35 weeks pregnant and you can really feel your pregnant body preparing for birth. Your private parts become redder and everything gets softer and mushier. Hopefully, you’ve done the Internal Work from Birthing Better and can begin to feel how much more stretchy the inside of your baby’s birth canal is and less sensitive to the massage.
Your Braxton-Hicks become more defined, so each week it’s easier to practice your Birthing Better skills. Your baby is also beginning to really feel ‘big’. In other words, you now know that you’re going to give birth to a BIG object that’s going to grow until you give birth.
Baby Center has a video about hiring a doula in their 35 weeks pregnant post. There are many great reasons to hire a doula. However, your partner/other should not just be there to support you, they should have the skills to work with you. A doula should be the one supporting you and not the primary ‘labor coach’ or ‘birth coach’.
Some families, find this hard to understand and some of this lack of understanding is cultural. If your family believes birth is ‘women’s business’ then hiring a doula makes sense because your husband will not take part as a birth-coach. However, most fathers want to know what to do and how to help. Birthing Better fathers developed all those skills. Being a birth-coach does not require you to have attended any previous birth.
The Baby Center post also discusses your Birth Plan. We hope you have also taken Birthing Better families’ advice and created a Skills-based Birth Plan. Baby Center talks about informing the staff, midwife, and obstetrician about what you want and don’t want. However, there is NO mention of the importance of you telling them about the skills they will see you use! You will WOW them!
Birthing Better families want to add at 35 weeks pregnant:
- Skills-based Birth Plan
As you’ve been learning the Birthing Better skills since 24 weeks pregnant (hopefully, but start anytime!), you now have a range of skills to put into your Skills-based Birth Plan.
Make your Skills-based Birth Plan like a ‘cheat sheet’ that you and your partner can take into your baby’s birth as a reminder of the skills you’ve learned.
What to include:
- Breathing skills
- Relaxation skills
- Skills for my birth-coach
- Touch skills
- Teamwork
- We’ve prepared our pregnant body with skills that create space side-to-side such as The Hip Lift, front-to-back as The Sacral Manoeuvre or Sit-Bone Spread for slow 2nd stage
- We’ve prepared our baby’s birth canal and hope you notice a difference down there
- We’ll use our skills no matter what happens to, or around, us. We will use our skills when there are assessments, monitoring, and procedures.
- If we need staff or you (midwife, doula or obstetrician) to help us we’ll teach you at the time.
- Add to your Skills-based Birth Plan right up to the start of The Birth
What not to include:
- Don’t bother to explain anything more than KISS … Keep It Simple Stupid
- Your obstetrician, midwife or staff don’t care what skills you’ve learned. They will just be over the moon delighted to work with a skilled birthing mother and birth-coaching dad/other
- Ideology … those ‘wants’ and ‘don’t wants’ go in your conventional Birth Plan. You can tweak this Birth Plan right up to The Birth
Here are the resources in LESSON TWELVE
LISTEN and READ: The two most common causes for more medical care during birth are: delay in 1st and 2nd stage and women not coping with the natural occurring pain. Learn all the skills to keep your labor moving along. No woman wants to be in labor forever. Reduce or prevent delays. Learn to cope and manage well.
- Audio: Birth is Not Just a Noun Mp3 – 80min
- PDF: Progressing of Labor – 21 pages
- PDF: 5 Phases and Bell Shape Curve of Contractions – 63 pages
- PDF: Staying in the NOW – 18 pages
- PDF: Practice as Though Your Birth Depends on it – 18 pages
Birthing Better skills were developed by moms and dads in the early 1970s in the US and used by many thousands globally in all types of birth. Birthing Better online birthing classes are housed in Common Knowledge Trust.