As I type this I stand at the edge of a new point in my life, a point that for a long time I thought that I would never reach, that it would never happen to me. For nine months I have nurtured and carried a child inside my womb, for nine months it often felt like he would never be here and that I would be pregnant for ever but now all of that is about to change. Sometime very soon I am going to be holding my first born child in my arms and my life as I know it now will never ever be the same again. I am excited, I am nervous, I am terrified that I am going to stuff up and screw him up in the process but when it comes down to it I know that I can and will be a good mother. In these last moments of the life where the only person that I have to really consider their needs is myself all I can think about it how much I look forward to holding my baby in my arms and and guiding him as he grows up and explores the world around him, I look forward to watching him discover new things and learn new skills and I look forward to the new challenges that being a mother will bring to my life.

I have now been in labour for three hours and i can say even at this point in time this early in that the contractions are already worse then I ever imagined they would be so early but so far I am coping and I am breathing through them. I know that each contraction has a purpose, that it is a healthy pain and that it means my little boy is on his way and that soon he will be here. I know that if they get bad enough that I can not handle them on my own that I am allowed to ask for pain releif and that if I need pain releif that I have not failed. My goal right now is to have as natural a birth as a can but over riding that the goal is to deleiver our child in the safest way we can for both him and I, if it means that i need help to cope with the pain then I will do what ever it is that I need to do.

Notes: This jouranl entry was made only half an hour before we decided we had to call our ride to the hospital as the pain was getting to be too hard to bare. We arrived at the hospital at 7pm and Samuel was born at 12.08am the following morning.