The surprise freebirth of twins Archer & Annabelle:
At 5am I was tossing and turning in bed and I felt a massive pop. My waters had just broken and went all over the bed.
My gasp woke my husband Kris up and he fixed up the bed and I went to go have a bath. I said to him, this could be the start or this could go on for days. I'll let you know if anything progresses. He went back to sleep and I ended up having a bath and making some fried rice to eat as I was hungry.
After I ate it, I threw it all up. I also emptied my bowels. I was getting mild contractions here and there but eventually I fell asleep on the couch. At around 7am, Kris and my daughter Jeanie woke up. I still was only having contractions here and there and I wasn't sure that this was the real deal. As the contractions started to become more frequent, I started using the exercise ball to support me while I was on my hands and knees. Jeanie was trying to steal the ball and kept yelling “no mummy, stop”. Now that I knew it was happening, I decided that if I was going to lean into these contractions and focus, I was going to need her to leave.
I hopped into the bath while I waited for Jeanie to be picked up by my mother in law. While I was in the bath, my contractions stopped. Once Jeanie got picked up, I got out of the bath and was still only experiencing mild sensations. I told Kris that now would be the best time to leave and get any snacks and drinks before things intensified more and I might need him. When he left and until he got back, the sensations stopped again. It was around 10am when he got back from the shops and he decided to finish up some of the work he had to do before he took time off (talk about last minute 😂) he left me to labour on my own and after a while I was calling him in to apply counter pressure to my hips. It was getting quite intense and I couldn't believe how much the counter pressure was alleviating the pain, so I asked him to do it every time.
I decided to hop in the pool and the hot water was starting to run out as it was filling up so my husband started adding pots of hot water to keep it nice and warm. As I felt a big contraction coming, my husband poured a big pot of hot water in which eventually made contact with my skin and was way too hot. I leaped out of the pool while in the middle of that contraction, this was not pleasant at all! I had a few contractions outside of the pool because I didn't have enough time to get back in between them. Kris was still applying counter pressure each time because I felt like I couldn't get through them without it. I then decided it was time to get back into the pool.
The movement of me lifting my leg over to get into the pool must've shifted the baby’s position in some way because immediately after doing that, the next contraction forced me to push and I remember saying to my husband “oh this is the feeling I really hate”. I had to pull myself together and tell myself that I needed to relax and allow my body to do what it needed to without resisting. On the next contraction, the head was out.
At this point we hadn’t started recording anything as we didn’t expect things to happen so quickly, so Kris got up and hit record on his phone once the head had come out. While he was walking back to the pool after pressing record, the baby’s body had come out and he fell into the water. Kris picked him up and told me it was a boy, he let out a loud cry after about 10 seconds.
It happened so quickly that there wasn't enough time for me to really feel any pain.
I was so grateful for a quick second stage of labour because for Jeanie I was in that stage for two hours. I couldn't even turn around to look or hold my baby. I was just in pure shock and joy that I had done it. I remember thinking not long before that we could've had hours and hours to go so I was mentally preparing myself for a much longer labour. After what had just happened set in, I turned around and held my baby boy. What a joy, I was so happy at how everything went, I couldn't have been more pleased. A happy and healthy baby too! Because I had a wild pregnancy there were always thoughts in the background… What if the baby is deformed or has something wrong with them? So seeing him looking so perfect and crying as soon as he came out was so relieving.
I started to get strong contractions again so I figured I better birth the placenta because they were too strong for me to hold the baby. I hopped out of the pool and Kris held the baby while I worked out how to get the placenta out. With the next contraction I tugged a bit on the cord to see if it would come out. I tried squatting and that didn't work either. It was getting so uncomfortable with the contractions that I thought maybe if I took some placenta release tincture it would help it come out faster. I did say to my husband that it was weird how strong the contractions were and I was getting quite a pushy feeling with them that I never remembered having with the placenta when I gave birth to Jeanie. The next contraction I had I tugged the cord again and to my surprise a water sack popped. I was so confused. I was trying to figure out why that happened but before I could think about it too much another contraction came and I pushed. My husband was in front of me holding the baby and I was leaning over the couch. I felt down and I said to Kris….”That's a nose”.
He put the 1st baby down on the floor under me and I asked him to start recording again. I could feel the second baby moving around adjusting themselves. This took what felt like a few minutes or so. Eventually I got the urge to push again and the baby's body came out. She was covered in a lot of vernix and she was quite slow to transition. I could immediately hear her breathing but she did sound a little gurgly. I held onto her and rubbed her back and eventually she let out a big scream. I can't imagine how she would've been treated in the system with how she presented. I imagine there would've been a huge stress about it and there would've been a lot of aggressive rubbing or trying to clear her airways. Intuitively I just knew she was fine and needed some time. I wasn't panicked at all. After all that I looked at Kris and just could not believe what had happened. What a shock. I was still trying to process it all. All that time there were two babies, not one. I just thought how blessed we were to have an amazing surprise like this. It was so nice to have such a surreal experience of birthing twins at home without encountering all the fear and anticipation that we would have if we had known beforehand.
After I birthed the placenta, which came out very easily, we discussed what to do next. We weren’t prepared for this situation so we needed to re-group. I was planning on trying a lotus birth but now with two I was struggling to figure out how I would try to breastfeed them while having them both attached to their placentas. We were also feeling like we didn't have enough hands! I called my friend to come over and help because I felt extremely faint and out of breath when I tried to stand up. In the meantime, we moved the placentas into a bowl and carried them with the twins into the bed. On my way to the bedroom I almost fainted due to my inability to breathe well. It made sense though because my insides had just undergone such a huge change and my body hadn’t yet adapted to that. My friend arrived to help and she brought us food and made me a smoothie with raw milk, kefir, Oystermax and Liver powder (how amazing is she?). We only had one cord tie so we used some yarn that I had instead to tie them both. Kris cut both cords and then my friend helped me to try breastfeeding them both.
Two weeks on and the twins are thriving and growing well. I am getting the hang of feeding and handling two babies at the same time.
Despite the conditioning that I’ve been exposed to about twins being difficult, I’m choosing to allow this experience to be what it is, and not having any preconceived ideas about what the future will look like. I deeply feel this experience was meant for us, and because of this I know we have the tools to navigate this special gift we have been given.
Before giving birth I couldn’t imagine having twins, now when I look at them cuddling up to each other, I couldn’t imagine having only one.
