Only you know your body best—the lesson I learned the hard way (twice!) in the hard labour of childbirth.
We wouldn’t be a new mom podcast if we didn’t take the time to tell our birth stories. In this episode, Kasandra shares her two very different experiences: birthing under the care of an OB-GYN in a California hospital, and at home with a midwife in Alberta, Canada.
In this episode, we talk about:
- The rare condition that made Kasandra change from planning a home birth to a hospital birth
- Having the support of both an OB-GYN and a midwife, and what roles they played
- Using an age-old midwife at-home “labour encouragement” technique—how it worked for me, and what I’d do differently next time
- What happens in labour that your birth prep course will NOT prepare you for
- Trying to describe the feeling of meeting your baby for the first time
- How having really painful periods influenced my approach to pain management in labour
- Energy changes and “staying in the zone” while going from home to hospital
- Knowing you’ll have your baby that day—what I did to prepare mentally, physically, emotionally, and to set up my space
- Hypnobirthing—and what I found helpful from the approach
- Feeling like your reserves are empty for birth, and what I did to fill them up again
- My home birth setup
- The yoga practice that helped me prepare for birth
- The feeling of self-doubt about my birth’s progression, and what helped me overcome it
- Partner support for the second birth—what was different the second time around
References:
*Correction: In this episode, Kasandra said midwives let you go "40 + 2 days". That's incorrect. In our experience, midwives in Alberta may let you go up a max of 42 weeks (40+14).
A gentle reminder: we are not medical professionals and this is not medical advice—just our experiences.
