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When did you realize you were really in labor?
At 02:30 I knew that something was happening, but I didn't need to know what exactly. Maybe my breech baby was turning, or it was false labor, or contractions had started. I asked myself at about 06:00 if this was labor or the beginning of a long process, and a piece-of-a-moment later my midwife (in my house) asked if I wanted to be checked (for cervical dilatation). She said maybe 8 centimeters (a white lie, as I was actually 9), and then we both knew that baby was coming very soon.
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What was the most challenging thing about going natural?
My midwife's professional body (College of Midwives) forbade home-births with breech presentations, so I had to birth in hospital. But the hospital asked us, in a meeting before hand, to go birth somewhere else because natural breech births were bad publicity when they went wrong. So the compromise was a hospital birth with two private midwives and the hospital staff monitoring the birth.
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newborn-in-blanket
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What was the most helpful thing you did to prepare for childbirth?
Hire a private midwife. I wish all women to have this option.
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What surprised you about your birth?
That the placenta did not come out naturally, as it had with my first child, so I needed an injection of hormones to finish the labor.
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Read Ina Mae's Guide to Childbirth (updated edition). Forget everything that you've ever seen in a movie or TV show where a crazed, pained, helpless woman gave birth hysterically (especially if something bad happened to her or the baby) - the screen is not real life! Ignore family and friends that think they have the right to tell you what to do - you're an adult, it's your baby, and it's your birth.
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What pain relief strategies worked best?
Breathing, quite room with no uninvited people, low light, freedom to move around, freedom to make noise, no one touching or probing me uninvited, knowing that birth is not always painful. I had a painless birth, except for the hormone shot used to get out the stuck placenta two hours after birth.
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How did it feel to hold your baby for the first time?
Calming.
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What did you name your baby, and why?
Casper, because he's a quarter Swedish and that's a popular name there for boys right now.
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What advice can you give to other mamas who want to go natural?
Read Ina Mae's Guide to Childbirth (updated edition). Forget everything that you've ever seen in a movie or TV show where a crazed, pained, helpless woman gave birth hysterically (especially if something bad happened to her or the baby) - the screen is not real life! Ignore family and friends that think they have the right to tell you what to do - you're an adult, it's your baby, and it's your birth.
