Hello all,

I want to share the wonderful news of the arrival of our daughter, Ava-Lucia, last weekend at Homerton Birthing centre. We are now at home getting to know each other. It is wonderful! I attach a couple of piccies taken a few hours after birth…

Our birthing day was fabulous but not how we had planned (lesson no. 1 from our new teacher- baby may have a different schedule!). So a shortish version of how Ava-Lucia came into the world…

We were ‘overdue’ and into our 41st week when our membranes released at 4 in the morning…mild contractions started but wore off towards the morning. Although you are meant to go straight to hospital to get your waters checked when they break, gabriel and I decided to continue with our day as planned and hoped that we would spontaneously go into active labour and deliver at home. So this meant that I attended an acupuncture appointment in the morning and the acupuncture lady aimed to give me a big boost to kick start my labour and get things moving. I knew the clock was ticking as the hospital like labour to get going within 24 hours of the membranes releasing…on the way back from the appointment, the contractions started up again (on the no. 48 bus!) and so all seemed to be moving in the right direction. We had an appointment with a homebirth midwife in the afternoon. She wasn’t sure if there was meconium in my waters so she advised us to go to hospital to get checked out. This was a bit of a shock as meconium in waters = no home birth ;-( Of course, we followed her advice.  

At the hospital they weren’t sure if there was meconium in the waters or not but wanted to stay on the safe side so wanted to monitor us closely…i.e. no prospect of a homebirth for us. We had to stay in hospital. As my waters had broken over 12 hours before, they also started talking about ‘augmentation’, ‘induction’ and all these  medical procedures that I truly wanted to avoid. After a few tears and some negotiation, the consultant gave us some time to ‘mobilize, mobilize, mobilze’ (what is this a military operation?!) to get our labour going naturally. All throughout this time, I was having regular contractions but Gabriel thinks that the doctors didn’t believe I was in active labour because I was just breathing through the surges and taking them calmly. As there was no space in the birthing centre, we were first located a room in the labour ward. This was a very medicalised environment, with bright lights and lots of machines. Very far from our imagined home environment. The midwife also wasn’t very sympathetic to our birth wishes. After a few hours of labouring, walking and bouncing on the ball, I was examined and it was revealed that I was still only 1cm dilated and hadn’t made any progress. My heart sank! The midwife started to talk of induction and drips etc and it seemed my worst fears for the labour were coming true….but we waited to discuss the situation with the doctors who came round to us a little while later. In the meantime, I continued to breathe through the surges, listening to nice music and focus on an opening flower! When the doctors arrived, they were absolutely wonderful and completely understanding of my birth wishes. As everything was fine with me and baby, they would give us another 6 hours in the birthing centre to get our labour going. I could have kissed them! It was such a relief. We were allocated a room and for the next 5 hours, I used the different aids in the birthing centre, my TENS machine (this was amazing), music, balloon breathing, and the affirmations (these were such an amazing source of strength and re-assurance during my labour) to get things going. To cut a long story short, I amazed the midwife by dilating in super fast time from 1cm to 8cm. No wonder the contractions were so painful! Gabriel had to further negotiate to get us a birthing pool (the concerns about meconium still loomed over us) but again, the consultants were wonderful and happy for us to go into the water. And so that’s what we did. The water was just so soothing and relaxing, and after a night of labouring, I could have fallen asleep in that pool. This meant that my surges began to slow down so we had to get out of the water occassionally to keep the momentum up. After a couple of hours, I was fully dilated (yey! what a moment that was) and could follow my body’s desire to push/ breathe down the baby.

It was at this stage that the tiredness, the slowing down of my contractions, my inpatience and the lack of encouragement from my midwife meant that I just wanted to get the baby out! I lost trust in my body to be able to breathe the baby down, couldn’t feel the contractions like before, and so followed the advice to push push push! This was really hard work and took a couple of hours before the baby arrived. Unfortunatly, she had done a big poo just before coming into the world so had to be cut from me straight away and cleaned up in a different room (followed by a bare chested daddy). This was quite dramatic and scary as a team of staff swarmed into our room and whisked her away. A few minutes later, she returned with her dad and we were given some time alone to bond and breast feed. This was a magical time (before I had to go to theatre for some stitches!)

So despite not having the home birth and ending a bit dramatically, our birthing day was wonderful. We felt that we were able to follow most of our birth wishes and are in awe of the little person that has arrived as a result.

We hope you are all well and enjoying parenthood,

karen, gabriel and ava-lucia

xxx