My son Nicolas is my first Hypno Baby and the reason I am writing this post now. His birth was such an incredible and magical moment for me, and I would like to share this with you and help other moms have the birth they dream of.
My pregnancy actually went really well. I felt nice and didn’t have any problems. When I moved to the Netherlands seven years ago, it was always clear for me: if I was pregnant, I was definitely going to give birth in Germany. However, that changed quite fast. I really found the Dutch Birth system great as they treat you not like you are sick and everything is very natural with as few interventions as possible. You don’t need to go to a gynaecologist and have ultrasounds every visit if there are no special circumstances. I can understand a lot of Expats who are here and pregnant who think it looks scary at first and I will go deeper into this topic in a different post.
At 20 weeks, I had to change my midwives due to an administrative failure… I lived too far away from them and they also wouldn’t go to my chosen hospital. This ended up being the best thing that could have happened. The new practice I found was smaller and there were just two midwifes. I felt very comfortable and felt that they could handle me during birth…as I am sometimes not easygoing and need a strong person next to me for support.
Home Birth? Hell no!
My husband is from Chile and I am from Germany, and we were quite in favor of the option of giving birth in the hospital. My husband especially didn’t see any reason for a home birth (which is quite Dutch) and saw it as super irresponsible. We changed our mind quite quickly due to the new midwifes, and also because of the birth course we attended.
Searching for an alternative birth course that avoided having my husband behind me shouting, "push push push!" as seen in the movies, I heard about HypnoBirthing for the first time. My first reaction was more negative…oh no, hypnosis…that is definitely not working for me as I had a not so good experience with hypnosis in the past. I looked deeper into it and found out that it was more about deep relaxation techniques and special breathing techniques to support your body during contractions.
I was convinced and we took the course even though it was in Dutch and a bit more challenging as a result. This changed our whole view of birth and after just one lesson, we planned a beautiful home birth.
The course gave us such an incredible positive feeling about birth and an understanding about how your body naturally will work during labour and is currently working during pregnancy. It was astonishing. Your confidence is raised and I was actually looking forward to birth so much that I couldn’t wait for it anymore.
Planning is one thing, but it doesn’t work with birthing and Nico showed us that quite soon…