Let me take a moment to tell you a little about the birth. For those of you who didn't (or still don't know) there is a thing called the birth centre at the Royal Hospital for Women (RHW) in Randwick. As one of our friends from church would say, it's a bit of a hippy commie (as in communist - no offence to left wingers here) hand clapping and chanting kind of set up, where a midwife (we had two in fact due to a shift change occurring at the time of the birth) and the spouses support people (ME! and our doula Eta - short for Henrietta) deliver the baby. Yes that's right, no epidurals, no gas, no doctors, no forceps, only us and some rubber gloves. The room that we stayed in is somewhat reminiscent of a hotel room, but with a huge bath tub. It was definitely a nice and relaxing atmosphere.

How did it all happen? Well, on Tuesday Emma started to get the first couple of contractions. She managed to breath through them without me taking any notice at all in fact. She told me that the contractions are there, but, as I didn't believe her, I thought it would be another couple of days before the baby would arrive. I said to Emma "those are not contractions. I watched the videos at the Calm Birth course, I know what a contraction looks like. If that was a real contraction you would be wiggling your hips and be breathing like an rhino (heavy and deep breathing is meant here)." Well surely after Emma finished watching NCIS that night at around 10.30pm I realised that the contractions were getting stronger. I had a job application due on Wednesday 18th June, European time though and thought that I could finish writing what was needed on Wednesday and then send it off in the afternoon. Emma advised me though to finish the application that night and send it off. That was done by about 1.30am. By then Emma's contractions were getting stronger and stronger, to the point where she thought she could calm them down by having a hot bath, which she surely did. She realised though that the contractions were getting any weaker and advised me to sleep for a couple of hours. At around 3am I woke up as I could here Emma getting more and more restless, and around 3.30am we made the decision to go to hospital.

It was around 4am by the time we got to the hospital and about 4.30am by the time the midwives had a chance to examine her. It was kind busy that night, 5 deliveries all together. We were quite worried that they will tell us that we still need to go home. But Emma's cervix was already 7cm dilated (if you are baby person, you know what this means, if you are not, well it's kind of a lot, they usually let you stay in hospital if you are at least about 4cm, baby pops out at about 9-10cm, so you can imagine that the contractions would have had to be already super strong). So Emma held out formidably.

From then on, it all went reasonably quick, textbook style, apparently, according to the midwives. We had a water birth as you can see from some of the photos. Emma's water didn't break naturally, the membrane was popped by the nurse to accelerate the birth. There was no clap on the bum of the baby to make her cry after she was born. She just came out and was placed straight away onto Emma and didn't say to much for quite a while.