Beth's Birth, with photos

[Matangi]

The story of our newest family member’s happy home birth starts a week or two beforehand. I was expecting my baby to arrive a bit before 41 weeks, seeing as I have a longer than average menstrual cycle and both of my other children were a little “late”, so I wasn’t surprised to find myself at 40 weeks with no signs of impending labour and the baby’s head not engaged. At the end of the week, the contractions duly started off quite gently. Just as with my last baby, they were strong enough that they definitely weren’t just Braxton Hicks, but not strong enough that I really needed to concentrate on them much. I just noticed them and and was delighted that baby was on the way, as I felt very prepared for labour and birth.

I had a good day of prelabour, or possibly early labour (I’m not too good on the official definitions, who needs them?), until my slight accident that evening. I was running the bath for my children, and while I was twisting around and stretching, I sneezed an enormous sneeze. Suddenly, something snapped in my side and there was an excruciating pain in my ribs. For the next couple of days, I couldn’t move much, and it hurt like hell every time I coughed, talked above a whisper or even tried to take more than a very shallow breath. Having a slight cold, I was coughing all the time, so this wasn’t fun at all. K took time off to look after me and care for the children, but I was terrible mental state wondering how on earth I could birth my baby without being able to breath very well and being unable to move into any of my preferred labouring positions (the only way I could get semi-comfortable was flat on my back, which is of course the exact way I didn’t want to labour). I was also starting to wonder whether the baby was OK as labour had come to a complete standstill.

The next two days were fairly miserable, and the second night K ended up calling the ambulance in the early hours of the morning because I was having a panic attack and couldn’t breathe. That made me panic more, because I didn’t want to end up being carted off to hospital in case they found out I was “overdue” and wanted to extract the baby. However we discovered that my injury was nothing more than a damaged muscle, with the symptoms being exaggerated by my panicking. (My bp was about 170/90 when the ambos arrived and dropped to 135/80 after they had reassured me that there was nothing major the matter with me!) They were very kind and reassuring, but they were wrong about one thing. I was told that unfortunately my torn muscle wouldn’t recover much until after the birth, since the baby was putting so much pressure on me and I would have high levels of relaxin in my body. However after four days or so, I was feeling much better. It still hasn’t recovered 100% now, but it did improve a lot with rest, and it seems that my baby somehow knew and was simply waiting until I was physically up to labour.

So halfway through the next week, I was feeling a lot more positive (except for some niggling worries about things like whether my baby’s kicking conformed to expectations) and the contractions started up again. They were still quite gentle though, and it wasn’t until Thursday night that they had got strong enough to demand my full attention. They kept me awake for most of the night, but very considerately damped down for about two hours so I could get some sleep. By early Friday morning, I was starting to get restless and couldn’t deal with the contractions lying down. Eventually everyone else got up and we proceeded with our normal morning activities, with me stopping and breathing and talking to the baby through each contraction.

In spite of my best efforts to surrender and go with the flow, I still had a fixed idea in my mind about what constituted “real” established labour: I had decided that the contractions needed to be regularly spaced no more than five minutes apart before I could be sure that the baby was actually coming, and that would be the earliest time I might agree to phone my midwife. She had said she’d wait until we contacted her, as she was very conscious of not wanting to put me under any sort of pressure, but on the morning of the birth, she got a feeling that she really needed to phone and check how I was going. I told her that nothing much was happening, as the contractions were so irregular, some up to 8 or so minutes apart and some right on top of each other, and it might be a long time before baby is born. Famous last words!

Within five minutes of saying that nothing was happening, I went into transition very suddenly, with four or so extremely violent contractions right in a row, nausea, sweating, roaring and shouting my head off. According to my recollection I lucidly told K to phone the midwife back to let her know, get the pool ready and then help me to the toilet. According to K’s recollection I was incoherent and he could hardly work out what I wanted although he’d figured out the baby was coming sooner than I’d said! My clearest memory is of the other children’s comments:
M: Why is Mummy making those noises?
G: Oh, she’s going to squeeze the baby out.
M: Oh…
And they both went back to playing with their Lego (so much for the idea that children are traumatised by seeing their mother in labour).

Trying to crawl from the loungeroom to the toilet and bathroom while in transition really brought home to me how ridiculously long our hallway is! I crawled along, shouting at K to take off bits of my clothing because I was so hot and sweaty; it was like a bizarre alternative version of a Hollywood sex scene where the clothes get discarded one bit at a time on the way to the bedroom. Halfway there I felt the baby beginning to move down, but I could only think about trying to make it to the toilet. (Amazing, no matter how many times I’d read or heard that the pressure of baby’s head feels like a huge poo, it still gets me every time lol.)

As soon as I’d struggled onto the toilet, the pushing started, and I belatedly realised that, well, regardless of my ideas about spacing of contractions, the baby was coming right now. I’m not sure how long the pushing took, but I don’t think very long because it was only a few pushes and suddenly there was the head. There was me trying to hold the head and saying “don’t let my baby fall down the toilet, don’t let my baby fall down the toilet!” The baby wasn’t going to go down the toilet because I had somehow managed to stand up, but I was panicking because the head felt so slippery. K rushed in just in time to catch the baby as the shoulders and body emerged. His first – and most likely only – baby duhlivery. (Later on I said “look how far you’ve come: the first time around you said you wouldn’t even want to look so you were going to stay near my head, and now you catch babies!” His only comment was “I wasn’t planning to.” But I know he wouldn’t really have missed it for anything.)

My first thoughts after the birth were:
1. OMG, it’s a baby! My baby! The baby is actually here!
2. Why oh why didn’t I get into the bath sooner?
3. Oh crap, I only cleaned the toilet and the floor an hour ago

Seeing as the birthing pool – AKA our huge spa bath with padding and lining in it – was all ready, with the candles and aromatherapy going in the bathroom, it seemed like a good idea to hop in and get warm and relaxed while we waited for the placenta. Our baby had cried loudly and energetically at birth, which surprised me, as my other babies didn’t cry (at least we had no trouble ascertaining that the breathing was fine, though) but cuddles in the warm bath proved to be soothing. I think we tried some breastfeeding at this stage to see whether that might encourage the placenta along. After maybe 20 minutes we had a look and found that we had a little girl. At some point G and M wandered in to meet their new sibling and marvel over the tiny face and tiny hands.

I’m not sure how long we were in the bath, being in just-gave-birth timelessness, but it wasn’t long afterwards that our midwife arrived. When I’d had enough of relaxing in the bath, she suggested I try sitting on the toilet again, and after a few minutes our daughter’s placenta was born. Then we set me and baby up in a little nest in front of the fire and just hung out baby-gazing for the next few hours. The midwife stayed for four or five hours; in between observing me in a very low-key way and writing up her notes, she helped K wait on me, clean up and do the laundry. We decided not to do anything major to our baby straight after birth, so as well as not getting injections, she didn’t get weighed, measured or examined. It was obvious from looking at her that she didn’t have anything drastically wrong with her. She was content to lie in skin to skin contact with me, dozing between sucking at the breast.

We were undecided until the last minute about when (or whether) to cut the umbilical cord, so we just waited to see what felt right. I eventually asked K to cut it after about five hours. Once this had been done, she seemed to be completely here, and we felt it was time to decide on a name (after all, she couldn’t very well go through life being called Bellybaby). As with my other two children, the name that became apparent as the right one wasn’t exactly what we’d thought beforehand. We chose Beth for her everyday name, and Elizabeth Laura for her birth certificate (the Laura after one of her great-grandmothers).

I’m not sure whether this was my longest labour, being almost 8 days from the first contractions until the birth, or my shortest, since only the last 10 minutes or so was intense enough that I couldn’t keep pottering around and doing housework in between contractions! But ultimately it doesn’t matter, because not fitting into nice neat categories and timings is all part of the uniqueness and unpredictability of a natural labour and birth where everything happens just as it needs to. It wasn’t what I expected, but it was still a joyous birth. I feel incredibly lucky that we had the knowledge and support to stay at home and let it unfold.

[The Morrigan]

That's just so lovely

[Astarte]

*sniff*
Beautiful!

xxoo
Sarah

[Blossomtime]

Oh Is, how beautiful!! What a precious thing Beth is! So much love to you all

[Blossomtime]

Did I mention CLUCK!!!

[Melaleuca]

Yummo, she is beautiful! And what a great read your story was. Thanks for sharing it. Enjoy that precious bundle!

[Ratis]

Cluck cluck cluck.
What a gorgeous little womyn! I love G and M's reaction too, back to the lego!

[korahblue]

Lovely to read, congratulations to you and yours.

[aeracura]

aww thats so lovely, huge congrats to you and your family. Thankyou for sharing those precious pics

[Mahilaa]

Congratulations and thanks for sharing your daughter's birth with us! The gorgeous photos just make me so clucky....
Enjoy your babymoon!