Giving birht without an epidural

It's been a while since I posted. Not much news to report. I'm 24 weeks and a day or two pregnant. Baby is much more active now, or at least I can feel her or him more. It's interesting to compare this pregnancy with when I was pregnant with Kaua. With this child, the kicks and movements are always felt down low and with Kaua it was always up high. I've heard or read somewhere that the kicks are usually the indication of where the baby's feet are, and everytime I had an ultrasound with Kaua, he was always head down, which explained why I always felt movement up high. I wonder if this means this baby is head up, and if so, i hope he or she turns eventually, and is not a breech baby. We've decided to give birth at the local hospital. It was just too expensive and difficult to plan to fly away to give birth, especially because of the unsure timing of when baby will come (who knows though, it is always a possibility). We've signed up for a local birthing class where hopefully we'll learn better techniques of how to help me cope with the pain so that i can last until I'm able to get what is called an "intrathecal." this is a procedure where pain medication is administered for labor, but it only lasts for two hours before it wears off. We are allowed to get it twice, so I'll have approximately 4 hours of pain free labor and will have to bear the rest of the pain on my own. My labor with Kaua lasted for quite a while, from about 2am till when he came out at 8:25pm that day....so about 18 hours....11 of which I was on epidural and about 4 of the preceding hours on morphine. (yes, i've come to realize that I've got a very low threshold for pain.) I am hoping that with this labor, because its my second it'll go quicker, especially since I wont have an epidural which apparently can slow down the labor process b/c I was essentially numb from the waist down (but boy was it such a blessing). But I am estimating at least a 12 hour labor (conservatively I hope), so I realize that I'll have to last at least 8 hours of drug free pain!! ugh! Other than the above, no progress on the choosing the name front. We've come up with several possibilities but none that have felt right nor have the meaning that we had when we came up with Kaua's name. I really want this child to also have a great story to his or her name and so far we haven't seem to found one that fits. I'm hoping that as the day draws nearer, something will inspire us and the perfectname (or names, since we will have to be prepared for either) will come to us. So far no belly pictures for this baby yet. Although this baby is very much loved and we're excited to have our family of 4, it's all so different because its my second. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that my days are filled with caring for kaua (who I must say is a HANDFUL) that I do not have time to dwell on this pregnancy like I was able to before. Being a mommy to a 16 month old is tough...and I've heard that it only gets tougher!!! Yikes!