03. May
A Calmbirth® couple story.
Ray and I are excited to announce that we have welcomed our baby into the world.
He came 8 days early which was a big surprise to us. My mum had flown down for the birth and literally arrived 2.5 hours before my waters broke on Monday night at 10pm. What luck!
We went into action setting up the pool (not filling it through), the oils, the prayer flags etc.
Then we realised contractions were mild enough to sleep through, and were 6 minutes apart, so we went to bed around midnight (which was hard because I was actually in quite an excited/nervous space).
We both slept through until around 2am at which time I was woken by bigger contractions/waves/surges.
Ray and I did some breathing through them and lots of “horse lips” out breathes to keep the cervix loose. These were 2.5 minutes apart and lasting a minute but were bearable. My mum got up and read some affirmations to me during these waves and it really helped. I focussed on those. She also rubbed my back while Ray filled up the pool. She did nice big circular motions from the lower to middle back and that was perfect for me.
The surges kept coming at 2 minute -2.5 minute intervals so at 4am I jumped in the pool and the midwife arrived.
The pool was a good relief…..however…… I stayed in it for 2 hours and the surges got very strong. I could feel the baby moving down. I also felt sick so I was sure I was in transition. So I kept waiting and waiting for the push urge which didnt come. Then the waves got more intense and i felt like I couldn’t escape them and was feeling a bit frustrated as I expected to feel his head by now but couldn’t. I had some decent breaks in between these and sometimes the break went for 3-4 minutes as which time i was definitely floating away into my own world of happiness. But every time a wage came it was very strong.
My midwife recognised I need to move positions to progress but I wasn’t being very cooperative when she suggested doing so, so she got clever and told me to get up and go to the toilet to do a wee because I hadn’t done one in 2 hours and had drank a lot of water. It was about 6.30am (on 1st May) by now.
So I very slowly stumbled my way to the bathroom and thank god I did because I sat on the loo and almost instantly my body began to push. What a relief!!! I was so happy to know I was finally entering the second stage after feeling for so long like I was in transition. This feeling also came with some slight nerves about “now I really have to push the baby out after all I’ve been through!”
My body did about 5-7 nice big pushes (at times I joined in but the body knew what it was doing) and I could feel the baby moving down. The midwife left us alone but came in when I said I think his head was crowning. She told me to stand up and I did that and hung from the overhead towel rail and put my foot up on a birth stool to get a bit of opening up happening. I felt another nice strong push (these didn’t seem to hurt after the first stage of labouring), and his head started to crown and although I felt nervous inside I really did just listen to our midwife who told me exactly when to push and when to relax. I noticed she almost never told me to push unless my body wanted to. His head crowned and it really wasn’t that bad. Our mums were there giving us commentary about what they could see. They could see his head was mostly out and i was so relieved as I knew I wasn’t in much pain at this point and things were about to end. So I just stood there and breathed and looked down at him. I could see the rest of his head come out and he started to blow bubbles, so cute!
Then the midwife told me to push the rest of his body out and I did that and he came out fairly easily after a bit of maneuvering his shoulders. His hand had been against his face which had made it slightly harder but I didn’t notice and I didn’t tear luckily.
The midwife tried to get RAy or I to catch him but we were both feeling like we wanted her to, so she did.
She put him straight into my arms and we talked to him and rubbed his belly and he made some gurgling noises and everything was good. Except the midwife noticed that his chord had broken all by itself on his way out so she immediately clamped it. She had only seen this twice in all her many years of doing birth so she was surprised but calm about this. This hasn’t affected the baby even though we weren’t able to let him have all his beautiful chord blood.
He weighed 7.17 pounds or 3.250kgs and we went straight to bed and did skin to skin. The midwives and our mums brought us food and drink while we sat in bed with our baby. We saw he was a boy and named him Arthur Browning Crowley. He latched within the first 30-40 minutes and had a great latch so things are going well.
The placenta was delivered naturally within 15-20 minutes and we had no excess bleeding, tearing or need for any drugs or vitamins or fluids other than what we eat.
We absolutely love him. We’ve done skin to skin for 24 hours now and we will start to dress him today.
We found that the calm birth prep really helped- especially the breathing. I had all the oils ready but didn’t end up using them much. I was so pre-occupied with what was in my head. But the fact that we felt so educated about what was happening during each stage made us feel really in control and able to surrender to the process.
Oh and my only tip is that the midwife told me i could have hit the second stage earlier if i had just moved a bit earlier into a better position. So if you feel that the first stage should be over and you don’t feel the second then get up and do something different. I wish I had, then I could have knocked an hour off my already short labour 🙂
Lucy.