Hi everyone! I've been on the lookout for a good forum for dads. I'm glad to have found you all! Thanks for being here.

A little about me:
This is our first child. We're 33(me) and 31(her), respectively. We have been friends for 8 years and pride ourselves on our communication with one another. I hear that's a good trait to have when kids become your focus. I was in a few bands around town for about 10 years and ended up DJing to actually make some money with music too. We live a practical lifestyle, though we're consumers and enjoy the occasional shopping trip. We love the outdoors and are looking forward to getting our daughter interested in it too. To that effect I'm looking for a non-religious Girl Scouts type organization to help get her involved with outdoors activities and hands on experience to carry throughout her life. I have plenty of time for all that, though.

We're having our first child at home. We have done a ton of research and want a calm and intimate childbirth without drugs or medically influenced pressure. There is a place for medical assistance, but we feel that hospitals have an agenda that we'd like to avoid. Our close friends just had their second child at home (their first was at a birthing center). The feeling that I'm getting from all the questions that I've asked is that it's a very personal experience. I haven't heard a lot of 'what-to-expect' talk. I'd love to hear about your experiences with your home births and your interaction with your midwife and assistants or doulas. What positions or techniques or tools were most or least helpful? Did you have time to make food to keep everyone sustained or did you have a family member there for extra support? Do you remember any mistakes you made? How did you deal with the emotions from your partner?

I really appreciate all of your input and I'm sure I'll have more questions as I read your responses. Thanks again for being here! I look forward to helping out as I get more experience.

Hi,

Congratulations on the birth of your upcoming child. It's an exciting time.

My only recommendation would be to select a birthing center (or hospital) to use as a backup in case complications arise during the birth. In our case, we didn't want to have a home birth. We wanted to have a medication-free water birth using the hospital's midwifery program. But around the time of our due date, we found out that we had pre-eclempsia, which medically ruled out the possibility of a water birth. Thankfully we were still able to use the midwifery program, and the midwives were part of our birth process.

I guess what I'm saying is, some births will go exactly as specified in the birth plan, but some won't, so if I were planning to have a home birth, I'd have alternate arrangements planned out, just in case.

In any event, good luck and best wishes to you during this exciting time - hope some other dads with home birth experience will offer their perspective here.

Roger

Thanks Roger!

Excellent advice. We have a birthplan drawn up that includes a trip to the hospital in the event anything untold pops up. You can bet I'll be handing out birthplans to anyone who walks in the room too. Our midwife has a birth center as well so our choices are covered in that respect. I had overlooked preeclampsia as a possibility, so I thank you for reminding me to monitor that. We haven't taken BP together in a few weeks.

As far as dealing with the hospital's midwifery program; how do you feel they respected your wishes throughout your wife's labor? Did you have to take the reins from the nurses when they insisted on medical intervention? How did you keep calm in that situation?

Assuming your wife and child are well, it sounds like everything happened for a great purpose.

Cheers,

John

Good luck with your home birth plans. First of as a guy I will say the choice is totally up to the woman as she bears the pains. But its quite true from my experience that modern medicine leads to more C-Sections. I have seen this cycle. Labor Pains -> medication to ease the pain -> Mommy feels ok but baby goes into stress. Ultimately it leads to a C.

Doctors don't do any of this intentionally I guess its what they are trained to do. Imagine if your a doctor and you have these options wait 24-48 hours for normal labor process. Get paged anytime during this time period every day you are in duty. Or the other easy option speed up labor and better yet do a C-section. The best part is you get paid more for a C-section.

All this said you will need the help of doctors in case of any intervention/complication. I don't believe there is a big conspiracy I think its a combination of women given the choice of less pain (I would totally take that option if I had to go through it) Doctors wanting to get more done in less time and spend more quality time with their families. Human Nature.

You're absolutely right. Thank you for the perspective.

My wife is the figurehead on this journey, and I'll be the wind in her sails no matter which course she plots.

Everything you said about the doctor's aspect is what we're going to TRY to avoid. I understand the convenience factor for my wife and for them, and I am 100% behind her decision if that's what she wants. Our current plan is medicine-less, and low pressure.

I don't blame them for doing what they're paid to do, we just don't need them dangling the proverbial carrot of medicinal intervention in our faces. I think I'm more worried about catty and judgmental nurses and my response to them. My friends have relayed some stories with varying outcomes regarding nurses with poor people skills. I don't want formal complaints to be part of our exit paperwork.

Again, thank you for that perspective! I really appreciate you taking the time to help us through this!

John

Home birth is about the only away we *haven't* delivered.

We did:

1) Emergency C-section of a 30 week preemie, 3 wk NICU stay
2) Midwife natural hospital VBAC
3) Ob/Gyn delivered VBAC

Our #2 is the closest to the experience that you guys are looking for. I found that our midwife did an outstanding job of shielding us from hospital staff trying to nudge us toward more mainstream practices. She ran the show to our precise specs.

My advice coming out of that experience: You need to get yourself ready to witness intense pain and suffering. You care about the child's mother. She is going through an experience that is unimaginable to you -- to anyone who has not given birth. At some point, in all likelihood, her resolution will flag. She will be hurting, suffering like you've probably never witnessed anyone suffer unless you are a combat veteran or a hospice worker and she will ask you to make it stop. Decide ahead of time how you will respond to that.

Other than that, it's a miracle.

Hi John,

It sounds like you and your wife have a very thoughtful approach to your upcoming childbirth.

I think it's natural to have concerns about the medical staff at the birthing center/hospital. Those concerns might be one of the reasons that get people interested in home birth.

In our experience, the midwives and nurses were excellent. They reviewed our birthplan with us in the days leading up to the birth of our son, and we discussed it pretty extensively with them.

As it eventually happened, virtually none of our experience went as we'd planned/hoped for in the birthplan. Preeclampsia came as a big surprise to us. It's a relatively rare condition and I guess we assumed it wouldn't happen to us. It put us in a situation where we needed more medical intervention than we'd be planning on. Like I said, we wanted a medication-free waterbirth. Preeclampsia completely ruled out the waterbirth.

We were in labor a total of 34 hours. There were two times that I had to step in and ask the medical staff to back off, or for a change in process. The first came several hours into labor. A hospital tech took a rather substantial blood sample from my wife. About 15 minutes later, a nurse came in and said that the tech had mislabeled the sample, and per hospital guidelines, they were going to need to draw another. I said no way, you are not going to do that, forget about it - and they left us alone. The second incident came about 20 hours into labor. The nurses had a shift change, and they assigned a student nurse to us. I said no way, it isn't personal, but please assign another nurse to us. They did, and the person we got was an experienced full time nurse. (One of the things I was repeatedly told in our 10 week childbirth class is that you have the right to "fire" a nurse, and in fact you do).

Overall though, the midwives and nurses were very professional and respectful of us. 34 hours isn't the world record, but it is still a long time to be in labor. At the time, we didn't get the services of a doula because we wanted to save money. In retrospect, we wish we'd had a doula, and if we have another baby, we are definitely getting one. I slept about 3 hours during the whole thing, and took one hourlong trip home to check on our pets (another thing we hadn't set up ahead of time, because we didn't think we'd be in labor that long), and I wish I'd have had a second person in the room with me as a helper and an advocate.

Mother and child are both wonderfully healthy... Mom is planning a backpacking trip this summer, and baby is now 15 months old, walking, and brimming with inquisitiveness and personality.

I realize this is a longwinded description of our hospital experience, when in fact, you are planning to deliver at home. Hopefully it at least casts a little illumination into the alternative experience. Best wishes and let us know how it goes.

Roger


edit: I've been misspelling "preeclampsia" all along, I'll fix it with this edit.