, stabbing pain in my hip. Unbeknownst to me, pressing the \u201cPlay\u201d button is the equivalent of taking high-powered labor-inducing drugs.<\/p>\n
\nI didn\u2019t call my (now ex-) husband when the stabbing pain hit. I didn\u2019t want him standing around for 76 hours, waiting for me to expel a kid (I freeze under pressure, and assumed my cervix would do the same). So I decided to wait until I was having regular, real<\/em> contractions\u2014you know, those belly-spasming things that people measure with stopwatches and \u201cbreathe\u201d through. I never had regular, real contractions. I had irregular bouts of stabbing pain in my hips, followed by diarrhea. Bad diarrhea. Clearly, an invisible gnome with anger control issues was sneaking into the room to stab me\u2014or I\u2019d developed food poisoning. Uh\u2026nope again. Unbeknownst to me, my labor was progressing rapidly\u2014without a single \u201creal\u201d contraction.<\/p>\n
\nI called my ex before the end of the first movie. Even if I had another 74 hours of gnome attacks and diarrhea to go through before real<\/em> labor began, I wanted someone to suffer with me. After surmising from my voice that Something Wasn\u2019t Right, ex-hubby raced to the house. Baby #1 was born on our beige bedroom carpet\u2014and so was everything else that accompanies a baby into this world.<\/p>\n
\nThe screaming ball of fury weighed nine pounds at birth, and had done several powerful karate kicks on the way out. So I sat on a fluffy pillow in the nursery, while my ex used a shop vac to remove the Miracle of Childbirth from our bedroom carpet. My tip for future home birthers: Rent a high-quality shop vac\u2014do not<\/em> grab an old, cheap one that\u2019s been stuffed in someone\u2019s basement for years. As I sat in the baby room pondering whether my groin would ever recover, I started to worry that I\u2019d suffered eye damage during the delivery, as well. Looking down the hall at my ex\u2014who had his back to me\u2014I felt like I was looking through a haze. A cloudy red haze. I called out his name so I could break the news: I\u2019d ruptured my retinas during the delivery and was going blind. When he turned, his reaction could best be described as Squirrel Attacked By Fire Ants<\/strong>. I\u2019ve never seen anyone move so fast\u2014and in so many different directions at once. Turns out my eyes were fine\u2014the shop vac<\/em> was defective. Yes, it was sucking the Miracle of Childbirth off the rug. But it was spraying that Miracle out behind my ex, leaving an even coating of sticky, red Yuck all over the dresser, windows and wall.<\/p>\n