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Birth Story: Baby Harper


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14/10/2017

Congratulations to Tracy and James

"I wanted to let you know that we welcomed Harper Ruby Lay into the world on the Tuesday 18th July! We have survived the first 6 weeks – yahoo. Below is a little run down of how it all played out. 

I had a stretch and sweep on the Monday afternoon and was awake pretty much all Monday night with consistent cramps. I think I put the Calmbirth tracks on at about 3am when I was so annoyed with not being able to go to sleep. Little did I know that these were early signs of labour and my waters broke at about 6:45am on Tuesday morning. Contractions started ramping up after that and were about 4-5 mins apart straight away so we called Cabrini and they told us to come in so we arrived about 9am. I started doing the birth breathing as soon as my waters broke and I now understand what you mean by labour land!

I was put onto the monitoring machine when we arrived and by then I was having about three contractions every 10 mins. They couldn’t get a read on the baby so I was on the machine and therefore sitting in a chair for about an hour before we were moved into the birthing suite and could get more comfy. I still had to be on the machine for at least another half hour but I was able to be on all fours on the bed which was better than sitting in a chair. The midwife checked me for dilation around 11am and I was 4-5cm, to which she was surprised and thought I would only be 1cm. Probably because I wasn’t screaming in pain and was just super focused on my breathing. 

I moved from the bed to the shower and sat on a fit ball in there for what felt like 15 mins but James said was about 1.5 hrs and nearly flooded the birthing suite in the process as I was covering the plug hole with the fit ball! Oops! It was in here that I think I hit the crisis of confidence moment and with the contractions becoming so intense I realised that I didn’t need to be going through this pain and relief was available and called for an epidural. To James’ credit he did try to talk me out of it but I replied by telling him I knew what he was doing :-)  

Had the epi about 1pm and my OB came in to check me at around 2:30pm – I was fully dilated, ready to push. I couldn’t believe it! When I was in the shower my contractions felt like my body was pushing but I assumed that we were still many many hours away from meeting our baby.  

Harper was born at 3:55pm after over an hour of pushing and nothing will ever beat that feeling of when she was put onto my chest and we became a family of three. The whole labour and birth was such a good experience and one that totally exceeded all my expectations and I have you to thank for that! There was nothing traumatic about it which I am certainly preaching to anyone and everyone seeing as we only ever hear about people’s traumatic experiences. I do not know how I would’ve coped without the breathing [techniques], it was crucial to remaining calm and just letting my body do its thing."




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