The Birth Story of Noah Michael Franke | Cincinnati Birth Photographer

In typical motherhood fashion, it’s taken me way too long to sit down and write out Noah’s story of coming into the world. I know the longer it takes to write it down, the hazy-er it will become so I’ve forced myself to sit down to document as much of his story that I can remember.

On December 20th in the late evening around 8 pm, I started to experience pretty frequent contractions. They varied quite a bit in intensity but were pretty frequent at about 3-5 minutes apart. I wasn’t quite sure what to do and I wasn’t incredibly positive that this was true labor. At baseline, my uterus is pretty irritable so frequent Braxton hicks contractions are pretty par the course over here and they were something I’d been experiencing since I was 24 weeks.

After a couple of hours of these contractions (and a handful being fairly intense), Zach decided to call my mom to let her know things could potentially be happening. I was 37+5 weeks at that point and I delivered my first son, Leo, at 38+1 so it was possible I was in true labor. While he was on the phone with her I had a pretty intense contraction which then prompted my mom to say “yep, you’re going in, I’m coming over ” 😂.

So we gathered our things and got ready to go. My mom pulled up to the house a couple of minutes later and after much insistence & debate, I agreed to get in the car.

As we drove to the hospital the contractions seemed to subside a bit in intensity (still very frequent) so I peppered Zach with multiple insistences that we should just turn around and come home. Zach, in all his wisdom, stated there was nothing wrong with getting checked out. To my surprise, when I was checked into triage, I was 5cm dilated and Noah was nice and engaged. They admitted me and I made my way up to the labor & delivery unit to settle in.

Not much was changing so I continued to labor overnight into the morning hours. My water was still intact, so just as the evening before, the contractions continued to come frequently but varied in intensity. Around 10 am, my midwife came in to check me and I was only 6cm dilated. She stated he was right there, ready to go and once she broke my water, I’d be having a baby quickly thereafter. She mentioned getting my epidural prior to breaking my water would make things far more manageable pain-wise so we opted to get my epidural started.

Around 1030am, the anesthesiologist made his way into my room and started prepping. Zach quickly excused himself to grab a cup of coffee because watching the epidural process was definitely way harder on him than watching me give birth

My contractions continued to be pretty manageable, but frequent. They decided to admit me and I spent the entire night having contractions every 3-5 minutes varying in intensity. It was a long night to say the least. Come morning, I had progressed to 6 cm with some more thinning. My midwife came in and told me he was very low, engaged and ready to go. She said once she broke my water, I’d be having this baby. So we made the decision to go ahead with the epidural and then break my water to get things rolling.