My husband and I were living in New Zealand at the time, far away from friends and family, and when my mother learned that I was pregnant she had organised to fly over to meet her first grandchild. She had booked her flights to arrive 10 days after I was due, so that Doting Dad and I would have time to bond as a family and get into our own little routine. That was the plan anyway, and at first she was worried that I would have the baby early and she would miss out on seeing her as a squishy newborn, and then as the days rolled on by she started joking about how I might not even have the baby until after she arrived, at first I balked at the idea, I was heavily pregnant and very uncomfortable and I didn’t know how I could possibly stay pregnant that long, but sure enough when Doting Dad and I picked Mum up from the airport I was still very much pregnant.

Of course by then it was February so everyone I know was asking “where is the baby?”. I thought I had been ingenious to be so vague about my due date but I really should have considered the possibility of going so far past 40 weeks. It was hard having to deal with all the questions, in the age of facebook and twitter it’s not just a polite phone call here and there that you have to field, instead each morning I would wake up to a cascade of questions and well wishes and concerned comments. Wall posts, inbox messages, tweets, Email, SMS, phone calls etc etc etc, It was exhausting, after a while I found it very draining and toward the end, even infuriating – I blame the hormones a little for that though.

At first it was just the “any news yet?” comments but later, as the days went by, there were all sorts of messages, “are you sure you’re even pregnant?”, “Will you get up and wash the windows for goodness sake, you’re sitting down too much”, “What does the doctor say?”, “are you even ‘allowed’ to go this overdue”? The comments implying I was hallucinating a pregnancy were particularly hurtful since we had spend over two years trying to fall pregnant, during which time I had convinced myself over and over that I was pregnant only to be faced with negative test after negative test, equally hurtful were the comments that implied that it was somehow my fault that the baby hadn’t arrived yet, as if my laziness was causing her to stay put, the questions about the doctors were difficult to field since I wasn’t seeing a doctor at the time, which made people a bit nervous on our behalf, worst of all though were the questions about what I was ‘allowed’ to do. I would find myself typing infuriating responses about how I was a grown woman and I was ‘allowed’ to do whatever I wanted to do, only to delete them all without hitting send (thankfully!).

Truthfully though the reason why I found all the questions so daunting was because I was starting to doubt myself. We had tried for so long to get pregnant, and in the end we found ourselves in the position of having to use fertility drugs in order to fall pregnant, so late at night when I was lying in bed, unwieldy and uncomfortable I couldn’t help but worry that maybe since I couldn’t get pregnant naturally, I wouldn’t be able to go into labour naturally either. We were trying so hard to have a natural pregnancy and birth but maybe I was putting myself and my baby at risk by being so stubborn about not wanting any interventions.

I know that a lot of people were worrying about us, and about the baby, but (in the light of day at least) I knew that she was okay, I could feel that she was perfectly fine every time she kicked her toes under my ribcage or got a case of the hiccups, and every hour or so you could see my whole belly jiggle around as she did a little dance in there. People would ask “aren’t you worried?”, I would assure them that I knew she was okay and they would just look at me skeptically. I think we are all so dependent on external validation that we forget to take note of how we feel. But we had refused ultrasounds throughout the pregnancy and hadn’t even heard the heartbeat until 30 weeks because I didn’t want to use the doppler, choosing instead to listen with a pinnard. I think the fact that we had always been relying on my intuition about the baby from the start really helped us to connect with her as the days ticked by.

After 40 weeks, our midwife was starting to pressure me in her quiet little way, and kept suggesting that I try natural induction techniques to get things started. At first I was all for the idea of homeopathics or acupuncture to help bring on the labour but the more I thought about it the more I thought it was unnecessary. Induction is induction after all and if the baby isn’t ready to come then she isn’t ready. In my opinion, just because the induction techniques are not medical doesn’t make induction of labour any more a ‘natural’ thing to do. So I didn’t take the cimicifuga and caulophyllum homeopathic pills she left for us and I didn’t call the acupressurist who’s number she left for me and I didn’t head up to the hospital for monitoring just to ‘make sure’ that the placenta was okay. Our baby was going to come in her own time and it was really important to me that I hold the space for her until she was ready to come.

And so we waited. As family members created facebook groups to try and encourage ‘chicklet’ to make her appearance and acquaintances asked if we had tried having sex yet. My Mum had been staying with us for a whole week, and there was still no sign of labour, she was starting to worry that the date of her return flight would arrive before the baby did, Doting Dad’s bosses were starting to get antsy since they had someone on standby to cover for him during his paternal leave, and my hips were creaking under the weight of full term baby, but still we waited.

It was a long wait – and felt much longer than it actually was – but I went into labour naturally on the morning of the 13th of February, 19 days after my medical due date. I was 42 weeks and 5 days pregnant. When our daughter was born, she still had patches of vernix on her skin, she weighed just 3.5kgs, by no means the giant baby people were warning me about, and her placenta was perfect, not a single calcification spot to be seen. Had I been planning a hospital birth instead of a homebirth I would have been routinely induced far too early and she wouldn’t have had the opportunity to grow to her required maturity before being forced out into the world. As it was, she was bright eyed and alert, born with her eyes open, taking in the world and already strong enough to hold up her head when held. I hate to think what damage we would have done if we had left ourselves in the ‘care’ of hospital policy.

Those last few weeks were a hard slog but I’m so pleased that I was able to give Juniper the time she needed to enter this world in her own time.

I remember the exact moment homebirthing became a consideration for me. We had just decided to start talking seriously about the possibility of having a family, and (not yet) Doting Dad – my now husband who was then just the hottie I was dating – had done his weekly library run and brought me back a couple of books about pregnancy and birthing. I’ll be eternally grateful that the two books he picked up weren’t stock standard mainstream books like “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” but were “Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering” By Sarah Buckley and “Spiritual Midwifery” by Ina May Gaskin. I picked up Gentle Birth Gentle Mothering first and I was hooked. I had never before considered the possibility but as soon as I did, it felt like it was the exact right choice for us. I remember broaching the subject with Doting Dad that night, treading carefully because I didn’t want him to be freaked out by the idea, but he only hesitated for a moment before he was on board.

So the decision to homebirth was made really quickly, intuitively it felt like the right decision for us, it wasn’t until later when I was researching, that I learned more about the hospital system and about the appalling treatment of women during birth. The more I read, the more convinced I became that homebirthing was the right choice for us. It took a long time to get from deciding to homebirth to actually having our homebirth, because we were part of the unlucky percentage of couples who have problems conceiving. It took 26 difficult months to finally fall pregnant but in a way I am grateful for those months because it really allowed me to educate myself about birth, about the risks of homebirthing, and the risks of hospital birthing, it allowed me to become part of an online community of wonderful homebirthing women who supported me through the TTC journey and then through my pregnancy and birth. It allowed me to really come to terms with taking the road less travelled, so that when people questioned me about the choice, I was prepared to answer their questions.

So why was homebirthing the right choice for us? First and foremost I really wanted my birth to be gentle and calm. I am a calm person, and my husband is a calm person, we take things in our stride and our home is a quiet, calm and relaxed place so doing everything we could to make sure that our child’s first journey was calm and peaceful and gentle was a huge consideration for us. We didn’t want her to be born amidst noise and light and strangers in a cold room, in a hospital filled with sick people. The idea of her being born instead into a warm, quiet, dimly lit room with only her family and a midwife present was much more appealing, we loved the idea of her being born into our arms instead of the arms of a stranger. We wanted her entry to be beautiful, not filled with fear or confusion. Secondly, I was very aware that by going to a hospital I would be giving my body to the system. There is a lot of talk when it comes to birth about choice, but I strongly believe that the choices presented to women during birth are not true choices at all and that in most cases women are bullied into fitting into the system, they are coerced into giving up their rights for the sake of the convenience of the hospital staff in the name of policy. They are taught to fear the process of birth, to distrust their bodies and to believe that birth is dangerous.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a place for hospitals in birth, sometimes there are emergencies, and sometimes women – and babies – need a little help, but it is far from the commonplace occurrence that doctors will have you believe and in most cases women CAN do it on their own. I have heard stories from SO many women who found themselves in the midst of a crisis during the birth of their child while they were in hospital and in most cases the crisis was not averted by the hospital staff but instead was created because of their procedures, this is often referred to in homebirth circles as the cascade of intervention. Babies come in their own time, and messing with the process only causes problems, which is why when you are induced you are WAY more likely to end up with a C Section. Messing with the natural order of things only makes things worse, but a lot of women are lead to believe that the hospital is what SAVED them from disaster instead of being a big part of the problem.

But I digress – In the end deciding to homebirth was the best thing for us, my birth was everything I wanted it to be and Juniper’s entry into the world was just as I imagined it (if a little more intense!) and we were lucky to have made that choice for ourselves because as it turned out I didn’t go into labour until I was 42 weeks and 5 days pregnant which in hospital land is practically unheard of and would have earned me an induction well before our beautiful girl was ready to join us. As it turned out Juniper was born in the middle of the night, into an inflatable kiddie pool covered in fish in the loungeroom of our house-on-a-hill in a country far away from home, with my husband and mother there to hold my hand and a midwife who walked in the door with only 15 minutes to spare.

I’ll tell you all more about that beautiful day in another post, but for now, let me say that homebirth was absolutely the right choice for us and that I would choose it again without a second thought.

Living with my mother again isn’t something I had planned, but after Juniper was born suddenly living outside the country started to feel more isolating than intrepid so we figured it was time to come home, we hadn’t intended to come back so quickly but a run in with some people we trusted – but shouldn’t have – put us in a tight spot financially and instead of slogging it out so far away from home, we decided to take my mother up on her offer of a room, cheap rent and the opportunity to save up a new nest egg, and so here we are.

We’ve only been here a couple of weeks and we are settling in nicely. My Mother is over the moon about having her first grandchild under her roof during these precious early months and is thrilled to bits about having her own personal chef in the kitchen cooking up a storm in the evenings. We are struggling a little with the change in weather, but otherwise are happy to be here and ready to plan our next life adventure.

I guess in our position most people would be saving up a nest egg for a home, or at the very least figuring out where they want to settle down to next, but we’ve always been a little odd. So instead of saving up for a home – and a life of mortgage repayments and interest rate headaches – we are saving up for a caravan and hitting the books (well, the internet anyway) to figure out the best way to see this beautiful country of ours. It’s going to take a while to get set up and to save enough to get ourselves started but our plan is to be on the road by 2015.

This blog will eventually be about that journey, and the joys of parenting peacefully on the road, but in the meantime I’d like it to be a place where I can talk about the daily decisions we make as parents, and about the choices we make (or have made). I will write about my decision to homebirth Juniper in a loungeroom a thousand miles away from home, about her lotus birth, about going into post dates, about my desire to raise empowered children, about homeschooling. I will blog about the difficulties I face and the road bumps I find along the way as I discover my own limitations as a parent. I will blog about our triumphs and pitfalls and sometimes I will blog about nothing at all.

Wherever this crazy little life takes us, I’ll be here sharing the journey with you – oh imaginary blog reader. Wish us luck.