A calm and positive home birth
The Birth Of Zachary
A calm and positive home birth
After having a lovely experience with our first baby in hospital following a wonderful Hypnobirthing course, we wanted to have a similar experience with our second baby, this time at home. We got in touch with the lovely Abby and arranged a refresher Hypnobirthing course at home and we are so pleased we did.
At 9 days over my ‘guess date’, my waters broke at 4am and I had one, tiny, little surge. I went back to sleep and felt nothing else until 10am when I started having one surge every 10 minutes. Wanting to stay as active as possible, our little family went to the local park for a walk and played on the swings and slides.
Our lovely, supportive midwife came to our home at 3pm to say hi and check I was doing ok. She advised me to keep active and that she would see me later when labour progressed. We headed back to the park with our daughter. We were able to have a lovely, personal family day, stopping every 10 minutes to breathe through each surge. Our daughter didn’t notice a thing.
Creating the birth environment
After putting our daughter to bed, the surges slowed right down until about 1am. We decided to fill the pool at this point in hope that labour would speed up a little. There was a mishap with hosepipe, so we ended up filling the birth pool using buckets of hot water from the tap. It was an amazing way to get things to progress.
Once in the pool, surges became more regular. I tried lots of different positions to see what worked best for me and found floating on my back, supported by my husband to be the most comfortable. Two lovely midwives joined us while our daughter was still asleep upstairs.
Baby Zachary arrives into the world
As baby’s arrival became more imminent, my daughter went to play with our neighbours. I’d had my first and only examination at 6am and was at 10cm dilated. As per my birth plan, there was no pressure to ‘push’ and baby naturally made it’s way down. I decided by around 9am that I was quite tired and wanted baby to arrive a little faster so gave him a little helping hand with a few pushes with every other surge.
Catching baby Zachary myself, and safely removing his cord from his neck, he was on my chest straight away with my husband's arms around both of us.
The midwives were so supportive throughout, discreetly listening to baby’s heartbeat using a water doppler, quietly telling me each time how happy and safe baby was. I felt so safe and cared for throughout labour and birth.
Immediately after Zachary was born, our midwife picked up Danny’s phone and took the most amazing, intimate and loving photos that we will forever treasure. (Maybe an idea to add to your birthday plan?).
A year on, Zachary is a chilled out little man, similar to his big sister, something we put down to a chilled out pregnancy full of relaxing, calm music and amazing affirmations.
