The Pink Kit is now known as Birthing Better online birthing classes.. The skills were developed in the early 1970s by hundreds of ordinary mothers and fathers. Our Trust, Common Knowledge, has been online since 2000. Our resource has kept up with technology and is now available in online lessons. You can browse through each lesson now so you can see what type of birth preparation, birth and birth coaching skills are available to you.
Hi Annette:
Your story is SUCH a typical Pink Kit birth story. It’s full of awareness, consciousness, and ability to self-reflect. I hope you, like so many thousands of women … and men … feel incredibly proud of yourself.
Perfect births we don’t usually have but we have really conscious ones, even with moments of ‘I lost it’.
From now on listen carefully to other women’s birth stories and you’ll hear how very different most women talk about their birth experiences than how you described yours to me.
I started this email before you emailed that you had a forceps birth after a ‘failed ventose’. I sent your email to the three midwives who inspire their clients to use The PK and they told me you’d make a great Pink Kit Presenter so if you ever feel inclined to get further involved, please do.
I hope you’ll be comfortable with my sharing your story (with or without your name) so other women and men learn from you. It’s our stories that help so many other expectant families learn why they need to have a good set of birthing and coaching skills no matter what birth they have.
So I’ll get on with what I wrote …
What CKT is trying to do, and you successfully learned, is a whole new language about birth. Instead of shame, blame and guilt about ‘what they did or didn’t do to me’, you have had an experience that has taught you heaps. You’ll redo your birth again and again in your head, re-applying your skills to what you now know. For example, where do you think your baby got stuck? And if you had been alone what would you have done? Then …
Imagine what story you would have told had you not taught yourself these skills. Could you write a little to me about how you’d have handled your birth if you just had the information you got from your childbirth class, care provider or books? Often we have a clear idea of how that type of birth would have been and how The PK skills led down a very different path.
One of the great gifts we receive (as women who give birth with PK skills) is an incredible ability to learn quickly from our one-off past birth experience/s. We mentally re-do things and refine these skills for our future one-off birth/s.
What we absolutely KNOW for certain is that the unexpected will happen and each time we are able to adjust quickly to the reality rather than how we’d like things to be and we do that by choosing and using our PK skills more effectively. Hope that makes sense.
What I’d like to do is go through your story and give you some more Pink Kit perceptions about your birth.
I always keep people like yourself in my mind once we’ve had a correspondence. Our Trust wishes more couples would interact with us. Hopefully, our new website, when it gets up, will help people get more involved. It’s through stories like yours that help other expectant parents understand the importance of The Pink Kit Package and the skills we absolutely should all be teaching ourselves when we’re pregnant.
Sciatica is not uncommon for quite a number of women in the last part of pregnancy. If this happens next time, go to an osteopath, chiropractor, other types of ‘adjusting’ bodyworker or get acupuncture. As you probably are aware, our birth hormones loosen up our ligaments etc and everything becomes looser. This loosening up is good for birth but if it throws your back out, it’s a bummer and should be worked on constantly whenever it occurs in pregnancy. Some women get sciatica earlier in the next pregnancy. It can be totally exhausting.
Sciatica is sometimes caused by the baby’s head coming into the hole (inlet) in the bones and settles down (engagement). This puts pressure on the inside of the bones and causes a pinching of the nerves. There are very specific homeopathic that can help with this as well. Also, physiotherapists are often good at giving some exercises. Sometimes we just have to keep working with it, working with it, working with it until we give birth.
TO BE CONTINUED …