Saturday, 2 January 2016

Why I chose Daisy?...

Hello and welcome to my first blog!

I wanted to tell you all about my own experience of Daisy, mainly because it was amazing but also because if I'm going to promote myself as a Daisy Birthing Teacher I feel I should share how Daisy Birthing really helped me.

I was talking recently to an expectant relative about my birth and why she should give Daisy a try. What I didn't realize was that inadvertently I was promoting Daisy as a way to achieve a home birth. As a first time mum she said I'm not that keen on birthing at home, which made me stop in my tracks and rethink how I do promote Daisy?

Daisy did help me achieve the home birth that I'd waited years for but it also gave me so much more at a time when I really needed support...

My first son was born in 2004. I really wanted an active, natural birth so I did a lot of research and a lot of reading in preparation. My labour lasted 24 hours from the first twinge to delivery and for me was not the positive experience I'd hoped for. I swore then that if I ever had any more children I would have a home birth. What I realised was I'd had the will and belief in my body but I didn't have the skills I needed to birth the way I wanted and nobody there to guide me back then.

Prior to finding out I was pregnant in 2015, Daisy had popped up on my Facebook a few times and it really struck a chord with me so when I got that positive line I knew this time I'd be doing things differently.

Due to personal circumstances I started Daisy classes at 28 weeks and attended two terms. During this time I was experiencing an awful lot of stress in my personal life and increasingly aware of how the stress would be affecting my unborn baby. All I wanted to do was enjoy my pregnancy and look forward to becoming a Mum again. So how did Daisy help me?

Well the first term of Daisy really helped me resolve what had happened to me 11 years ago. I had been carrying a lot of grief around about the experience. Daisy helped me understand what had happened to me physically and why and how a lot of the intervention I experienced and the direction I was given was unnecessary. I wasn't counselled about this as that's not what Daisy is about but the new knowledge that I gained helped me to see what could have been different. Simple things helped, like understanding how cervical dilation can go backwards as well as forwards and why some birthing positions are more helpful than others. Daisy taught me the skills I needed to birth this time and it also filled in the blanks in my knowledge about how to be active, breath correctly and stay relaxed and calm. 

Every session I practised my birthing breathing techniques and movements and I looked forward to the guided meditation at the end of the session, even though it was really hard to take my mind off what was happening in my personal life. By term two my personal stress had become less and I was generally able to relax a whole lot more. My second term really allowed me to learn to relax and it cemented all the skills I'd learned in the first term. 

What I would say to any new Daisy mums is complete as many terms as you can as the more you do the more embedded the skills you learn become so that on the big day you just know what to do to stay calm, you know how to breath and you can visualise exactly what your body is doing.

Daisy also offered a couples course which me and my partner attended; something I would recommend to all birth partners! My partner was really on board with my ideas for a natural birth and I'm really glad we attended together because we realised that his experience of childbirth with his ex wife were also very medicalised and Daisy helped him also to understand his previous experiences and how this birth would be completely different.




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