Shelly, Mark, Eliza and Hugo’s ‘s story.
Thank you for your advice regarding delayed cord clamping. It made the icing on the cake of our short, quick, beautiful home birth. Thank you once again.
Sure enough a few seconds later I gave one almighty push and the baby slid out at 3.10am on Sunday 9th March. At this point, as planned Mark and I closed our eyes and the Midwife asked out daughter Eliza what we had. She said “it’s a boy” and started crying. I had been convinced that we were having a girl, although quietly wanted a boy. After asking if she was sure I opened my eyes and lifted my boy up to see. “We have a Hugo” I cried. Still attached to our umbilical cord and placenta he took a huge breathe and screamed! I turned around and sat down with Hugo wrapped in towel and couldn’t take my eyes off him. Within a couple of minutes he’d started to wriggle around searching, so I lifted him up and he latched on straight away. At that point I realized that I knew our Midwife from an episode of One Born Every Minute! We sat around chatting and looking at Hugo, we made a couple of phone calls to grandparents and the midwives had their drink of tea that Mark had made half an hour previously. After about 25 minutes I got a few cramps and our Midwife suggested that I pushed to see if the placenta was ready to ‘birth’. After a couple of comparatively gentle pushes, our placenta was delivered. We had a feel of the umbilical cord, which was now virtually white and then they put the plastic clamp on and cut Hugo’s cord. We all had a good look and a prod of the placenta, the Midwife showed the different areas and how it would have fed Hugo and Eliza took a lot of interest in how it worked.
