48 hours

At this hour, two years ago, I had been at home in active labor for forty-eight hours. After spending the second 24 hours in bed trying to keep contractions minimal on my midwife's advice--she thought, correctly, that I needed to rest after the first day with no baby--labor kicked into high gear again.

Here is a funny labor story: we were trying to be super-prepared homebirthers, so we froze some Recharge to have Recharge ice chips. When my doula arrived, she got her stuff together to wipe my face with washcloths using ice cubes from our freezer. I thought the prickly-skin-on-your-cheeks-feeling was just a weird hormonal effect of labor until A. went looking for the Recharge cubes.