Before we become pregnant many of us believe that we will choose a hospital birth as many of our friends do and that is just what we know. However, after taking hypnobirthing classes we begin to see the many different options available for birth environment and how important the environment can be to the birth that we have.

I love that Azalia and Mike were inspired to find out more about birthing with a home birth team following our day course and that they went on and did just that. I think that their photo speaks a thousand words 💗. So, over to Azalia…

You may remember me and my partner Mike from your January Hypnobirthing session.

I’d just like to update you on how the birth went - our baby girl was born at the end of February.

Relatively late on in the process we decided to have a home birth which I’m glad to say went to plan. Given that I wanted to have a birth with no medical interventions, this seemed like the best approach and I was inspired in your session to explore this further after the information that you shared about better outcomes for women intending to have Home Births. Also I remembered another couple in the class said they were planning a home birth and I had a pang of jealousy!

So I rented a birth pool online and had a home assessment. My waters broke on Monday and there was some discussion of induction which I was very keen to avoid, so we went home and tried every possible thing to get labour started. I woke about 1am the next morning with reasonably strong contractions. This escalated through the day with some speeding up / slowing down, until the midwife finally said I could get into the pool around 7pm. She was born at 8.11pm. I was low on energy as I'd had only 2 hours sleep and couldn’t keep food down during the day. It was really exhilarating to do it naturally, feel the full process and in our own environment. I felt like an absolute warrior for days afterwards and would say it went as well as I could have imagined. I used the breathing techniques, affirmations and various positions through the day (although the visualisations didn’t really work for me psychologically!). 

Thanks again for the session which had a big impact on our journey.