Birth Plan
We’re up to that point. Baby #3 needs their own birth plan. I’m finally getting my head around the idea that we’re going to have 3 kids. Yes, one more kid than I have hands!
A lot of the focus over the last few months has been on getting ready for the arrival. From trying to find a home with enough space for a family of five, to being emotionally and practically ready to go through the process of birth again. As I touched upon in a previous blog (three’s a charm), I struggled with the process of Dragon’s birth and there’s frustration from both my wife and I about the way the pregnancy and preparation for the birth was handled. I certainly don’t hold any one person to blame, and I think everyone was acting in what they genuinely thought were our best interests, but it seems clear to me now that something has gone wrong in how we approach birth medically – at least in the UK.
When I look back to what we went through for Dragon: multiple scans and examinations, huge amounts of pressure to induce early, guilt-trip-based rather than evidence-based decision making, complete removal of control and perceived ability for my wife to deliver; it seems completely clear to me now that there was no way Dragon was ever going to arrive as the product of a physiological birth (i.e. natural and unaided vaginal birth). I don’t want to get too anti-medical and I appreciate that it’s a really difficult discussion area because when things do go wrong, even if very rarely, the weight of those consequences on both those specific parents but also the medical society more widely makes it very difficult to have a calm and reasonable conversation about whether the right decisions are being made. By its very nature, risk is an incredibly difficult concept for humans to evaluate. I am not in a position to comment on whether any individual case is being handled correctly, even as to whether the right decisions were made for Dragon; but from what I can understand, the levels of medical intervention during birth have increased hugely in even the last 20 years without the outcomes changing materially.
We are lucky in that baby #3 seems to be progressing well during pregnancy and so we are able to proceed without any particular concerns, unlike the headsize and weight issues flagged up around 20-weeks for Dragon. As such, we are looking forward to a VBAC. VBAC: a four letter acronym I’d probably never heard of a year ago, but one I hear so much now I almost forgot to explain what it means. VBAC stands for Vaginal Birth After Caesarean. In fact, what we plan to have is a HBAC: Home-Birth After Caesarean. This puts us ‘out of criteria’ as our midwife so delicately puts it so we’ve had to explain to various people why we want to have a home birth and that we’ve understood the risk associated with HBAC. The primary risk is the higher change of uterine-rupture – i.e. that the C-section scar is a weak point in the uterus; more so the sooner after the c-section that you have the next child. It is a higher chance, the evidence supports that. But actually it’s only a slightly higher chance given that there is a chance of uterine-rupture during any birth irrespective of previous c-sections or not. For us, the slightly elevated risks of an HBAC are easily outweighed by the chances of having a physiological birth which we believe is much more likely at home.
And so that is what we’re in the middle of preparing…
We have chosen to have a Doula support us for this birth. The hope is that this will give us some level of emotional support to create the perfect bubble for labour. Even as I plan to write the rest of this paragraph, I’m aware that it might sound a bit wishy-washy. Creating the ‘right environment’ has become of paramount importance to us, to the extent that I believe that it’s as important as any level of medical aspect of labour. We want an oxytocin-rich, low adrenalin environment to allow for one of the most primal aspects of human existence to happen naturally. For us personally as a family, this means privacy, autonomy, control, low lighting, low levels of noise but also to have our kids around and potentially even involved. Piglet is insistent that we wake him up when labour starts if it’s in the middle of the night.
We’ve also taken to watching quite a few positive birth videos. The kids get to watch relatively little TV – certainly Dragon – and so this is quite an occasion for them anyway; but they both really seem to enjoy understanding and learning about the process of birth and getting real context about what it looks like (and sounds like!) to deliver a baby. In all seriousness, they probably have a better idea of what to expect from a home birth than I did before Piglet was born! I found the birthing videos quite difficult at first and I still find them a little triggering. I don’t want my wife to have to go through such an intense experience. But at the same time, I have so much confidence in her (both her body and her mind) to be able to do it and I also know that, at least on some levels, she is genuinely looking forward to it. It is one of the most amazing experiences that any human ever gets to go through. I still pretty much cry every time the baby is finally delivered in all the birth videos and I know that that moment will be overwhelming again when it happens for us – in part exactly because of the intensity of the journey to get there. I try to think of it of akin to doing an extreme piece of exercise (a half-marathon is the closest I can get in my own experience). You put yourself through something intense and extreme and there are sensations you could choose to call pain, but actually its a wonderful and amazing thing to experience and the human body has ways of making it glorious and ecstatic when done well – with the finish line being made all the more worthwhile for the exertion to get there. But I do worry about how I will cope during the trickier parts of labour and hope that everything goes well.
In terms of getting ready for the arrival, the other big step is that we appear to have found a house to move into. We will be moving to Witney later in the year if all things go to plan. I’m very wary of calling it done until I’ve got the keys in my hand but we’ve found a house that we adore and I think will work really well for us a family. Plus we’ve accepted an offer on our house so it’s just the conveyancing and paperwork to go through over the coming months until we can know for certain. What it does mean is that we’ll probably be moving with a few-weeks-old baby which I’m sure will be fun!
The house ticks a lot of boxes for us. Naturally there are some sacrifices and compromises but if you’d have shown me this house at the start of the house hunting exercise; I’d have bitten your hand off! It’s modern so energy efficiency will be good – we’ve had enough of draughty victorian terraces and their astronomical fuel bills. But also just the prospect of being reliably warm in Winter is hugely appealing. It also has a large kitchen/dining/family room which was one of the main things we were looking for. I can’t tell you how excited I am to prepare meals and wash up while still being able to be with my kids as they play. Another little win I’m really looking forward to is just having a drive! The idea of reliably being able to park outside our house to unload food shopping/kids/bikes seems like a surreal luxury at the moment. I’ll be completely honest, Witney wasn’t really on our radar when we first started looking and it’s probably a slightly different type of location to what we’d originally discussed but I’ve really liked it from the small amounts of it we’ve seen and we’ve got family there which is always a bonus. It seems to have a lot of things going for it. I’ll miss living next to the Thames (although we’re arguably just moving an hour upstream) and the walks and countryside we can access from our door currently. But we’ll be near the Cotswolds and it’s hardly a sprawling metropolis so I’m sure we’ll find the outdoor spaces we need. All in all, I can’t wait to take this new blank canvas and make it home. Fingers crossed it all goes ahead smoothly.
On a slightly tangential (and tongue-in-cheek) level, the other baby prep I’ve made significant inroads towards is in making sure that we can all be suitably caffeinated when the baby arrives. My enthusiasm for home espresso making has not waned since lockdown and a set of Christmas presents based around coffee paraphernalia and a barista course have been subsequently topped up by a new coffee grinder and, eventually, the necessary replacement of our trusty Delonghi espresso machine that did about 13 years of solid work for us before packing up and heading off to the espresso machine vista in the sky. As a result, I am now a full-blown home-coffee enthusiast and, even if I do say so myself, able to make some pretty tasty drinks as a result. Certainly having a fully functional steam wand rather than the gallant effort of the Delonghi scrap metal auditionee means that I can quickly make a full set of coffees, babyccinos and hot chocolates for our weekend pancake traditions. I’m even making fairly good progress on my latte art although I’m never going to win any competitions. I’ll be honest: a major selling point of moving to Witney is that it has a fantastic coffee roasters! Not that I’d ever move house for something as trivial as that (!).
So as we get closer day by day to this baby joining us and making delighted big brothers and sisters of Piglet and Dragon, I feel like we’re getting closer to being in a good place for them to arrive into. A home with space feels so important right now but I can also feel the emotional space growing to welcome this baby into. I wasn’t, a few months ago, ready perhaps for this baby and certainly not ready to embrace welcoming it into this world. But I think I am now – or at least ready enough. And I’m certainly looking forward to it, even if with hints of trepidation. It’s funny – one of the aspects of hypnobirthing that sits least comfortably with me, just given my nature despite understanding what they’re designed to achieve, is positive affirmations. But actually, as I sit here in the dark with my daughter holding my elbow in her sleep, I have supreme confidence that my wife is going to be amazing at birthing our child – to the extent I’m pretty sure she could do it without any support if she needed to. She absolutely gets the sort of emotional and physiological state you have to get yourself into to be able to embrace the hormones and endorphins that guide you through what in effect is actually a very natural human and even animal process. So if I can write it here, I’m sure I can bring myself to tell her directly.
When it comes to a birth plan, we’ll need to work on the specifics, but actually all I really need it to say is how to create the best environment for my wife to do her thing. And then I just need to show her that I believe she can do it. And then make her a decaf latte once she has.
Toodlepips x