Jorja

Home Birth

It all started on the 22nd March 2021 at our antenatal visit with our lovely midwife. I was given the magazine 'Tummy talk' for some light reading and it was that afternoon I got home and decided to flick through it. I read a couple of pages and thought to myself 'why has a home birth not crossed my mind' so I kept reading. I said to my partner "I want a home birth, what do you think" he was really supportive of the idea so when I next spoke to our midwife and mentioned we wanted a homebirth I could hear in her voice she was ecstatic - this made me feel super confident about our decision.

I woke up on the 10th May 2021 (6 days before my due date) and went toilet, there it was - my "bloody show" well the start of it anyway. Yay!! We had our last antenatal appt booked that morning and she said to expect things to start happening soon.

That evening came round and I started getting slight contractions, things started getting more frequent around midnight so we called our midwife. She came to check on me. I was 4cm dilated but i was only having about 2 contractions in the space of a 10min interval. Sheryl went home and came back at 2am when contractions were happening 4 times in the duration of 10mins. Lars (my partner) put some relaxing music on and had a fire burning from a YouTube channel on the TV to create a nice ambience. Lars set up the birthing pool and I got in, this seemed to slow my contraction intervals down but boy were they intense.

My waters broke while I was in the pool and I didn't even feel it happening. We could all see vernix in the pool, I felt like I was in a pool mixed with some kind of oil as it made my skin super soft.

I laboured in the pool for 4.5hours with a couple of breaks to sit on the toilet.

Our midwife's partner arrived just before 5am.

I think after about half an hour of being in the pool I got out of the pool and lay on the floor. We had a tarp and lots of cushions and towels down. 27mins of pushing and we got our beautiful little girl. Lars got to tie the muka and cut the cord and by 7.25am our boys were in to meet their new baby sister. I felt great, and so empowered and in love!

We were in home in our own comfort. We had peanut butter toast and a drink and I had a shower and was then tucked up onto the sofa with our baby girl.

The whole experience as a first time mum was amazing and I would do the whole lot again.