Jo O'Brien

This weekend was all about winding down and spending some time together as a couple. It’s the first weekend in months where James and I have just been together without having people to see or places to be. I’ve been really enjoying it.

Today we set up the birth pool in the spare room. Seeing it sitting there is an unavoidable reminder that in the near future I’ll be pushing a whole baby out. Yikes!

It’s a really good feeling, having some time to prepare the space where I’ll be laboring and giving birth to our daughter. I’ve been spending a lot of time in the spare room recently, and that has helped me feel at home in there.

Today I grabbed the very last things on my list that are needed for the birth or immediately post-birth. The strangest items being some art supplies for making placenta prints.

I’m still not sure why I’ve become so emotional about our placenta, but I’d really like something to remember it by before it disappears into a rubbish bin somewhere or is buried under a tree. Placenta prints can be made using the existing blood, or with ink or paint. I’ve set us up with a pad of medium weight watercolour paper and some lush sepia toned artist ink. I guess the rest will come down to how much time, energy and creativity we have left after the birth!

Face of Birth extras - Sheila Kitzinger

Face of Birth is a documentary about home birth in Australia, which is currently in production.

When we first became pregnant we rushed around like mad trying to find a good obstetrician at a private hospital and quickly booked ourselves in. That was all plodding along normally as I began to read and research birth. It wasn’t until half way through this pregnancy, after I’d digested half the library, that we canceled our hospital booking and began working with an independent midwife towards a home birth. Why? I’m a fairly logical person, so first and foremost I couldn’t ignore the research that has been conducted about safety and home birth. Having a “low risk” (i.e completely normal) pregnancy meant a properly attended home birth would give us the best statistical chance of avoiding infant death, infant distress during labor, an episiotomy, infection after birth and post natal depression. There were also a number of emotional reasons but I doubt we would have made the leap from private hospital to a birth pool in our spare room unless there was sound research and evidence of it being a safe choice, and being a safe choice in our particular circumstances.

I’m thrilled to see Sheila Kitzinger petitioning for more and better research. I know that when I went looking for it, it was incredibly difficult to find independent research and many of the documents I read had to be considered along with the bias of how the data had been collected or how the results had been interpreted.

Today I ran a couple of errands after wrangling a few extra hours sleep last night. First on my list was picking up a car seat which my mother had very kindly gifted us for the new baby. I’ve been excited about picking it up all week, as it marked the last “big thing” we need to have ready and on stand by for when the baby comes.

James drives a very spiffy, but very compact convertible which made the whole car seat buying process quite a bit more tricky. I could only find two safety compliant models which fit in his backseat, and because I am avoiding the colour black like the plague right now, this left us with precisely one option.

On the drive home I couldn’t help but notice the plethora of ‘end of financial year’ sales and so parked the car for a quick look around. As though by fate, I finally found a large enough bag to use for hauling baby paraphernalia around. I’ve examined about 27266 billion nappy bags but was not able to find one that ticked all my boxes (big enough, light weight, compartments where I want them, not black etc.) Turns out what I really wanted was a large beach bag. And upon getting it home I spent my afternoon becoming better acquainted with it while getting it packed and ready to go.

Once I had bonded with my new nappy bag for long enough, it was time to attack the car interior with a brush and shovel. I started just before dusk, with enough light to work by, but ended up half squatting half reclining across the back seat poking into dark corners until they felt clean. Hopefully all my thrashing about did the job and tomorrow I’ll be able to take the new car seat in to be fitted properly.

There is still a whole bunch of frivolous bonus stuff on the wish list but now I feel like we have all the important items covered.

We have three different due dates. I guess that’s what happens when you see four different care providers over the course of one pregnancy and everyone works it out a different way. But as of yesterday, the most in the middle of those due dates makes our baby full term. That means if she were born now we wouldn’t consider her mildly premature any more. She isn’t actually due for another two or three weeks, and if she has inherited her parents’ procrastination skills it could be as long as another four or five weeks, so I’m not holding my breath for anything to happen just yet and with so many things still to get done, I’m in no rush either! Nature might help me out here, because a preganant women who is stressing out about getting things ready is also pumping a bunch of adrenline around her system, and adreneline is a really good labor inhibitor. So, theoretically, labor is less likely to begin until the mother stops running around and fretting about things. It also explains why most labors begin at night, when the body is naturally starting to unwind and relax.

We do our grocery shopping online, and so I ordered a box of baby wipes without really thinking much of it. Until they arrived with Winnie The Pooh plastered all over the container. Now before you think I am some sort of pooh-bear-hater, let me assure you that I am quite fond of the pre-Disney character. But there is something very strange about a bear who doesn’t even wear pants advertising nappy products.

Acknowledging that I had given this way too much thought and was almost certainly thinking irrationally, my mind was made up. Winnie had to go, or at least put some damn pants on.

Alas, I did not have any Winnie sized pants around the house. And even if I put pants on Winnie, what of all his pant-less friends mocking me from the side of the box? What I did have, was an off cut of fabric that has been in my hoarding pile for several years.

As if by magic, it was the perfect size for what I needed. The final dilemma was how to get it on. I have wanted to learn sewing since I was 14. Mum let me use her machine but it broke after just one day and that was the end of that. I’ve hand stitched a few bits and pieces since then, but the last time I moved house my modest sewing kit hit the bin along with nine tenths of my stuff. The choice was now between sticky tape or safety pins. I went with the pins.

Goodbye Winnie!

Mwah ha ha! I win. No more commercialised pant-less Disney characters adorning this box of baby wipes! Winnie has been clothed and silenced.

Well, I never thought it would happen, but yesterday for the first time in, well, my whole life, I felt like cleaning. Apparently I can thank my hormones for this.

I decided to make the most of it and got the spare room in order. There were piles of crap all over the floor and boxes of god knows what. Thankfully, we bought a new bookcase a couple of weeks ago which meant I could at least transfer some stuff from the floor to against a wall. This has has provided us with uncovered carpet for the first time in months. Alas, my intense hatred of vacuuming continued through this cleaning mood and I opted to craw around on my hands and knees with a brush and shovel for an hour instead of pulling out the vacuum for a quick suck up.

The idea of using this room as a nursery or child’s bedroom is still laughable. There isn’t room for a cot, let alone a bed, and it looks like the desk will be doubling as a change table for now. We have a temporary crib in the bedroom but I have no idea where we are going to put this kid once she outgrows it. Good thing babies are very small!

The apartment block we live in seems to have paper thin walls. We can hear when our neighbors cough, flush the toilet or plonk into bed. So, the idea of giving birth at home, along with the usual sounds of labor, has made us a bit concerned about what the neighbors will think. Rather than leave them guessing (and risk someone calling the police to make sure we’re okay) we made up some little survival packs and a letter to let each of them know what is going on.

Each pack contained:

1 x Coffee Bag (for a caffeine hit)

1 x Tea Bag

1 x Set of ear plugs (to block out unwanted noise)

2 x Panadol (for any headaches we cause!)

…and a little note letting them know what is going on and passing on our apologies in advance if we keep anyone awake.

We also dropped off some quick notes to the apartment block next door, with some added fluff attached to hopefully avoid it being mistaken for junk mail.

A couple of weeks ago Christine and I headed to Ikea for a look around. I’d already been online checking out some options for storing all the baby paraphernalia and thought the EXPEDIT bookcases were a flexible option when partnered with BRANAS baskets for drawers. At the time, there was a massive pile of the baskets, but I didn’t want to make the purchase without discussing it with James first, and since then, my two other visits proved basketless.

Determined not to waste a third trip, today I contacted the store ahead of time to ask if they had any. Confidently, I was told they had 21 in stock. I was in the car within 10 mins and on my way!

Upon reaching Ikea I noted that yet again, the spot where said baskets had been on my first trip was now full of some other type of basket. So I grabbed the nearest staff member to query where the 21 in stock baskets might be. Apparently, “21 in stock” is code for “the system says we have 21, but everyone who works here knows that we’ve been out of them for over a fortnight”. He suggested I go through the displays and pinch any from there, but that there would only be a few. So I spent the next hour scouring the whole store and found a single solitary basket in the size and style I wanted.

They tell me another delivery is estimated for within the week, but cautioned that I should check in before driving out again because the system can’t be relied on and that the delivery might just not come.

As much as I love Ikea, this whole basket buying experience is sucking big time.

Last Christmas James gave me a voucher for a two hour pregnancy retreat at Aurora Spa in St Kilda which I used this morning. Oh. My. God. It was amazing. I don’t think I’ve ever had a massage for the sake of relaxation before but the idea is certainly growing on me. In addition to a full body massage it included a facial, foot wrap and meditation. She even massaged my ears! I walked in there somewhat stressed out about a whole bunch of things I need to do, and have walked out of there feeling ready to melt. Then I visited James at work for some lunch, have come home to a hot bath and now plan to have a nap. Couldn’t have asked for a more relaxing day really.

Last night we had an unexpected ring at the front door - our midwife Jan popped past with a birth pool for us to keep here in the lead up to labor, and to practice setting up. It comes with a pump, one hose for filling it with and another for draining it. Jan checked out our kitchen sink with James and thankfully one of the hose adapters fits perfectly.

What a weekend! On Saturday we shot Kate and Fraser’s wedding which was a long day for an almost eight month pregnant person. Our friend John Robb came along to cover for me and I just acted as a supporting photographer for the day. Later on we stopped off for some Chinese food and to download images before heading home to sleep.

Sunday I had to get up at the crack of dawn to be in Dandenong for a St John’s first aid course. If I was starting a new job I would train myself, and parenting seems like a fairly major job so it feels only natural to do some training for it too. The course I attended was aimed at people who live or work with babies and children. The content and our instructor were excellent. There was plenty of practise time which we all found immensely helpful because you don’t exactly need to tie a sling or perform CPR or administer an epi-pen very often. I strongly reccommend the course for any new parents.

Later in the afternoon we had our big birth plan meeting with both our midwives and we also had a student midwife come along to see how it all works. It was all fairly mundane but important stuff. We talked through each part of labor and Jan asked a few specific questions to gague how we felt about things like regarding injections and getting out of the birth pool to deliver the placenta. It was a good task to get everyone on the same page and I feel better having talked it through with the people who will be there, than having a written birth plan sitting in a corner somewhere during the birth. When it comes to home birth, we’re pretty happy with the ‘deafult’ scenario which basically means doing what feels right at the time (for the family) and checking with the mother before doing anything to her or the baby (for the midwife).

The baby has been having hiccups for quite a while, but lately we’ve noticed that she does it for much much longer, and that they are very evenly spaced. She usually starts up when I’m in bed at night or sitting quietly with a book, and it can go for a good twenty or thirty minutes. It’s so funny, but when trying to sleep they have the same affect as a tap dripping. Ergo, last night I got up eight times.

All the books say hiccups are the baby practicing breathing and swallowing. If that’s the case, my money is on her coming out screaming! She seems very keen to clock up some practice time in utero.

We have been trying to clean out the spare room for months, but it’s every time we make some progress the void seems to be instantly filled with baby stuff. Today I picked up a bookcase at Ikea and will have to go back for some baskets to use as draws (they were out of stock). So at least now we have something to start putting all the baby things away into to keep the floor clear.