Birth Story Series: My third birth - 2026, part 3
As time passed, with one contraction after another, I started to feel like I should be seeing more results for the amount of effort I was putting in! The pushing phase with my first labour had been under 1.5 hours, and less than 30 minutes with my second, so I had kind of expected not more than half an hour or so this time. After a while Haylie suggested I could try moving into a lunge position…
Birth Story Series: My third birth - 2026, part 2
As Haylie was leaving home at 2:40 she messaged me to ask if contractions had started getting closer together, as she was trying to decide whether to call the second midwife yet or not. At that stage I told her they were mostly 3.5-4 minutes apart and lasting 50-70 seconds, although I had just had a spacing of 5 minutes, so there was still definitely some variation and irregularity. Dilation is rarely a perfectly linear process!
Birth Story Series: My third birth - 2026, part 1
At the end of pregnancy you just take one day at a time. Always knowing the birth could be any time, but also that you may still have a while to wait. That was how it was this time, in my longest pregnancy to date. But the day always comes in the end!
Birth Story Series: My second birth - 2024
As I was coming up to 41 weeks, I had a hospital appointment one morning with one of my midwives, since at that point they like to do a quick ultrasound to check there’s still plenty of amniotic fluid and also do a CTG on the baby to check all is good. That ended up going for quite a bit longer than we expected, so Simo ended up leaving me at the hospital, going home to get his mum and M and get changed for soccer, then they came and picked me up and we made it to his soccer game just in time! It was a great game; they thought the other team was significantly stronger but Simo’s team ended up winning 3-0! I got to chat with the wife of one of Simo’s teammates who is a midwife, and M had a great time playing with their little girl who’s nearly 3. We got back home 5:30ish, had something to eat, got M to bed, got everything wound down … and then about 8pm I started to have lower back pain…
Birth Story Series: My first birth - 2022, part 2
Simo came to see if I was OK. He’d heard my waters break and thought I’d vomited! I told him my waters had broken and he messaged Marianna who said she was on her way. This was shortly followed by the most incredible sensation of my body just taking over with a “pushing” contraction. I wasn’t prepared for it and it was so out of my control! I made some kind of noise through it and Simo came back. I realised by this time that I was never going to get the “longer gaps between contractions” that I'd been waiting for, and that now I was actually through active labour and transition already and into the pushing phase! I told Simo I hoped Marianna would arrive soon because I thought our baby would be born pretty soon!
Birth Story Series: My first birth - 2022, part 1
Setting the scene: My husband Simone and I live in the Italian countryside. I had support from a private midwife, Marianna, through my pregnancy with the goal of having a homebirth.
I was nearly 40 weeks pregnant, and one night I woke up at 1:30am to pee. I have no idea if I’d been dreaming, but I just had the clear thought in my head for no apparent reason “I’m going to go into labour today” (only I thought it in Italian, not English). I went back to bed and back to sleep.
He’s here!
So thankful for our baby’s safe arrival! I will share his birth story soon, but thought I would start a mini-series for my birth stories. So be on the lookout next week for part 1 of my birth story with my first baby!
42 Weeks Pregnant - will they let you go to 42 weeks?
Will they let you go to 42 weeks? Has the midwife told you what she wants to do if your baby isn’t born in the next couple of days? These are the kinds of questions that you get asked once you pass 41 weeks of pregnancy. And these are the kinds of questions that show how we’ve been conditioned to think that the hospital or medical care provider has the final word over a pregnant woman’s body.