Taj & Rish

We had a home birth which lasted 33 hours from when my waters broke at around 10pm on a Saturday. I told my hubby around an hour later once I was absolutely sure, following a false alarm a week earlier. He called our amazing doula, Mary-Anne, as well as the lovely midwife, Katie, who advised we take a kip. The surges at this point were far apart.

We woke up at around 7am the next morning and I noticed my mucus plug had released, which to Mary-Anne's delight, I sent numerous pictures of :). I used the Tens machine and attempted to monitor the surges; although, they were rather irregular. Mary-Anne arrived at around 2pm and was greeted with a rather quiet version of myself breathing through the surges. I locked myself away in the loo numerous times and even received an ice cream delivery whilst in there!

Katie arrived at 7pm when I was in the throes of the surges and the hubby began filling the pool. Katie examined the baby's position and because he was back to back we attempted to alter the position using the rebozo technique. This involves being on all fours as the midwife held either end of a scarf rolling it up and down my stomach. Soon after I had the urge to push and Mary-Anne had me doing lunges up and down the stairs. There was also a bizarre yoga type manoeuvre with my feet on a sofa and my hands on the floor.

Mary-Anne kindly made a really comforting and energy inducing cup of very sweet honey tea and fed me bags of popcorn whilst I took in the scent of clary sage. Once I'd been going for a while, the midwife offered to measure the 
dilation which came up to 9cm......12h

After a while, I think we'd reached transition stage, as we'd agreed to go hospital since it was taking a while. This is when Mary-Anne said we could beat them to it and asked for a tour of the house. We reached the nursery and thought what a great idea it would be to give birth there and as I pushed the baby's head crowned. At this point, we moved to the bedroom and I was close to having an episiotomy just as the baby was delivered - Monday at 7:30 am. There was no external tearing but just a minor internal tear which didn't require stitches. 

A massive thanks to Mary-Anne and Katie for all their help - I would do it all over again in a heartbeat x