For my first pregnancy my husband and I attended prenatal classes and learned about all sorts of things that never ended up being put to practice during actual labour. I do remember the teacher emphasizing that women didn't usually have their water break like in the movies - that in many cases women had to have their waters broken during labour or that even if it did break on its own it would usually be a trickle or small leak as opposed to a gush. That put my mind at ease.
Turned out however that my water did break on its own (two weeks early, might I add) and it did gush like in the movies and baby was born eleven hours later. Fortunately my water broke in the middle of the night when I was in the privacy of my own home and not earlier that afternoon when I was taking the crowded Dufferin bus. They would have had to burn my seat. I recall distinctly being woken up at 3am in a panic and calling out to Mike "Either my water just broke or I peed myself in bed!"
Fast forward to my second pregnancy when I was paranoid about my water breaking once baby had dropped at the 36-week mark. I started sitting on seat covers in the car while driving, or towels on the sofa while lounging. Late into my third trimester during my nesting phase I felt an urgency to reupholster all of our dining chairs (go figure). Once they were finished you can bet I wasn't going to chance an accident on the new fabric.
However this second time around I went into labour at 40 weeks without my water breaking which really threw me. I didn't know if my mild contractions were actually a sign of labour or not. I've heard that doctors/midwives will often break the waters during labour as a way to speed up the process. This was not necessary in my case because (as I wrote in my previous post Labour of Love) baby was delivered only two hours after arriving in hospital. In fact, my water didn't break at all until baby was already entering our world.
My husband described our newborn baby as looking like a bank robber when he was delivered. It's probably safe to say this isn't the image a mother has in her head of what her newborn will look like. His head and shoulders were encased in the amniotic sac which my midwife only broke open when the baby was half-way out. The membrane ended up clinging to his face like a mask which was then easily removed after birth. I have since read about how rare this situation is, to have a baby born "with a caul". Apparently it is more common for babies to be born "en caul", which is when the baby is still entirely encased in the amniotic sac after birth. That isn't intuitive to me as it seems like an even rarer occurrence to have the entire sac still in tact after birth. The reason is that premature (and hence smaller) babies account for many of the "en caul" births. According to Wikipedia babies born either with a caul or en caul account for fewer than 1 in 80,000 births. So it seems our little chub-chub is special in even more ways than I could have expected.
I found it so amusing to read about the superstitions surrounding caul births due to their rarity. In some cases people born with cauls were thought to have second sight, the ability to see what will happen in the future or what is happening in another place. The History section of Wikipedia is also a fun read so I thought I'd include it below:
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In medieval times the appearance of a caul on a newborn baby was seen as a sign of good luck. It was considered an omen that the child was destined for greatness.
Gathering the caul onto paper was considered an important tradition of childbirth: the midwife would rub a sheet of paper across the baby's head and face, pressing the material of the caul onto the paper. The caul would then be presented to the mother, to be kept as an heirloom. Some Early Modern European traditions linked caul birth to the ability to defend fertility and the harvest against the forces of evil, particularly witches and sorcerers.
Folklore developed suggesting that possession of a baby's caul would give its bearer good luck and protect that person from death by drowning. Cauls were therefore highly prized by sailors. Medieval women often sold these cauls to sailors for large sums of money; a caul was regarded as a valuable talisman.
Not all cultural beliefs about cauls are positive. In Romanian folklore, babies born with a caul are said to become vampires upon death.
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I noticed that that last point was missing its citation so clearly it can't be true ;)
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