You’re about 32 weeks along and 32 weeks is another landmark in pregnancy. At 24 weeks our uterus is above our navel and we’ve experienced movement for a few weeks. Although this is a good time to start to teach yourself the childbirth skills you and your birth coach will need, birth still looks pretty far away.
By the time, you’re 32 weeks, the birth begins to seem right around the corner. By now our baby is well developed, in fact my son was born at 32 weeks and I took him home the next day, although he was under-cooked, he was five pounds and a sturdy lad; I also gave birth to him entirely on own in an out of town hospital attended to by a lovely doctor I’d never met.
The staff had never seen a woman go through the whole birth and delivery on her own. The only problem was when they wheeled me into the delivery theatre and asked how I wanted the baby to be prepared. All I could think of was, and they want me to decorate as well.
They broke the bed down so I could sit and all the staff came into watch, they did ask. I have had twelve years between my kids and have been blessed by discovering BirthingBetter knowledge along with other women and men for those 12 years and I benefited personally by what we had all learned together.
There’s another reason 32 weeks is a special time, our body and baby begin to flutter our body with birth hormones. Our soft tissue and bones begin to soften. This is the time when we start the internal work. Many women and men have heard and either done or not done perineal massage.
The perineal tissue is located between the vagular opening and the front of the rectum. The birth hormones will begin to soften the tissue in this area as well. However, what we learned as women, many who have previously done the perineal massage is we needed to prepare our birth canal differently.
The reason perineal massage does not consistently prevent delayed pushing stage or tears is simply that it only works on a very small area of the tissue that needs to open up in order for our baby to come out of our body.
Discover how much tissue you actually need to massage, sit on a firm chair and pay attention to the space between the bones you sit on. If you heard the seventh talk in this series, then you already know the side to side space is located between the bones you sit on and your front to back space is located from your vagina to your tail bone.
Orient your mind to the tissue down there, the perineum is located between the front of the rectum to the front of your vagina. However, our baby needs to open our vagina equal to all the space between the sit bones and all the way back to the tail bone.
Because our baby’s head is as big as when we place our thumbs together and our index fingers together and form a circle, the tissue of our birth canal ultimately is pushed open to that size.
The funny thing about it is that most women think that the birth canal opens like a circle, first the circle is very small and that it opens equally around, but that’s not what happens. The front of the vagina is bordered by the pubic bone so the vagina opens entirely toward the tail bone.
This means that all the tissue inside needs to be stretched and massaged. Unlike perineal massage the internal work of the Pink Kit method for Birthing Better is always done gently, no stinging or burning. It takes about two weeks for any soreness or tension to begin to resolve.