091 - Lisa | homebirth, independent midwives, continuity of care, waterbirth, en caul birth, breastfeeding

What were the first steps then? Did you know much about your options birth wise? Did you have to go shopping around for the best hospital or was there a clear choice based on where you live? So I

did a lot of reading because I knew I wanted a baby and I read lots of different books, started listening to your podcast, I think like two years before I

got

pregnant.

So I just started consuming loads of content and there's so much out there.

And I knew that I wanted a home birth and Bracken was very supportive from the start.

He was born at home, his brother was born at home.

So he was just like, well, obviously that's what we're doing.

I think he would have almost struggled the other way around.

So that was really nice.

And I was like, okay, let me look into the options with the NHS.

And unfortunately there wasn't a lot of information available.

And I was like, you just hear so many things about maybe last minutes unavailabilities or just not having the same person.

And I struggle a bit getting close to people.

I need quite a bit of time.

So it's like, no, I'd rather pay for someone when fortunately we're able to have a midwife from the start to the finish and especially after birth to have someone for a few weeks.

So I started looking around for private or independent midwives and found some.

And that's I had a chat thing about midwives.

six or seven weeks after I found I was pregnant.

So before anybody knew, I just was like, so I'm really early pregnant.

I just got paranoid that if I don't ask them immediately, they'll be booked up, which fortunately wasn't the case.

And yeah, then I had a long chat and it all seemed fine.

So I went to Lister, which is in Stevenage, for the booking appointment just to have that as a backup, already knowing that I wouldn't use the NHS care if all goes well.

That was quite nice, knowing that early on and just not having to do two things parallel, which I think you can do.

So you can have the NHS appointments and the private appointments, but they do the same checks.