Finding Balance: Wellness for the Everyday Struggle: Vaginal Birth Recovery

It's hard to imagine having two births more different, unless I suppose I'd managed to have a medicated homebirth, lol. As much as Jade's birth was painful and hard, it was nothing as compared to Legan's.

Snoozing in bed with a fresh baby

To spare SOME details, I'll just say that I only had two very small micro tears. Not worth mentioning. They stung like hell for about 24 hours, but totally faded away in less than 2 days. No joke.

Not 20 minutes after giving birth I was getting out of a tall birth pool. I was walking to the bed and to the bathroom.

Not an hour after, I showered. All by myself!

This isn't to say it was all peaches and cream, but seriously not in the same realm as the c section recovery.

I still had bleeding. I still had a goofy mushy tummy that was sore. I had to be careful how & where I sat down for a while, but maybe only a week, 10 days? General soreness wasn't really worse than from a Tough Mudder. In fact, my shoulder was the most sore in the immediate postpartum period, probably from hanging from Eric's arms to squat. But really, it just wasn't a huge issue.

Stairs for instance. Stairs were not hard. Getting up and down off the couch wasn't hard. Even off the f3.5 loor wasn't too bad. I made a point to not bend too much at the waist, and to rely heavily on my arms to help me get up. Not because I didn't feel capable, but because I was trying very very hard to not overdo it. You see, a friend of mine had a massive bleed 10 days postpartum, nearly ended up in the hospital, and was put back onto bedrest for a couple of weeks. I really really didn't want to end up in the hospital.

The first two days I tried to do nothing. For the next week and a half, I did my best to only travel up and down the stairs maybe 2-3 times per day, carefully do some laundry, and make time for Legan while changing a ton of Jade diapers and nursing her constantly. I tried to not even have to make food for 2 weeks, I wanted to heal.

Cozy girl

The most surprising part of recovery for me though was the inability to pick up my toddler for an extended time. I figured it would be a day or two, maybe a week.

Instead, my body asked me NOT to pick up Legan for nearly 4 weeks. I tried at maybe 10 days out to just hold him if he stood up on a chair first, and that was only ALMOST ok, but still led to extra bleeding every time. Trying to lower him back down into his crib, even if I didn't lift him, didn't hurt, but it led to enough extra blood that it concerned me. It was 3.5 ish weeks before it was ok.

Physically though, by 4 weeks I felt still a bit overly heavy but basically healed up, save for my pelvis separation. By 12 weeks, the pelvis felt as put together as it did a year after Legan's birth. So that was super exciting. My core started coming back together around 8 weeks. There's still a little muscle separation, but it's literally growing back together, it's going to be ok.

So while I at the time felt like recovery was super super slow, I remember now how at 12 weeks after Legan I still felt like a total invalid that was just forcing life to happen. Not at all true this time.

That all being said, while I functionally feel great (even though I'm still working on muscle building and probably around 10-15 lbs of fat to lose still - seriously gaining almost 50 lbs is really really rough!!!!!) I cosmetically am much much more rough than after Legan. Might have something to do with those extra pounds I put on. The skin of my belly is...in a word destroyed. But that's another story....