Heres a bit of a personal post hopefully you’ll enjoy looking through the pictures and reading a little about our Home Birth experience

Here’s a brief story of the past 3 weeks with our newborn Daughter Olivia. From the very early stages of pregnancy we had planed to have a home birth, but when Anna started getting pains on the 15th February,  4 weeks early this ment we had little choice but to go into hospital for the delivery.
The home birth idea was something we were keen on as we didn’t have a great hospital experience with our firstborn, Alexander.  The decision was made mainly due to convenience and Anna feeling more relaxed in a familiar environment with all our home comforts available. We always viewed it as a best case scenario, if all was going well then we’d go with it, the slightest chance of complication we would go into Derriford Hospital without hesitation. Although there were no apparent complications in the beginning the fact that Olivia was 4 weeks early was enough for our Midwife to take that decision out of our hands and advise us to go to hospital which we did with out any second thoughts.

Although we didn’t have the planned home birth the level of care we recived being under The Jubilee Homebirth Team was exceptional. Anna had all her prenatal appointments at home, and we were allocated a Midwife who took care of everything throughout the whole process. Having that level of continuity made the whole birth a far better experience for all involved.

Although we had to go in to Derriford our midwife meet us there and took care of the whole deliver.  We were not given another midwife on arrival, so even though we didn’t have the home birth the level of care was a far better experience than before. The first time we had 2-3 different people  as the labour was extended over over  2 shifts and were kept in what was pretty much a store room for 10 hours before established labour began.

There were a few complications with the birth which made us glad we were in the hospital, but our midwife assured us that it would never have got to a stage at home and we would have been admitted long before Olivia failed to progress as expected.

Our advice to mums and dads to be would be opt for a home birth, even if you don’t manage to stay at home the care we received was second to none and we feel privileged to have had such a good caring midwife and also her back up Midwife who was on standby cover should our primary midwife not have be available.

We always wanted to try and document and photograph the experience as much as possible as memories fade………. This is what we got during the calmer moments of our first 3 weeks.