Party of Five

It has been quite a week! Baby number three arrived in remarkable circumstances at the beginning of the week. Born at home, a handful of millimetres away from where Piglet was born just over 7 years ago, baby Griffin entered the world in the middle of the night. On one hand it was the perfect birth, on the other it probably didn’t go exactly as expected!

We were so much more prepared for this birth than we had been for either of the first two, particularly motivated by the experiences of Dragon’s birth. Everything this time was geared up towards doing anything we could to absolutely maximise the chances of having a physiological birth with as little intervention as possible. My wife’s antenatal training (to do antenatal courses rather than receive them) combined with the hypnobirthing course we did and a huge amount of research meant that we were in a great position going into it. It helped that the pregnancy went very smoothly: the first trimester was really tough but medically there weren’t any worries which meant that we didn’t have to fight off consultants or push back against a wave of concerns or worries that needed to be managed.

We certainly achieved a physiological birth.

One of the steps we’d taken in order to help with our plans was to hire a doula. For those of you who haven’t heard the term before, a doula is a trained professional who helps expectant parents by giving emotional, physical and informational support before, during, and after birth. Doulas are not (generally) medically trained and do a completely different role to a midwife. The emphasis is very much on providing emotional support and motivation. Having a doula helped us in a handful of ways. I had found it quite difficult to know how best to look after my wife during Piglet’s home birth and was very keen to have more of a team for this birth. Also, we both wanted Piglet and Dragon to be there for the birth. At very least asleep upstairs if not actively involved. We didn’t want to ship them off to a grandparent/friend at the first signs of labour. But in order for that to work practically, I needed to be able to leave my wife in someone else’s capable hands or feel comfortable having someone else comfort the kids if they were finding it difficult. Having somebody with a wealth of experience of similar births also helped to give us confidence and reassurance in what we were choosing to do.

Kindly, our doula offered to loan us the birthing pool that they had so we received that a couple of weeks before the due date. Once we were up to 39 weeks, we decided to do a dry run (or wet run perhaps that should be) of filling it, jumping in as a family, and emptying it; just to make sure we had the right adaptors and that everything worked. The kids loved joining mum in the pool and it was actually very straightforward to inflate, fill, use and empty. I think psychologically, just having the pool up and ready was a material step towards feeling ready for the baby arriving. So much so that my wife started to have initial contractions later that night.

The contractions came and went throughout the night and across the next day. We abandoned our plan to lug a car’s worth of camping stuff to a storage site near our new house (part of the sequence of getting ready for the house move) and spent the first hour of the day carrying everything back up to the loft (having brought it all down the night before!). The contractions were still pretty mild/irregular but I didn’t fancy driving an hour away given they’d started. In general they ramped up as the day went on and we went on a walk to keep things moving. This served as quite a good calming family exercise until a cow charged at us and scared away all the oxytocin that my wife had been building up. (Oxytocin is a famously ‘shy’ hormone and disappears at the first sign of adrenaline). We expected that the contractions would probably ramp up as we got further into the evening, especially once the kids were asleep. Although even by adult bedtime they were still fairly far apart, even if getting more intense.

We’d been messaging our doula at regular intervals to keep her up to date and had given the midwife service a ‘heads up’ that labour had started. It was around midnight when we made the call to our doula to suggest she came to us. We didn’t think we were necessarily that close to birth (when we did time the contractions they were still 5-10 mins apart) but the level of intensity meant that if one of the kids woke, I’d feel bad having to leave my wife on her own to put them back to sleep. By the time the doula had arrived the contractions had been become pretty regular and we made the call to ask the midwives to come out.

We’d always been walking a bit of a tightrope with when to call the midwives out. We didn’t want to get them out too early and have my wife feeling too observed as we try and get towards active labour. But obviously if we leave it too late then they might not get here. As I write this, I realise that feeling ‘too observed’ might seem an odd thing to balance up against the risk of having the midwives come too late. All I can say is that it’s highly personal and for different people the risk/reward is very different. We learnt quite clearly from the first two births that my wife has an amazing ability to own the birthing process and allow herself to submit to it; but also that it’s quite fragile and in the wrong environment it can stagnate and lead to complications. As I said at the beginning, we were doing everything we could to lead to physiological birth.

My wife actually suggested that we should maybe call the midwives before the doula had arrived but while the contractions had been quite intense (all consuming by that point) the gaps between them were still up to 10 minutes apart. On top of that my wife was still incredibly lucid and communicative at this point and I had expected (based both on experience and research) her to be further lost to the process by the time we needed the midwives out.

As it turned out, as if I should have ever doubted it, my wife was right.

When I did call the midwives, there were some complications getting two to come out to us at the same time. There was even talk of us going to the hospital if they couldn’t come (something I knew even as they said it was probably already too late to achieve if we’d wanted to). Luckily just at the point that my wife started to ask to get into the pool (a sign that we were probably very close) we got a call from a midwife to say they were on their way to us.

Once my wife got into the pool, things started to speed up very quickly.

I had expected to be able to spot the moment of transition. This is a point in the labour when the uterus goes from gathering itself upwards away from the cervix and the baby’s head to starting to push down on the baby to deliver it out. This point is usually accompanied with a surge of adrenaline and is often the point at which mothers start to say things like they ‘can’t do it’ or asking for pain relief. In hindsight, I think for my wife it was her saying that she was tired. Not a phrase that comes with the alarm bells of other such transitions. As a result, by the time she was in the pool it was clear that she was starting to push and I realised quickly that we starting the stage of actually pushing the baby out. Our doula was a supreme calming influence at this point – helping to stop any of us panicking without actually doing anything practical to assist the birth (she isn’t there to actually do the delivery). The only guidance was to make sure that my wife kept her body in the pool (I later realised to avoid the baby taking its first breath before being fully delivered). Apart from that, my superhero of a wife delivered the baby entirely on her own with my only contribution to massage her arms and back and tell her that I loved her. The midwives arrived about 5 minutes after the baby had arrived with the baby already feeding.

On getting into the pool, the ‘noises’ had become notably louder. My son was the first to wake and I heard him walk along the corridor to the bathroom. As I went up to check on him, my daughter also woke up with a cry. My first thought was that I’d have two upset and scared children to tend to, on top of a rapidly progressing labour. In fact, Piglet’s first words to me were “don’t worry, Daddy, you go to mummy, I’ll get [Dragon]”. I don’t know that I’ve felt prouder! In the end Piglet and Dragon sat at the bottom of the stairs, cuddled up and watching on as I supported my wife. I don’t remember the exact sequence of things from there but Piglet was being very reassuring to Dragon telling her that it was just the contractions and that mummy was fine. Our doula also went between my wife and the kids, making sure all were ok.

I said in the previous paragraph that all I’d done was to massage my wife’s shoulders and while this is largely true, I’m actually very pleased with how well I managed to cope with the birth and provide the support I was needed to. Around a year ago, before Griffin was even on the cards, I’d had mild panic attacks just talking about Dragon’s birth or what we might do if we ever needed to go through it again. As I’ve talked about in Three’s a charm, I did a short course of talking therapy around acknowledging and addressing any trauma I had on the back of our experiences with Piglet. The hypnobirthing course also helped to understand the physiology of birth and what environment was important (from a hormonal as well as just psychological point of view) and our doula did a ‘3-step rewind’ on each of us separately to process any unresolved trauma. But mostly just having very frank conversations between us around what we wanted the birth to be like, drawing on our experiences, and discussing what my role is and should be were hugely helpful in making me an active contributor to the birth process rather than just a helpless observer (the role I had largely played previously). As such, without the midwives present and with two innocent children watching on, I was so pleased to be able to present a calm and collected persona and, in all honestly, not really as a mask! Clearly I deserve all the plaudits for a successful home birth!

One of the things that did surprise me a little was the length of time it took to deliver the placenta. I suspect a lot of people don’t even realise that this is a stage of physiological labour but it took quite a period of time after Griffin came out for this to happen. We had the synthetic oxytocin injection with Piglet which speeds this process up significantly and obviously missed it completely with Dragon’s c-section, but we’d decided to avoid the injection this time and it was probably an hour before it came away. Again, coming back to the fragility of oxytocin and the birthing process, it seems like it was possibly not a coincidence that delivering the placenta slowed down considerably from birthing the baby (which was very quick at the end) once there were two perfectly friendly and supportive but unknown midwives in the house. The placenta actually came in the end when my wife and I stepped away to the bathroom. Perhaps it was the privacy or perhaps it was the movement; we’ll never know.

The baby was born at 6lb 11oz making it the biggest of the three so far, but noticeably smaller than we’d believed it to be tracking from the development scans (which were pretty perfectly tracking along the 50th percentile). In fact, if we’d have know that baby was just below the 10th percentile prior to birth we would have faced a lot of resistance to have a home birth or even proceed to full term based on guidance for SGA (Small for Gestational Age) babies. I’m very glad that we didn’t have to fight against that during pregnancy but also that we got the happy, healthy ending that we did given that they were small.

Those first few days after the birth were surprisingly straightforward compared to the first weeks with the other two. Piglet had a tongue-tie which meant he really struggled to feed and lost quite a lot of weight by day 5. Dragon, on the other hand, was immediately hungry but with my wife recovering from the caesarian surgery the first days were difficult in a different way. Griffin has been incredibly calm and peaceful; feeding and sleeping on short happy cycles.

My wife has largely been following the concept of 5-5-5: 5 days in bed, 5 days on the bed and then 5 days near the bed. I.e. making a complete cocoon at first for just sleep and feeding and very slowly re-integrating into everyday life as mum and baby progress. It means that my wife can be awake as much of the night as she needs to be, catching up across the day based on how much Griffin sleeps. Piglet and Dragon have struggled with this a tiny bit, missing mum in the middle of the day (although by no means completely excluded from going to spend time with their new brother!). Perhaps more tellingly I feel like I’ve had a crash course in keeping everyone fed and entertained which I’ve found exhausting and rewarding in equal measure. There’s no doubt that my patience has not been there to the extent that I’d like it to be at times. Trying to persuade a 1-year-old that they need their nappy changing so they can go out for a nap as they get progressively more tired and cranky is quite the experience. I’ve been pretty involved in the day-to-day aspects of Piglet and Dragon’s lives so none of the experiences are novel. But just the relentlessness of it surprised me. When I’m at work, if I need a breather or 5 mins to clear my head; I just step away from my computer. But obviously you can’t really do that with kids! Having Dragon fast asleep in my arms because she woke too early from a nap while I type this is reward enough. I’ve probably never felt closer to my two oldest, and the occasional cuddle with Griffin too doesn’t go a miss.

This week hasn’t been without issue though. Heartbreakingly, the day after Griffin was born, we found out that the buyers of our house have pulled out; for reasons we don’t entirely understand. We’d done nearly all of the conveyancing so I genuinely thought we were just weeks away from exchanging and therefore not far from completing. It was like a punch to the solar plexus to realise that we need to start again, having now put the house on the market over a year ago! We’re fairly lucky in that the house we’d had an offer accepted on is being kept off the market for now but we will have to find a buyer quickly for that to remain the case. We’re having an open day at the house this weekend but that’s going to be a headache to get ready for with a 10 day old!

After such a big week, lets see what the next one holds!

Toodlepips x