3 Ways I Prepared For My Third Birth and How It *Actually* Went

We welcomed a precious baby boy into the world this past week & we are absolutely smitten with him! After a series of wild & not-so-fortunate events, some things did and did not go according to “plan” regarding his delivery. But at the end of it all we had a health baby boy and we are SO grateful!!! I love stories about all things birth, so today I thought I’d share a few ways I had prepared for this go-round and how things actually went.

Making a Birth Plan

I’ve heard several people say that birth plans aren’t necessary because so much of what happens during birth is out of your control. But, I beg to differ. We plan for matters to us, we plan for the most important days of our lives! When you get married, for example, you plan for what you hope to happen - let’s say you plan a beautiful ceremony outdoors in an open field, because that’s what you want & it matters to you! It doesn’t mean you don’t have a plan B for if it rains or that you can’t still be satisfied with plan B if it comes to that! But to not plan at all would be silly.

It’s the same with birth. You make your plans (or “preferences” may be an even better way to say it), you inform yourself on other possibilities of what could happen, you hope for the best, & you adjust as you need to!

Informing yourself on all the possibilities & knowledge you can will help inform your preferences & make it a little bit easier to adjust your expectations if things don’t go as planned. I purposefully tried to listen to - positive only - stories of all different kinds of births this time around to widen my perspective & keep me open-minded. Positive natural birth, cesarean, induction, at home, in the hospital, v-back, etc! Listening to these stories helped me prep for all of the possible ways birth could go NOT according to plan. I loved the Nurture Nest Hypnobirthing podcast if you want a good one to listen to!

Planning for my Third Birth

While this wasn’t my first labor & delivery, I really wanted to refresh my memory about how my body works during labor & get some practical tools to use to make my birth a positive experience. Plus, it’s amazing what I can forget over time! My brain often holds onto the info it needs for a season & then lets it go when it’s no longer needed! Especially in motherhood. Can anyone relate? 🤪

I had two relatively unmedicated births in the hospital with our girls (you can read Wylden’s birth story here and Rivers birth story here if you’re curious) and my goal was to have a similar unmedicated experience again this time, but more specifically, my goal with my third labor & delivery was to stay mentally strong, positive, & calm as much as possible through the very end. (Easier said than done, or course!) But I think SO much of our labor is mental. Our minds lead & our bodies follow.

Taking a Birthing Course

I decided to take an online birthing course to refresh my understanding of labor & delivery & get some practical mental tools to help me work through it. I ended up taking The Nurture Nest Essentials Hypnobirthing Course, led by Claire from England, and I was so so glad I did! I definitely recommend her course if you’re looking for an online, time-efficient option. She also leads small group and 1:1 live coaching, too.

3 ways I Prepared for Labor & How it Actually Went

I’m going to share some of the most impactful ways I prepared for labor this time around. Keep in mind, I am no doctor & the way I explain things are definitely in layman’s terms as I have understood them. But if you are preparing for a labor & delivery of your own, I hope what I share will encourage you and maybe make you curious to learn more for yourself, too!

Fear + Tension = Pain. Acceptance + Relaxation = Positivity.

The more fear & tension we experience during labor, the more it exasperates the pain we feel. And on the flip side, the more calm & relaxed we stay during labor, the more we’re able to enjoy it. It can be either a vicious or wonderful cycle. There is so much power in our minds to impact what our bodies experience physiologically.

The biological explanation of this really helped me understand that.

Our bodies needs endorphins & oxytocin to help manage our pain & help our bodies work most efficiently during labor to deliver our babies. Oxytocin is released in larger amounts in our body when we are calm & relaxed. But, when we are feeling fearful & tense, our body begins to release adrenaline, our body’s fight or flight response. The release of adrenaline sends blood to our critical body parts for fight or flight (limbs, heart, lungs, etc.) instead of sending it to our uterus where the work of labor is being done. And, oxytocin and adrenaline cannot be released at the same time.

Understanding how these hormones work in our body made me realize the importance of staying mentally positive, calm, & in control. It also helped narrow my goals for labor even further - I want more calm, more oxytocin, more enjoyment of labor.

How it Actually Went

At almost a week past my due date, I was feeling very eager & excited to meet our baby boy! But, labor did not start the way I had hoped for. I unfortunately caught the stomach bug - & quite violently. 😬

After hours of vomiting and all the other lovely things that come with a stomach virus, I felt contractions starting. Nooo. I prayed to God that I wouldn’t go into labor in such a vulnerable, dehydrated, & weak state. But ready or not, it was happening. And all the while, my husband & 4-year-old were starting to get sick in the middle of the night too… it was a MESS.

My goal of staying mentally positive had flown out the window at the start - I felt panic setting in, wondering how I’d be able to labor well while feeling so exhausted & sick & with my husband/birth partner feeling the same.

But, thanks to my husband & mama’s encouragement & anti-nausea medicine & fluids at the hospital, God truly helped sustain me and help me get back to a better mental place.

I focused on two main ideas while trying to stay positive:

No matter how this all goes, I get to meet my baby soon!

&

I can do anything for one minute.

So, did I stay calm & positive 100% from start to finish? Definitely not, but I was able to take back control of my mind, off and on along the way, which did impact the way I experienced the pain of labor for the better!

Understanding the Stages of Labor

Even if you never take a birthing course, if you at least look up the stages of labor & learn what your body is doing when giving birth, this information alone will help you immensely! Knowledge = power! Here’s a 12-minute podcast that describes the different stages.

The biggest takeaway that stuck with me this time in regards to the progression of labor was what happens during transition.

Transition is the stage of labor that comes usually when you’re progressing from around 7-10 centimeters in dilation and things are really ramping up before you start pushing. Contractions become more intense & closer together. Your body gets a rush of adrenaline to prepare you for the pushing ahead, but that can often also lead to the feeling of “I can’t do this.”

How It Actually Went

Knowing about the transition stage really helped me push through the final 30 minutes of my labor. When I felt my contractions getting more intense & felt myself emotionally wanting to give up, I knew that meant that we were close to the finish line of meeting our little guy! I went from 7-10cm in less than 30 minutes. Fast and furious!

I also knew that the pain I was experiencing was productive. There’s a difference between pain that is purposeful and pain from injury or accident. The best analogy I can think of is exercise. There’s a difference between the burn you feel in your muscles during a squat that’s making you stronger and the pain you feel from tearing a muscle with injury. One you embrace and the other you seek out medical help for. Knowing the pain of transition was getting me closer to meeting our baby boy made it possible to endure.

Alternative Birthing Positions

I delivered both of our girls on my back on the bed & while this worked fine in my experience, the more I learned about my own anatomy and how a baby comes out influenced which position I hoped to deliver in my third time around.

These two visuals from @the_nurture_nest Instagram were helpful to me in thinking a little bit more intuitively about the most efficient way to get my baby out. Plus, this podcast about the history behind why women began laboring on their back to begin with was SO interesting.

I wasn’t sure exactly how what position I wanted to be in for delivery, but I did know that I wanted to try an alternative to being on my back. Something to keep my pelvis more open & let gravity work with me.

Honestly, the biggest fear I had with doing this was what I would look like. Our culture has deemed so many natural things about birth as “granola” or “barbaric” and in my opinion it’s such a disservice to women! It puts a pressure on women to keep a certain culturally defined “dignity” about them when giving birth instead of allowing them the freedom to do what feels best for their body & their baby. I don’t think we give our own intuition enough credit… but I’ll save that for another time. (;

During transition, I started laboring in a position on the bed leaning over top of a birthing ball. It felt really productive like it was allowing the baby to really start making his descent and let the final dilation occur. So, when it came time to push, that’s where I stayed! On my knees, bent over the ball or gripping the back or the bed around it.

And when that time came, I really didn’t care what I looked like. My focus became so crystal clear: get this baby out, as quick and effectively as possible! As much as I can care about what I look like or what people think of me at times, in this moment I let all of that go and just listened to my body.

Of my three deliveries, this birthing position definitely felt the most effective & the least painful.

Sidenote: Is pushing without an epidural horrible?

People considering delivering naturally often ask me, but what about the pushing? Is it terrible without an epidural? What if I tear?

But what I tell everyone is that the pushing is the least of your worries! The contractions are the hardest part to do unmedicated, but when it comes time to push, there is so much pressure down there, you aren’t as aware of the tearing (if any) as you think you’d be. Plus, pushing means relief is coming and when you feel the urge to push there is nothing that feels better in that moment than doing just that!!

Confidence in Birth

Things don’t always go as we plan, we all know this. But that shouldn’t keep us from making the best informed decisions we can make to try to plan for the best outcome possible!

I really do believe that birth can be a more satisfying experience when YOU feel confident about the decision YOU are making for YOUR baby & YOUR body. The more knowledge you have about how it all works, the more confident you’ll feel to speak up for yourself and say what you want along the way. That way, no matter how the birth ends up going, you’ll know you made the best choices you could with what you were given to work with. In birth, we can’t always decide the cards we’re given & we have to roll with the punches as they come, but I feel more sure than ever that the more we know & understand about our bodies & our rights as patients, the more positive birth experiences we can have. 🙂

So, I’d love to hear - how was your birth experience? What was the best part? What was the hardest?