Before your baby arrives
Childbirth education, in your own living room
A private session with a midwife, at home, preparing you and your partner for labour, birth and the first weeks. All four EverNurture midwives offer it through their own practices.
What it is
A class of one couple
Hospital antenatal classes work well for a lot of families. For others, a room of strangers is the last place they want to ask the question actually worrying them.
A private session is the same preparation, held at your kitchen table. Nobody else is in the room, the pace follows your questions, and the content bends to what you want covered rather than a fixed syllabus. Partners are part of it, not spectators.
Sessions usually run for around two hours, and most families book one somewhere in the last stretch of pregnancy, from about thirty weeks, when birth feels close enough to be worth preparing for.
This is education, not clinical care. Your pregnancy appointments carry on with your GP, hospital midwife or obstetrician exactly as before, and nothing here replaces them.
What gets covered
The ground a session usually covers
Each midwife shapes the session around you, so the list below is the territory rather than a running order.
Getting to the birth
- Symptoms and concerns that come up in late pregnancy
- How to recognise early labour, and what to do in it
- Labour and birth, stage by stage
- Pain relief, both the natural approaches and the medical ones
- Modes of delivery, including what happens if plans change
- Comfort techniques, and how a partner can actually help
And then afterwards
- What to expect during your hospital stay, including the checks done on your baby
- Feeding your baby in the early days
- Caring for yourself as well as your newborn
- The postnatal period, and adapting to parenthood
- Where your support network sits, and how to lean on it
Drawn from what the EverNurture midwives publish about their own sessions.
Why families book one
Fear usually comes from not knowing
Most of what frightens people about birth is the unknown shape of it: how long, how much, what happens if. Being walked through it by someone who has attended hundreds of births turns a vague dread into a sequence you can picture.
It also gives your partner something concrete to do. A great deal of the discomfort partners describe is standing there feeling useless, and most of that is fixable with an afternoon's preparation.
A quiet advantage
You will already know her
If you book your session with the same midwife you plan to see after the birth, the person who arrives at your door in those first foggy weeks is not a stranger. She knows your birth plan because she helped you think it through.
When to book
Late enough to stick, early enough to matter
Book too early and it fades before you need it. Leave it too late and you are learning about early labour while having contractions.
Somewhere in the third trimester suits most families. If you are expecting twins, have been told to prepare for an earlier arrival, or simply want longer to sit with the information, move it forward.
If plans change
Including the birth you did not plan for
A good session covers the modes of delivery you are not expecting as well as the one you are. Plenty of people arrive at a caesarean or an assisted birth having deliberately not read about either, and find the unfamiliarity harder than the birth.
Knowing roughly what happens, and why it might be recommended, takes very little time and removes a great deal of fear from the moment someone suggests it.
What it costs
Fees and Medicare
Each midwife sets her own fee for a session, and a Medicare rebate may apply for eligible families because all four are endorsed. How much comes back, and when, depends on your own Medicare position, so ask the midwife you contact to spell it out before you book.
Arrange a session
Book your education session directly
Every midwife takes her own bookings and can tell you what her session covers, how long it runs and what it costs.