It is late. I can’t sleep. I’ve been blogging for a couple hours now while baking treats, and just wanted to write a little about Andrew, my second son and fourth child. Tomorow September 7th he will be nine years old. I have had quite a bit of time now to process through the various feelings and emotions tied to his birth.

Expecting Andy – giving Michelle a foot massage while Allison makes a face…
Some ironies for this Natural Mother; During my pregnancy I ate no refined sugar. I was a disciplined Vegan and ate no animal foods, and basically built this child on grains, beans, carrot juice and green leafy vegetables with an abundance of soy protein.
Want to know what Andy’s requests were for his birthday meals??? Bacon AND sausage for breakfast with donuts and hashbrowns. For supper, just one word: Steak. That’s it. Just Steak.
For his cake – Chocolate cake with icing, and for his fourth grade class? Chocolate brownies, homemade of course, with chocolate frosting. (I have never in my life made brownies with frosting, but I just ate one, and man they are GOOD!) I learned a long time ago, that this particular age group of children has an emotional need to be “just like the other kids”. No tofu surprise/grated carrot and zuchini muffins for his class!
Andys teacher informed his class that she “loved homemade birthday treats, and for the kids to ask for their moms to bring home baked goodies for the class”. I would have bought him a big sheet cake and/or store bought cupcakes if I could, but NO, he wanted Mom to make it to please his new teacher. So I have been baking all evening, and this afternoon my husband went to the store and purchased all the meat.
I am still mostly a vegetarian, and so to have to cook up all this fleshy food is rather nauseating to me, but I have promised the children that I will cook whatever they want on their birthday, and make them as gooey a cake as possible. So, three pounds of butter, twelve eggs, and ten CUPS of sugar later, here is what I came up with. (I did use freshly ground whole spelt as the flour though for both the brownies and the cake!)

Cake and brownies
and the meat…

Andy’s complete birth story is on the birth love web site, but I can’t link to it because it is a members only site. I don’t have the gumption to rewrite it now, the complete story is in my book A Mothers Journey, but I will take a few minutes to write some thoughts about this beloved son of ours.
The morning of his birth was a life changing moment for me personally. I had done my own prenatal care and was five weeks overdue. My husband had given me multiple priesthood blessings promising me that he would be born in the “due time of the Lord”. I held fast to those blessings during those sultry hot nights in late august when I was so big, and so ready for him to be born.
During the three hours of his labor, I felt the veil part and angels were in my bedroom while I danced him out. I felt that all of my life to that point had been in preparation for this one moment in time. A time to birth. I pushed him out in three painless contractions. And when I held him in my arms for the first time, I just marveled that he was really here, whole, beautiful….but not breathing. We could not get him to take a breath.
I could tell he was a large newborn, but did not know until a couple hours later that he was eleven pounds and twelve ounces with a fifteen inch head and 23 inches long.
Why wouldn’t he breathe? We prayed, Paul gave him a blessing, I tried a little CPR, and he was just so still. At that moment a scream started in my heart. “No, Father in Heaven, NO! Do NOT let this happen. Please let it be perfect…please don’t make me face them.” And then the whirlwind began. It’s like a dream in my memory. Paul dialed 9-11 and within minutes they started to arrive….

Andrew two days old at the hospital
Three and a half days of horrifying scrutiny, questions, mental torture, why, oh why did you give birth alone??? You had insurance??? If only YOU had come to US, none of THIS would have happened. You must be a gestational diabetic, nobody has a baby that big, whatever were you thinking? And it went on and on and on until I wanted to scream. But I didn’t, I stayed quiet and just quietly stuck up for myself and my son when it seemed appropriate to speak.

Andy on his blessing day – three weeks old
I believe I heard the words brain damaged home birth baby thirty times in those three days. Every doc and nurse at both hospitals reassuringly informed me that my oxegen deprived child would most likely be brain damaged.
I’ve spent the past nine years watching and waiting for the “damage” to appear. It never did. He is perfect. He is one of the nicest children I have ever personally known. He is thoughtful, kind, and ever since he could hold a crayon in his hands he has drawn me beautiful pictures of flowers, trees, the sun, with the words, “I love Mom” on them, which we proudly display on the fridge. I taught him how to read in our home school and by the age of six he was reading chapter books.
When he was about four, I asked him if he remembered his birth. I have learned that it is about this age that they start to forget. He told us, “when Mom came to the hospital to get me, she wanted to beat up the doctor”. Yes, that’s right, I did. That particular doctor, I asked that she be removed from the case, as she had done some unethical things, and I did not trust her. And it is true for a time I wanted to beat the snot out of her.
I have often pondered on the words of the nurse who moaned to me “if only you had come to US, none of this would have happened”. She is right, most likely I would have been induced three weeks before he was ready to be born, perhaps resulting in a C-section, and the thrill of giving birth in my own bedroom surrounded by angels and in the sanctity and purity of my own home would have been lost.

Andrew 6th birthday
Do I have any regrets about the way things went? Sure. If I could have prevented Andrew from being pummeled in the NICU for three days I would have, but I like to think that some of my efforts during those days lessened his time there, as they were talking about keeping him for a month, but when they could not find anything wrong with him they sent us home.
I kept asking everyone “Why are we here? What is wrong with him?” The first doc that I fired kept saying to me when I first showed up, “you have a very sick baby”. I thought as she said it, “I have a very drugged baby – but please, define sick”. I didn’t say that to her, she was the wrong type of doc to say something like that to, but I did say it to some others and in the end, they agreed and sent us home.
For a couple years I felt alot of guilt for what he experienced during his three days in the NICU. But you know what? I did the best I could. And I think he knows that. We had three wonderful years of on demand breastfeeding, and now he is growing up so fast, so tall, so full of life and love.

Paul with Andrew on his Baptism day
As the peacemaker in our home, he is simply a joy to have in our midst. It was worth every second of pregnancy misery, after birth medical trauma, and unending questioning by everyone in my life to know WHY I gave birth at home alone. I would do it all over again to have the blessing of him being a part of our family.
I figure we are at about the halfway mark of his time in our home. May these next nine years simply be more of the same, just enjoying his quiet, thoughful manners, and curious insights into how he views the world.

Jeff and Andy dress up 2002
This post is dedicated to all of you mothers who are on the fence in regards to UC birth. We mothers don’t have any guarantees in life. When Heavenly Father asked us to “walk by faith” during mortality, what that means is that we sometimes have to take a flying leap out into the darkness, and simply trust that the savior will be waiting with outstretched hands to catch us if our leap into the unknown sends us in the direction of the sharp rocks and briars of life.
Some would look at Andy’s birth and say it was a failure. Instead of thinking of the blood loss (My crit was 4.7 right after the birth)and the baby not breathing, what I remember is the sensation of being in a standing position while I pushed and how powerful it felt to be on my own two feet instead of on my back.
To feel the unfettered flow of pure spirit and love as he was born, and to grasp him in my own hands and pull him up into my arms. Although my triumph quickly melted into abject terror at the thought of having to transfer to the hospital at that moment, I will never forget the high of how it felt to give birth alone and in my own bedroom.
I need to sleep – but God bless the birthing mothers where ever they may be this night; at home, in the hospital, in the surgery wards, and in the recovery rooms, and Please God, bless the babies…
Jenny Hatch
UPDATE: September 7th

Andrew the morning of his ninth birthday, holding his chocolate cake!