{Birth Story} : Where I was Born Serie Project | Xenica
The last homebirth story of 2024 told by Xenica:
Falling pregnant with a second child, coincided with us buying our first house and moving from the northern Beaches to the Central Coast. having had a positive physiological birth experience with my first daughter with a Midwifery continuity of care program, and also working as a midwife, i knew that i was going to engage with midwifery care for this pregnancy aswell. Now that we had our home, cozy and nestled amongst the trees and waterways, our dreams of a beautiful, undisturbed home birth could be bought to life.
Pregnancy was beautiful and uneventful, and subtle signs of my body preparing for labour started at about 38 weeks. The days passed, and then the weeks, and quickly we passed the gestation that’s my daughter was born at, and then surely enough passed the 40 week mark. We knew that the dates meant nothing, but something in me wasn’t prepared to be more pregnant than i had been the first time. In the four days that followed the date we guessed baby might be due we decided to stop all the things we had been doing in an attempt to bring labour on (curb walking, tea, hand expressing), and decided to just surrender to the process. On Friday morning i woke up still pregnant and we dropped Violet off at daycare and came home to have a coffee before matt started work in the home office. I decided it was probably time to inflate the birth pool, just so we would be ready to go when ever things started to happen.
I then had a shower, and rested my head on my pillow, and had a bit of an emotional release, trying to come to terms with the fact i might not meet my baby for another week. The tears turned into sleep, and shortly after i woke up to a painless tightening which i thought was a braxton hick (i had been having consistent braxton hicks for weeks). I kept my eyes closed, making the most of the unusual quiet which came with a toddler at daycare. Soon after, i felt another tightening, followed by another. i decided to stay in bed and time these tightenings, soon realising that they were about 5 minutes apart. by this stage it was about 11:50, i waited for matt to get off his work call and let him know that maybe things were starting to happen and that it was probably time to start unraveling our lights and setting up the birth space. The tightenings remained consistent, some making me stop what i was doing. I found relief in grounding my feet, feeling the floorboards, and transferring my weight from one foot to the other.
I decided to call my midwife, just to let her know that things were possibly starting to happen at 12:35, with the knowledge that my first labour was quick, so this may be even quicker. We were on the phone for 3 minutes, and in that time i had one tightening that wasn’t too uncomfortable, and started to doubt that things were actually happening. We agreed that i would call back if things progressed and figured we would probably see each other was the sun started to go down. As soon as i hung up the phone a contraction started, and built to a peak that none of the previous ones had. I decided that i needed to put on the tens machine, and asked matt to please hurry with setting up the pool. I was quickly unable to tell wether i was having a contraction or not, and found myself in the bathroom, asking matt to abandon the fairy lights and help me call the midwife back. Within seconds i felt a release and my waters ruptured below me at 12:49. I instinctively put my fingers at my vagina and was able to feel the hair on my baby’s head.
We called back the midwife and let her know what was happening, she was still a drive away, and we all knew that this baby wasn’t going to wait for anyone. In the calm, quiet bathroom, with the afternoon sun streaming through the window and a chorus of cicadas as the background noise, i asked matt to get some towels and get ready to catch our baby. After breathing their head out slowly, Matt received his body and passed him onto my chest. With a gentle tickle on the back and some cool air on the face, he soon let us hear his voice, and we discovered we had a baby boy at 12:57.
One of the midwives arrived shortly after, and we walked from the bathroom, past the half strung fairy lights and empty pool to the couch, where we remained until my primary midwife arrived to meet our cheeky boy who made us wait, and the couldn’t wait. We fed, cuddled, did his weights and measurements all in our living room. We discovered our little boy was not so little (3.9kg), and Matt and I debriefed about was a magical privilege it is be the first person to touch a new life, as he gained a newfound appreciation for the midwifery profession. Matt picked up Violet from daycare, the midwives left, and me and baby Llewyn were left alone to soak in the skin to skin and oxytocin, a slow start to our busy life as four.
