Birth story - Emma and baby Daisy

While pregnant with my second I listened to hypnobirthing tracks every night, attended pregnancy yoga and relaxation sessions which included some hypnobirthing and used the digital pack.

I had a really positive hospital water birth my son but this time desperately wanted a homebirth. We got the pool put the affirmation cards up around the house, then at 38 weeks we were told that due to many members of staff being on annual leave our homebirth was less likely depending on when we went into labour. This really caused me a lot of stress so I contacted AIMS and sought their guidance and spoke to my local head of midwifery who apologised for the stress this had caused and assured me I could have my homebirth even if she personally had to attend. Massive relief and I was excited about birth once again 😍

On my EDD I started having very gentle surges, hadn’t had my bloody show so just breathed through them when they came while looking after my eldest. Around 2pm I noticed they were every 5 mins or so but still very mild and no other signs of labour so carried on with the day but started timing them.

Surges were so irregular in length and frequency so I went to bed around 10:30pm but got up an hour later because I couldn’t move about when I was having the surges and I could feel my body tensing rather than relaxing. By this point surges were every 3-4 mins or so and lasting over a minute but I was still just breathing and swaying/rocking through them. I kept thinking back to my first birth and midwives saying that if I could just breathe through them then it wasn’t time to go into hospital because we were still a while off meeting baby.

I asked my husband to inflate and fill the pool just after midnight and then we noticed surges were 2 minutes apart and getting stronger but still completely manageable. We had our electric tealights around the room, dim lighting, calming music and aromatherapy diffuser on.

Around 00:45am we called the midwife at which point my waters went, the pool was still filling. The surges felt completely different all of a sudden and I told my husband that I thought our daughter was on her way and he told me to just listen to my body but didn’t think we were going to be able to get in the pool.

Standing up and leaning on the edge of the pool, I felt my body bear down and with my hands could feel the head and asked my husband to help hold her. Another surge later and I was sitting on the sofa holding our new baby!

Husband called the midwives back and told them she’d arrived and asked what we should do. My husband covered me and our daughter with towels, found a hat and switched off the running water filling the pool 🤣 The midwives were still waiting for their taxi and arrived at our house 20/30 mins after the birth.

After a long feed and lots of skin to skin in which time the cord was cut and I naturally birthed the placenta, the midwives weighed our little lady at 9lbs 3.5oz and checked her over. They were so amazing and supportive and I couldn’t have hoped for better support following birth.

It wasn’t the homebirth we had planned for (we didn’t get all the lovely calm labour photos or videos we’d hoped for, I didn’t get to eat all my favourite snacks I’d stocked up on) but thanks to all the hypnobirthing, it was so calm and I’m so happy that ultimately the only people in the room when Daisy was born were me and her daddy (our son slept through everything!) people keep talking to us about how “dramatic” it was that we had an unplanned freebirth but at no point did it feel dramatic in the slightest and a big part of that is thanks to Siobhan and the digital pack.