Carrying a baby

 Pregnancy – It has been said that a woman is at her most beautiful when pregnant. Well I am about to burst your bubble and tell you that there are women out there who beg to differ – especially for those saying goodbye to their 36 -26-36 figure for the next 9 months. Well ladies have I got news for you, this is just one of the many changes you can expect throughout your pregnancy. Carrying a baby and all that extra weight can take its toll – proving very stressful for some women who tend to feel ugly about them selves at this time, why? When in the world of fashion you have designers who focus purely on the pregnant woman. In the world of cosmetics we call it a make over and in the world of pregnant women it is called a cover up. This only apply`s to the woman who is still trying to come to terms with her new look similar to that of a sumo wrestler. Pregnancy is a wonderful experience and even more special when holding your new born baby in your arms. If this is your first pregnancy then you may need a little more understanding on the baby`s development within. At first you may not even be aware of any baby movement like the odd flutter all because the whole process is new to you It is around 18 to 20 weeks into your pregnancy when you may experience your first sensational sensation. Don`t expect your baby to constantly kick because there will be times baby needs to rest. From as early as 20 to 24 weeks the activity inside the womb will gradually increase and from then onwards over approximately the next ten weeks, your baby will be in overtime mode with kicks and turns. From 24 to 28 weeks baby can develop hiccups, which will explain any jolts you may feel occasionally throughout this period. It is at this time the amniotic sac will now contain up to 750ml (26floz) of fluid which permits the infant in the womb to move around freely. Into the 29th week your baby will start to make smaller but more distinct movements because of the limited space – in other words hard to manoeuvre inside a cramped uterus. Positioning time for baby is classed as normal around the of 36th week where the infant is now in the head-down position, Expect baby`s activities at this time to feel like prodding jabs from the feet and arms followed by a couple of uncomfortable rib kicking episodes. From 36 to 40 weeks the baby inside the womb will be of a good size therefore less action. Activity on the inside is a lot less frequent now and even more so during the last two weeks of your pregnancy. The infant now waiting to make his/her appearance will have their growth rate slowed down slightly. This is nothing to worry about as it is completely normal. For all those pregnant women who still feel the need to cover up then go and fashion your self up from head to toe with all the latest trendy designer gear in maternity wear but what you have to remember is, that you can never cover up the end result – can you MUM

This gateway is recognised in absolutely all cultures as being a significant transition in a persons life just as reaching puberty. When we reach puberty, we move from being a child to an adult. We transition from being a woman and a man to being a mother and father when we become pregnant and give birth. These are significant shifts. Puberty for a woman occurs at one time menses starts. For young boys this is not as clear a time. Women are the only ones who physically experience pregnancy and childbirth. There is truth in the statement no one will do the labour except you. However, pregnancy and childbirth stimulate emotional changes in both men and women. Many cultures honour the becoming a father. When their partner is pregnant, many fathers exhibit physical and emotional sympathetic symptoms. This is referred to as Couvade symptoms. Fathers all over the world have adored the Pink Kit Method for delivering babies with better resources. They like the practical, can do approach and they can do. Men are absolutely wonderful childbirth coaches. Remember, they have all been born through a womans body. No woman has been inside a mans body. And, they have the same body. Once they learn to work with the pain of labour being part of the process (unless told differently) rather than indicating a problem; men will bring persistent and determined skills that their partners can rely on. In modern maternity care, the role of the father in childbirth has changed dramatically in the past 30 years. Up to the 1970s fathers were excluded from the labour and delivery. In some cultures this exclusion existed historically and still exists. Women were left alone in a hospital ward or room while staff periodically came in and checked them. Since the 1970s fathers have been encouraged to support their partner in labour. As an aside, there are many terms used in childbirth discussions that no one has bothered to define or clarify but we are somehow all expected to know. Conduct your own research by asking 20 people what a natural birth is, what interventions are, and what a father should do to support his partner during labor. You'll discover that we use those terms to mean or imply something significant yet few people have the same understanding. We have developed our own definitions as a result of the large number of women and men who have used The Pink Kit Method. Birth is natural, it comes at the conclusion of pregnancy. Birth is natural, so is pain, death, bleeding, long labours, quick births, tears, pain free experiences, tension, relaxation, screaming, quiet breathing and all the combinations you can imagine. Childbirth interventions can be lying down for a vaginal exam, taking a shower if youre tense, having someone breathe with you, taking castor oil to stimulate labour along with all the medical assessments, monitoring and procedures that people discuss. Fathers, friends and relatives who support a woman can be there yet not know what to do, feel useless, helpless, a failure, know how to breathe with the woman, touch her just right, encourage her or wish someone would give her pain relief because she is so obviously suffering. Variability is the name of the game in childbirth. Yet, childbirth is a remarkably same experience for all women. (At the moment we will assume a woman will labour to give birth. Women who plan an elective delivery for personal choice or necessity can still use The Pink Kit Method. Doing so gives expectant parents a sense of involvement and closeness not offered in other types of childbirth education. Many of the skills learned are applicable.) Childbirth is an exercise in plumbing. An object will move through your container. Your job is to get out of the way of the object. In other words, work with the process of opening up for the object and ejecting it. The opening up phase of childbirth is accompanied by a series of contractions that open the diaphragm (cervix). Once the cervix is open and when the object has moved through the tube (pelvis), the contractions begin to eject the object by opening the aperture (vagina). Not one woman in history or any place on Earth has given birth by a different experience. No baby has popped out of the crown of a womans head after a shiver started at her big toe, moving up her body until her cranium separated. No baby has delivered out a mouth, nose or ear. As silly as it sounds, we must remind ourselves of our similarities. Instead people have focused on all the variability, diversity and differences. Common Knowledge Trust shares our similarities: The childbirth preparation that does prepare our physical container to allow this object to pass through it with less trauma. The positive birthing behaviours we can use to work through the process of childbirth even when we dont like the experience AND in and around all medical care. The real and effective coaching skills that help women stay focused, open, relaxed and willing to meet the challenge of childbirth. Pregnant women and expectant fathers have a specific window of opportunity to prepare for childbirth in the last 12 weeks of pregnancy. The pregnant body is beginning to prepare for childbirth and so is the baby. Our body and baby prepare in their own way but arrive at the same point together which is labour. If a woman needs or plans a non-labouring delivery, her body and baby dont know that. They are still preparing for labour and birth. Why is childbirth called labour? Its hard work. Learn the skills that will make your work easier by utilizing The Pink Kit Method. The Pink Kit Method for birthing better presents 4 foundations. The Pink Kit: Essential Preparations for Your Birthing Body, which focuses primarily on the necessary body preparation, contains the first two. In order to prepare for birth, we must have a relaxed and good understanding of our 3D body. As one father explained Until my wife and I used The Pink Kit, I thought giving birth was about having strong muscles to push the baby out. Now I understand its about creating space. Space creation is done in a 3 dimensional reality, not a 2 dimensional one. This means that we must know those parts of our body that are most involved with birth. Because CKT is the collective voice of ordinary people, we explain birth as plumbing: object, container, tube (pelvis), diaphragm (cervix) and aperture (vagina). Mostly we, the container, must prepare so that when the object decides to come out, we can work to open our container through the process of the efforts of our baby. As humans, we have minds that tell us how to prepare the actual components of our container. Humans are gifted with an amazing mind. We can remember the past and even alter our perceptions or responses of what happened before. We can make plans into the future just as athletes mentally go over the event again and again, we can imagine ourselves working through labour and giving birth. When we prepare our container, we use our amazing Mind. When childbirth occurs, then we can use our minds to implement our skills in how to create space, stay open and relaxed for our child to move through us. Its vigorous for most of us. Babies are big. When we connect our mind to our body or yoke them together then we have more control over our body and instinctive responses. For instance, every athlete, whether professional or amateur, has a complex connection between their mind and body. Theyve achieved that by practice, practice and more practice. Although the ability to run or jump is something that humans do naturally, these athletes do not go into their events just intuitively or instinctively doing those things. They learn how to do them well. Unfortunately, we give birth infrequently and have to rely on something other than practice to bring good labour management skills to childbirth. That something else is the process of labour that keeps going. There is nothing like it in our lives really. Once labour starts, it continues and leads us on whether we have skills or not, like it or not, are coping or not or have a good coach or not. We can use that physiological experience to apply the skills right away at each moment of the process. If we dont apply the positive skills then we often just react, particularly if there is a lot of pain associated with labour. We will still breathe in labour whether we breathe positively or scream. Our body has to be in some posture or position, we can either use positions and postures that facilitate the passage of our baby through our body or we can get into positions we like that slow the birth process and keep us in labour for hours longer than necessary. Although there is a current belief that women will get into the best position, thats hardly the case just as many women tense up naturally to the pain of childbirth. If the current belief that women naturally know how to give birth is true, then they would rarely use pain medication or have medically assisted births. At home, in the birth center, and in the hospital, women become tense. We cripple ourselves when we believe that external factors are the sole reasons for good or bad births. We leave ourselves feeling victims to the external rather than powerful within ourselves. I blamed my first bad experience on the hospital, doctor, what they made me do and my husband for being pathetic at helping me. Next time, I changed where I gave birth home, changed my birth provider a woman midwife; I still had a horrible experience. Then I realised that I had to learn how to birth. True power for all of us as women and men is to have personal skills. Childbirth is an event in our lives where its easy to get skilled because the event is so similar to all women regardless of where they birth or with whom or who they are. For such a BIG and important event people perpetuated a belief that women should have to respond to the experience intuitively or instinctively rather than with skills. As humans we have many physiologically natural urges besides childbirth. When we get hungry, we can browse on the nearest bush or learn to cook. We all urinate and defecate, but we learn to hold it until we go to the bathroom rather than doing so while sitting. The operative word is learn. We can learn to respond to labour contractions, use our minds and yoke our bodies and to choose positive birth behaviours in contractions and between them. Birth discussions revolve around women taking responsibility for making choices about where or with whom they will birth or what they want done or not done to them. If choice achieved the goals, then wed all be happy. We have assumed that taking responsibility is about making choices. Being responsible requires two different aspects. One is choice, the other is skills not just options. Any woman in her right mind would choose an easy birth, not to tear, to heal well etc. Whether most women would choose home birth would depend on other factors: whether they prefer the hospital, have health issues, young children at home and want a break, home isnt where they want to birth, it isnt safe or quiet etc. Not one woman would choose a birth she found too painful, to use pain relief when she didnt need it, have a major operation if she felt confident and knew she and her baby were healthy or to live with childbirth trauma. All women can have skills. So taking responsibility is just as much about being skilled at doing something so that the choices a person makes are more likely to actualise. For example, if a woman doesnt want to use pain relief then she has to have the skills to manage the experience of labour. Such a woman can still have a very painful labour and change her mind about her choice if she doesnt have the skills to cope and then feel let down or guilty. Shame, blame and guilt are a huge part of childbirth today. A woman may choose a home birth and find that the unexpected happens (for example, her waters break and she doesnt go into labour after 48 hours) and she ends up in hospital. With skills, she can still have a wonderfully empowering birth. For the past 30 years birth discussions have revolved around choice and informed consent (information). Common Knowledge Trust would like skills to form the triad. When we couple skills to choice, we are more likely to have a goal (choice) and take steps to achieve that goal (developing and using skills). When we couple skills to information, we can are more likely to have mastery rather than data. Childbirth skills will only become the common knowledge approach to childbirth when all expectant couples know that The Pink Kit Method for birthing better is available and that the skills they can teach themselves work in all birth situations because you will have another contraction regardless of your beliefs, where you birth, with whom, whether you have a long labour or a short one and all the other variables we can tell in our stories. Too often we hear pregnant women say: I hope I have a good birth. Hope is not a plan. The strategy is the Pink Kit.