Thanks everyone for your warm wishes and comments! 🙂

I am still beholding the beauty in my life even if most of the time it is with my eyes half open.

Serafina has been so alert these days with periods of long wakefulness. She loves to watch and listen to Autumn and Kesa.

She is really really quiet most of the time and content just to look around and listen to the rest of us. She is also nursing like crazy and we are enjoying co-sleeping and cuddling skin to skin. This is my favorite part about being a mother. These moments are so absolutely precious.

I had an amazing labor which was mostly spent at home and was very peaceful. When I woke up in the morning, I had a crampy feeling but we went for an hour long walk as usual and my contractions started around 10:00 am. I wanted to spend as little of my labor as possible in the hospital and didn’t leave our house until 5:15 pm Throughout the day I cleaned the house and read my book outside under our Willow tree. I took a few short walks down the block while Craig was busy making sure that we had everything ready in the van to leave when we needed to. I still wanted to make sure that I was far enough along before we left so that I wouldn’t have to spend too much time in the hospital but Craig and my mother were hoping that I would go to the hospital sooner than later in case this baby decided to come quickly. I guess that I was making everyone pretty nervous.

We arrived at the hospital just before 7:00pm after dropping off the girls with grandma and grandpa. When I arrived I was dilated 5cm. We walked the halls three times, for 15 minutes at a time and when they checked me again just after 8:00 pm I was 8 cm. They called the doctor to come and she decided to brake my water at 8:20 pm. From there things progressed quite rapidly and I was beginning to feel more pressure as her head began to move downward and I was dialated to a full 10 cm. At 8:54 pm our angel Serafina was born. It was completely drug free and natural. I feel such a great new respect for my body and am proud at how I was able to keep my focus through the contractions. I just kept meditating on how each pain was bringing me closer to meeting my baby and was impermanent. I pictured her moving down and preparing to come out, watching the pain as a wave that would come and go. It was a really amazing and powerful visualization. The whole staff of nurses was amazed at how calm I was. One nurse said how I was deceiving everyone because I was literally minutes from delivering but so calm that you couldn’t even have known that I was in labor at all. Even Craig was surprised when she came out in what seemed like one effortless push. Another nurse said to me afterwards that she could tell by looking at my birth experience that I was a great mom who loved her children and that she was amazed.

Before leaving for the hospital I had just finished the last pages of Larry Rosenberg’s book Breath by Breath The Liberating Art of Insight Meditation which I think was an amazing help for me for my labor and delivery. I love that book and will definitely be reading it again. Impermanence was my main focus and the fact that I was able to keep my focus on that made all the difference and kept me relaxed through each contraction.

I have had a very good recovery so far too with little bleeding. The hospital stay was also so amazing and peaceful. The nurses were so good with me during the labor and with taking the baby if we needed to rest at all. They even allowed Craig and I to go outside for walks around the hospital while they took care of her! So I was already up and walking for 25 minutes the next day. I feel so healthy and grateful for my health and how different this birthing experience was from my last two. I really believe that I had both my body and my mind in a very healthy state going in there and it made all the difference. When you hold no fear in your mind there is just peace. When I didn’t fight the pain, but just let it come and go, my body was able to do what it was made to do. I ate healthy throughout my pregnancy and kept active daily with natural forms of exercise like yoga, swimming and walking and in the end I got a beautiful healthy baby girl.

I am breastfeeding too which is going so so well. The public health nurse was here to weigh her yesterday and she has already gained 100 grams in just two days. So I am obviously producing enough milk on my vegan (and mostly fruitarian diet) and she is a healthy vegan baby. I mostly just crave fruit these days so I am listening to my body in regards to what to eat. In the hospital they had vegan meals for me but I also brought my banana walnut bread, carrot apple spice bread, almond cookies and no bake chocolate peanut butter coconut oaties to snack on. Craig was also always getting me fresh fruit and big salads. I am also drinking lots of water. I made some more banana walnut bread last night and some more almond cookies to snack on and have really mostly been eating fruit most of the day. I love nuts too because they provide amazing nutrition for breastfeeding. Last night we had fresh corn and beans from our garden too with dinner.

We have also been going for walks again all together! The big sisters got new bikes and I have been wearing Serafina in my moby baby wrap.

Life is amazing. I will try to keep up with blogging when I can. It helps me to stay focused on positivity as well. Love to you all! 🙂