Before your baby arrives
Labour and birth preparation, without the guesswork
Most of what frightens people about birth is not knowing the shape of it. A midwife who has spent years in birthing suites can turn a vague dread into a sequence you can picture.
What it is
Labour and birth preparation, not a birth plan template
Labour and birth preparation is the birth half of an antenatal session, taken slowly with an endorsed midwife at home. What early labour actually feels like. When it is worth ringing the hospital and when it is not. How the stages run, roughly how long each tends to take, and what changes between them.
It is deliberately practical. Knowing that the drive in is usually the worst part, or that transition often arrives with the feeling that you cannot do this any more, is more use at two in the morning than a diagram of the pelvis.
This is education. The EverNurture midwives do not attend births. Your labour and birth are looked after by your hospital or birth service.
What gets covered
The ground a session works through
Shaped around what you want to know, so treat this as the territory rather than a running order. If you have been searching how to prepare for labour, this is the childbirth education half of it.
Getting there
- Signs that labour is starting, and the ones that are not
- What to do at home in early labour, and for how long
- When to call, and who to call
- What to have ready, and what you genuinely will not need
On the day
- The stages of labour, one at a time
- Pain relief, the natural approaches and the medical ones, with the trade-offs
- Positions and comfort techniques that are worth practising beforehand
- What monitoring, examinations and interventions involve
- The first hour after your baby arrives
Including the birth you are not planning for
Plenty of people arrive at a caesarean or an assisted birth having deliberately read nothing about either, and find the unfamiliarity harder than the birth itself.
In labour and birth preparation, covering what they involve, and why they might be recommended, takes very little time. It removes a great deal of fear from the moment someone first suggests one.
Knowing what you can ask for
A lot of what feels like a decision being made for you is simply a decision being made quickly. Understanding the options in advance, and the questions that open them up, is what makes consent meaningful rather than procedural. If you would rather spend a whole hour on those questions, a prenatal consultation allows for it.
Late enough to stick
The third trimester suits most families. Early enough that there is time to practise anything you want to practise, late enough that it is still fresh when labour starts. Bring it forward if you are expecting twins or have been told to prepare for an earlier arrival. For reading alongside a session, Pregnancy, Birth and Baby has a guide to labour and birth preparation.
Arrange a session
Book directly with the midwife you choose
Each midwife takes her own bookings and can tell you how she runs a session, how long it takes and what it costs.