Matthew Knott - Blog

She's beautiful, healthy, hungry and in my arms as I type this, but she's already put me though the mill and she's only 24 hours old.

She was due on the 20th January, by the scan date, but we were facing the real possibility that Lisa would have to be induced yesterday, at 3pm, which we were dreading. All along we'd planned to have a home birth. No fancy paddling pool stuff just get on the floor and pop it out. We had the home-birthers best friend, a shower curtain, so we were clearly well prepared, and the prospect of going to be induced and having no use for the shower curtain was more than we could bear.

Be careful what you wish for.

The day before she was due to go to hospital, she started having back pains, so we thought that there may be the slimmest of chances she was going into the early labour. The following morning the pains were still there, 9:30 we rang the midwife. She said there was a good chance she was going into labour and to see how things went.

So, we went into Ammanford for breakfast and to do some shopping. We spoke to the midwife again about 10:30, and then again at 11, when she said to come down to the clinic in Glanamman. She checked Lisa out and confirmed that she was 3cm dilated and in the early stages of labour. Hospital visit cancelled, game on. At 5pm there hadn't been much progress so we went back to the clinic. She gave Lisa another sweep, at which point she was 4cm dilated, and prescribed a hot bath for the pain.

Lisa got out of the bath at 6 and was have contractions 4 minutes apart, we phoned the midwife as per her advice when the contractions were like this, and she set out. She got her nighty on and we got her downstairs (she had 2 big contractions on the stairs). She got downstairs and was hanging onto the door, 5 minutes later she had a massive contraction and her waters broke, with that, the baby started coming out! 

Lisa was screaming and I looked down and the top half of the baby's head was out. I didn't faint, which is impressive considering what I was looking at, though I did nearly have a "Brando" (The horror, the horror). Lisa was half sitting on the shower curtain on the sofa at this point,and couldn't lay down because of the pain, so somehow, with the babies head coming out I managed to get her onto her back just as the head came out fully.

I tripped over my mother-in-law rushing for the phone, got the phone and called for an ambulance. The woman on the other end, Julie, was awesome, and as I was put through to her, Charlotte came out completely. She talked me through everything, keep them both warm, clear the baby's face. I panicked a little when she asked me was there any serious bleeding from Lisa, but luckily everything was great. She'd delivered a 7lbs 7 1/2 ounce baby in about 25 seconds with no pain relief and no tears (as in bears not tears as in fears). The ambulance crew took about 5 more minutes to reach us and cut the umbilical and checked them both. The midwife arrived about 10 minutes after that!

Her first night kept us up pretty much all night long, feeding and cwtching. In truth we worth both pretty traumatised but the whole experience and worrying about what could have been if something had gone wrong. I wish the circumstances of her arrival were better but she's amazing and I wouldn't change her for the world.