Our water baby William comes home

William comes home from hospital, originally uploaded by Racmol.

We finally left the hospital on Saturday afternoon, after 48 hours of antibiotics (William) and lukewarm, uninspired hospital meals (me). Very glad to be home!

On Wednesday evening I had gone down to the labour ward to be hooked up to the monitor just to check that William was ok, as I hadn't felt any movements all day. I thought this would be a 10-minute visit, but in the end I had the monitor on for nearly two hours even though everything appeared to be normal, because noone was prepared to let me go home until the machine said 'Criteria met'.

Eventually one of the registrars came around and said maybe it would be a good idea to try and do a sweep before I went home. So one of the midwives did that and said I was 1-2cm dilated already so things would probably kick off in the next day or two.

Jules and I got home about 10pm, had a pizza and went to bed. By about 3am I was feeling a bit crampy but not really having regular contractions yet. At 6am I got up and had a shower, then rang the midwives' team mobile. The midwife who answered said to see how many contractions I had in the next half hour. So at 7am I rang back and reported 5 contractions in 30 minutes so she said to come in.

Got to the hospital in a minicab by 7.30am. Only 3 contractions on the way this time, so a lot better than the nightmare cab ride to the hospital when we had Sofia.

We got one of the rooms attached to the birthing pool, and the pool was already being filled for me, so that was great. Around 8am I was hooked up to the drip for my antibiotics for Group B Strep, which took about 20 minutes. By that time the pool had cooled down again, so there was quite a painful half hour of leaning on the bed with Jules massaging my lower back before I could get in. Also threw up a couple of times around this point - the hot cross bun and cup of tea at 7am seems to have been a mistake!

About that point the midwives swapped shifts and the new midwife did an exam and said I was about 5 or 6 cm dilated. Got into the pool about 9am, which was a relief for the first few minutes and then after that I was in so much pain that I really couldn't tell if the water was helping or not.

Jules and the midwife sat around the edge of the pool and made encouraging noises and the midwife said she would let me choose when to start pushing.

The next hour and a half is a bit of a blur - I threw up again and made quite a lot of noise. Then eventually I couldn't help pushing. I remember feeling a big bubble as the waters broke and then having to not push too hard so William's head would be born slowly.

Then I looked down and his head was out and you could see his dark hair floating in the water and a few minutes later (10.35am) he came out in a rush, looking tiny and kind of blue.

The midwife picked him up, unwrapped the cord from around his neck and gave him to me to hold while Jules cut the cord. He seemed absolutely tiny but started crying straight away.

Then the midwife helped me out of the pool and the placenta was delivered on the bed. My only thought was relief that it was all over at last.

After a bit William got cleaned up and weighed and had his Vitamin K shot. Jules and I got a cup of tea each and then we were moved upstairs to the postnatal ward because someone else wanted the room.

The paediatricians insisted that William be given a 48-hour course of antibiotics because he'd only got 2 hours coverage from my IV antibiotics during labour. I wasn't exactly thrilled to have to watch my new son have a canula put into the back of his hand on his first day out in the world but he was very brave and didn't cry, even though it took them two attempts to get it in.

Jules went home and came back with Sofia and Grandma about 5pm. We gave Sofia her present from William and she seemed excited to see him so it went quite well - no screams of outrage or running from the room.

Today we've basically had a quiet day at home. Jules and Sofia went to the farmers' market in the morning and Sofia and I took a very quick walk to the charity bin with my maternity jeans (yay! good riddance) in the afternoon.

Snow has been falling since about 5pm (stopped now) and there's a severe weather warning over Eastern England tonight and tomorrow - expecting up to 15cm of snow in some places. So it may well be a pretty quiet Monday too!