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April 2003: Last July I was pregnant with my second baby after a lovely home birth for the first baby. My birth plan for this baby would have read "same as last time please, only quicker", and that's how it was.
We hired a pool, and bought an exercise ball for me to use in labour, which was a great help.
Baby M was born on his due date, after a mostly uneventful pregnancy, with the only problem some sugar in one urine sample. Once it became clear that this was a one-off, we relaxed again, and I got my 3-year-old to draw me some lovely pictures to hang in the birthing room, and wrote myself some encouraging messages to read during labour and hung them up where I could see them from the birth pool.
As the first baby had been a few days early, by the evening before the due date, I was beginning to feel very impatient to meet this baby. I was glad when something "went". It was not like the waters breaking and I thought it might be a show. We rang our midwife who was very calm, and said it could still be days or weeks away, which calmed me down a bit and I went to bed.
At 2.00 a.m. I could not lie still and went to do some e-mailing, but I found that I kept being interrupted by contractions, and woke up my husband, as he had said he did not want to sleep through the early stages, but to share them. We watched funny videos, I leaned on the exercise ball, and we chatted and just enjoyed some quiet time together while things heated up.
By 6.00 a.m. I was ready to send my older one to my mother-in-law's, and she arrived at 6.30. My contractions stopped while we chatted, but started again once they had left.
We rang at our midwife at 7.00 a.m. and she arrived at 7.30, and to my huge disappointment I was only 2cm dilated. She got me in the pool and I tried to persuade her to go home, because I was feeling a complete fraud for calling her out so early, and the contractions had mostly stopped again. I was desperate to get out and be mobile, but she persuaded me to stay there for a while, and when I escaped I went mad up and down the stairs, and things started moving along nicely.
I don't really remember any timings in this birth, but I remember the midwife ringing our student midwife at one point to say "come quickly things are going fast", and I was really pleased about that. At this point the birthing ball was my best friend and I hugged it for ages, then decided to get back in the pool.
I think he could have been born at about 11.00 a.m. if I had carried on going, but a complete crisis of confidence hit me. I was worried by a "lip" in the cervix, and thought all kinds of negative thoughts about this and brought myself to a standstill. The 2 midwives quietly left me in the pool, where I worried my husband by asserting that I'd had enough and wasn't going to do any more.
However, things don't work that way, and the baby was keen to arrive, so things picked up again, after what seemed like a long pause. After just a couple of pushes he was born, at 11.50 a.m. His head was born in the water, but I stood up (this was not intentional, it must have been some instinct of keeping the baby out of the water), and stood for the rest of the birth. It felt like he had 20 elbows and was digging them all in as he came out.
My mother-in-law brought the 3 year-old back after a couple of hours, and he just beamed when he saw his brother.
If we have another, my birth plan will say "same again", and I'll maybe deliver the whole baby in the water! But mostly, I'll just plan for another Home Birth, because I feel my chance of a straightforward, natural birth is hugely increased by the choice of birthing at home, and that the experience for us as a couple and as a family could not be the same in a hospital.
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