Doing your best to prepare yourself is the best thing you can do when it comes to something as unpredictable as labour. Many women find that each labour is different, as was the case with mummy blogger Kate Hogarth. Please enjoy this is excerpt from her amazing birth story.

"When things were more intense I put on my @Babycare TENS machine that I was kindly gifted. The relief was instant and gave me something to focus on throughout my contractions, alongside my breathing. I kept my Elle TENS2 on throughout the whole of my labour, it was a complete god send! By 4:30 am my partner and I were relaxing to music with oils diffusing. I asked Sean (my partner) to ring Angela-our doula. I wanted to make sure that I was relaxing properly and check if she actually thought this was the real thing as I was still doubting was in labour. She arrived and we took each contraction as it came - chatting and laughing in-between each one. I found that I naturally went into an all-fours position when contracting, and swayed with each one. By 6:00 am I knew I needed my mum here to watch Evelyn (my daughter) if she woke as I had begun to vocalise (I can only describe this as a mooing sound ). My mum arrived by 7:00 am and ushered us off to the hospital afraid I was going to give birth on the living room floor (not that I’d have been too upset by that) . We arrived at the hospital and I was 8cm dilated! This was such a relief as I think Sean and I were both worried that I was still in the very early stages. I had gas and air and asked for the pool to be filled, but by the time this was ready I was fully dilated and wouldn’t have been able to walk there.
I was in labour standing up over the bed, bearing down and swaying as each contraction came. The midwives were so supportive and really hands-off, which was exactly what we wanted. I didn’t actively push for long as it just wasn’t what my body was telling me to do. One of my midwives then said that baby was ready to be born in the next few pushes and as I knew I was tiring, I pushed with everything I had and our little babe shot out like a rocket in one push It’s maybe because she’s not so little and came out so quickly that I tore quite badly but that’s okay! Sean announced that she was a girl (followed quickly by ‘well she can be a footballer anyway’ ) and we had lots of skin-to-skin whilst we waited for the cord to go white. Our perfect girl, Annie Mae Hogarth was born at 10:31 am on Tuesday 2nd June 2020". To read Kate’s full blog post please click here