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 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!
23 Weeks Pregnant - birth reflexes, aka, your body knows when to push!
I listen to The Great Birth Rebellion podcast regularly, and this week I listened to an episode I’d missed on birth reflexes. That was really fascinating, hearing the explanations and comparing with my experiences with my first two births.