Charlie’s journey into the world

I’m absolutely thrilled to let you know we welcomed our little poppet, Charlie into the world on 15th November 2022! He’s a little dot at just 5.1lb and we’ve already lost hours staring at him!

I love having a wee nose at other people’s birth stories so thought it might be nice to share a little about my experience with you all! Having spent a lot of time with midwives recently, we’ve come to the conclusion that they’re a pretty special breed of humans! They have all been so knowledgeable, calm and caring and made the whole pregnancy and birth experience so positive for us.

I was so lucky to have a really lovely pregnancy with no sickness and very manageable tiredness - I’m a sleepy gal anyway so I was delighted with all the extra afternoon napping! I was able to carry on teaching Barre classes right the way through and taught my last live session 3 days before going into labour! Barre was an absolutely amazing prenatal workout for me - you can read all about my experience with exercising through my pregnancy here. Charlie managed to turn himself from head down to breech around 34 weeks so we were booked in for an ECV to turn him around and in the meantime I spent a lot of time lying upside down on ironing boards, burning moxibustion by my little toes and doing lots of hospital-recommended exercises to help turn a breech baby! The ECV was really successful (helped by the fact he hadn’t yet nestled his bum right into my pelvis) and despite all the stories I’d heard, wasn’t too uncomfortable at all!

I spent the next week bouncing on my birthing ball to try and get his head engaged and in the meantime, he did everything he could to turn himself back around 😂 So come week 38, we had a breech baby again! Charlie was tracking very small throughout the pregnancy so because of his weight, a natural breech birth wasn’t an option so we opted for a planned c-section. 

We got the call on Monday 14th November to say we were booked in for a 7.30am slot the following day so we skipped down to the hospital for a pre-op appointment and then came home to get the final bits prepped for Charlie’s arrival.

Charlie on the other hand obviously thought a very calm planned c-section needed a little spicing up so he made it known he was ready to come into the world and I started having contractions around 5pm on Monday night. Totally convinced it was Braxton Hicks, we went for a walk, grabbed a coffee, had a bath and generally tried to ignore them. 3 hours later I realised this probably wasn’t Braxton Hicks and labour was more likely! We grabbed the bags and headed straight to the hospital where they did an examination, confirmed labour had started and I was 1cm dilated. With Charlie being breech and only a small little thing they didn’t want to risk letting us wait until the planned c-section in the morning so we were quickly gowned up and taken through to the theatre.

Our all-female theatre team made us feel really relaxed and were more than accommodating of my Shania Twain playlist choice! The surgery was super quick and they were showing us little Charlie over the curtain before we knew it. Weirdly, I was expecting to recognise him and when I didn’t, the most I could get out was ‘f***ing hell’ - very motherly! 😂

Once we were into the recovery room we were able to spend lots of time bonding with Charlie and I started to get the hang of breast feeding. From here on in, we lost hours and hours of time staring at his little face and it was the loveliest bonding time. We were kept in for a few extra days to keep an eye on his weight so busied ourselves with newborn cuddles, Netflix and lots of Wagamamas deliveries!

So there we are! A hugely positive experience and cannot believe I now get to be a Mumma! It’s been 5 days since my c-section and the pain has been really manageable - I was up and about before not too long at all and even took the pram for a spin down to the local village for a coffee today. Very much looking forward to putting together a c-section recovery programme for our Bump & Beyond Movement Series to help all other Mummas with their c-section recovery.

Excited to introduce little Charlie to the Barre gang soon 💙