Baby and You

Baby and You - Session 3 - Safe Sleeping

Thu, 03 Sep 2020 06:00:00 GMT

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Baby and You - Session 3 - Natural Interventions

Thu, 03 Sep 2020 05:00:00 GMT

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Baby and You Session 3 - Caesarean Sections

Thu, 03 Sep 2020 04:00:00 GMT

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Baby and You - Session 3 - Perineal Care

Thu, 03 Sep 2020 02:00:00 GMT

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Baby and You - Session 3 - Skin-to-Skin Contact

Thu, 03 Sep 2020 01:00:00 GMT

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Baby and You - Session 2 - How Baby Moves

Wed, 02 Sep 2020 03:00:00 GMT

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Baby and You - Session 2 - Pain Relief

Wed, 02 Sep 2020 02:00:00 GMT

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Baby and You - Session 2 - Introduction

Wed, 02 Sep 2020 01:00:00 GMT

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Baby and You - Session 1 - Relaxation Exercises

Mon, 06 Jul 2020 07:00:00 GMT

Relaxation Exercises

Transcript:

Relaxation is important throughout pregnancy and throughout our lives. It’s important, if you can, to practice mindfulness or meditation relaxation. It’s really good for our mental health and our emotional wellbeing. Also, if you are doing any sort of hypnobirthing, then you might find that doing visualisations really helps during all the stages of the labour process. I am going to do a script with you now so get yourselves into a nice comfortable position. There is no right or wrong way to meditate and relax, but the worst thing you can say to yourself is I must relax because it will make you feel tense. It’s just about being kind to yourselves. If during this relaxation script you feel like you need to move, change your position, or open your eyes, that is all fine. You do what feels right for you. For now, if you can get yourself in to a nice comfy position that suits you. So, pregnant people may want to lie on their left side or be sat up with some nice comfy pillows. Partners may want to lie down or curl up. Do whatever feels right for you. I’m going to invite you to close your eyes if you feel comfortable to. If not, just focus on spots on the floor and just let your eyes relax. We are about to start the script.

Make yourself comfortable and now simply allow your eyes to close and the muscle of your eyes to soften so that you are completely comfortable. Now, breathe in deeply and slowly at least 3 times. As you breathe out say to yourself release, release, release. All the sounds you hear, such as voices or the traffic, are part of this wonderful soothing experience. As you focus on my voice, imagine that there is a surging wave of pure serenity and calm above your head. Now imagine that that wave is going to wash down through your whole body bringing calm, relaxation, and peace, with it. You feel it first moving through your head and down your forehead releasing all the muscles, flowing over the bridge of your nose, through your eyelids and cheeks, which become smoother and calm. It surges through your lips, your jaw, and your mouth. Now, it moves on bringing calm and softness to your neck and your shoulders. The wave of calm and peace moves on down both of your arms, past your elbows, down your forearms, and into your hands where the wave laps finally at the very tips of your fingers like the tide on a calm shore. Release, release, release.

Now the wave of calm and softness slowly surges through your chest and down your stomach. It flows down your back and through your pelvis as every muscle grows naturally softer. Now the wave continues down both of your leg, down your thighs bringing comfort and softness. Down past your knees and down your calves and into your feet where the wave laps down at the very tips of your toes like wavelets on a sunny beach, bringing complete calm and peace. Now, release every single muscle in your whole body. Sooth and release. Your mind and your body are now in complete harmony in a state of very deep comfort and serenity.

Now, I want you to imagine a carpet. A magic carpet just like in tales of old. This carpet is on a lawn in front of a large and beautiful tree. You know that this carpet is going to give you a wonderful and very happy experience, so you quietly walk over and sit down on it. Now you think about the place where you would most enjoy being. It could be somewhere you have been before, somewhere you have never been to but always wanted to go, or a completely new place that only exists in your imagination. All that matters is that it’s a place where you would like to be. You are going to a place where you feel completely tranquil and serene. Nobody at all, other than you, will know where you are going because you don’t have to tell anybody. So, it is completely your own choice. All that matters is that you are going to a place where you are completely happy and at ease. Mentally, tell your magic carpet to take you to this place now that you have made this choice. When you do so, you feel the carpet tighten underneath you. The edges curl up around you so that it is like sitting safely and securely in a cupped hand. Now the carpet starts to rise only to the height at which you feel completely safe and happy. It begins to move away, skimming over the earth quietly and swiftly. You see ahead of you in the distance the exact place you want to be. You approach it closer and closer until you are hovering above it. The magic carpet gently begins to descend. Down, down, down, until you very softly land upon the ground in this very special place. You stand up and walk from the carpet and you go towards something that catches your eye. As you come closer you see that it is a cradle filled with beautiful sweet smelling rose petals. You approach even closer as you see a small movement and then your heart leaps as you see a tiny new born baby resting on the petals and you realise this is your own baby for whom you have been waiting all these months. As you bend over your baby, you smile at absolute delight at seeing it and it looks at you with wide open eyes and you melt with tenderness and happiness. Pick your baby up and gently sit beside the rose covered cradle. You kiss your tiny baby’s face and nestle in to your chest where it naturally curls up warmly and contentedly. I will pause now, to enjoy this time with your baby for a few minutes as you relax blissfully until you hear my voice once again.

Time has come to return. Holding your baby safely and lovingly in your arms, you settle yourself comfortably back onto your magic carpet. You are well prepared for your baby’s birth as you know now how very happy being together is. Day by day, your love and confidence grow, and you know your subconscious mind is gently and subtly preparing you for the important day of your baby’s birth. You tell the carpet to take you back to the lawn beneath the tree. The carpet once more curls its sides up and holds you gently and safely like a large cupped hand. You feel it pressing against you as it starts to lift and ascending swiftly, you see once more the earth beneath you in miniature as you travel back to where you started. In the distance, you can see that beautiful tree and as you see it the carpet begins to descend and slows down until you are hovering by the tree. The carpet comes slowly down until very gently you feel the earth beneath you. As the carpet uncurls and lies flat and you are on the lawn by the tree again, but with the knowledge and the fulfilment and empowerment of what lies in store for you in the birth of your baby. You are now well-prepared for that day by being with your baby already, in your subconscious mind. You realise now what a wonderful experience you had. How very calm and happy you feel. Next time you do this you will become more and more tranquil and serene because you know how much you enjoy it. You understand the benefits it brings you to connect with your baby before its born. You look forward to birth and see it as the most wonderful and empowering experience. Meeting your baby happily and calmly. Now open your eyes and wait until you fully adjust to the here and now. Thank you.

That was lovely. Thanks. It’s rare that I get to relax. Thanks very much for this first session. We hope that you’ve enjoyed it. If you have any questions, speak to your community midwives and look out for the next session. Thanks very much.

Baby and You - Session 1 - Stages of Labour

Mon, 06 Jul 2020 06:00:00 GMT

Transcript:

Stages of labour

I just wanted to talk to you a little bit about the stages of labour which you may have heard of. There’s actually four of them. The first stage of labour we actually split in to two. There’s the latent phase which is the early part of labour, the bit that you probably do at home, and there’s the active phase. The whole first stage is basically the cervix going from a closed cervix to a fully open cervix or neck of the womb. The second stage is the bearing down stage where you give birth to your baby. So, we split it up into latent and active because they can look very different. The latent phase your surges might be quite infrequent, quite irregular, they might be coming every 5 or 10 minutes and then they start to pick up a little in pace. So, we usually say that active labour looks like a woman who is having surges every two to three minutes and for each one to last for around a minute and for them to be in a rhythm or a pattern. If they are still a bit irregular where you might have them every two to three minutes for say 10 or 15 minutes and then you have a really big gap, that suggests to us that you might not be quite in the active stage of labour just yet. If you were to have a vaginal examination, then we would consider active labour to be 5 or 6 centimetres and beyond. Even if you were 5 or 6 centimetres but your surges were still very irregular, we still wouldn’t necessarily say that is active labour. It’s like these two things have to go hand in hand because without regular surges it’s unlikely to make many changes to the neck of the womb and how that opens. So, surges are really important and think about your environment because if surges are irregular it might be to do with the environment or your position that’s affecting how much oxytocin you’re releasing. Oxytocin equals surges. For the active part of labour, you will either be at home and call for a community midwife, or that might be the point where your partner rings the hospital and speaks to someone about bringing you in for the birth. That’s the point where we want you to be quite mobile and active. We want you to be adopting upright positions and think about the position of your baby. We mentioned gravity is really important because the more pressure you can put on the neck of the womb, the more you’ll get that feedback response to your brain to make lots of oxytocin. So, upright positions are really important.

For the second stage of the birth, that’s the bearing down stage, it can last anything from a few minutes to a couple of hours depending on where the baby is in the birth canal and the woman’s urge to bear down. It is about using those muscles and some effort to bear down and push your baby out, but there might be a big chunk of the second stage where you feel that you are bearing down, and we can’t see the baby’s head for quite some time. When we see the baby’s head, we know it’s the latter part of the second stage. You will feel lots of pressure in your rectum before we even see the baby’s head and all of sudden that pressure becomes an overwhelming sensation to suddenly move those muscles and bear down. We’ll guide you with that and we’ll support you during that, but really what you have to do is just listen to your body and do whatever your body is instinctively telling you to do. So, you will give birth to your baby, that’s the second stage and we recommend that you bring your baby straight up on to your chest and skin to skin and we’ll cover skin to skin in more depth in another session. Once your baby is next to you and you are looking at your baby, you will release hormones to help you birth the placenta and the membranes, the bag of water that your baby has been sat in. The birth of the placenta and membranes is actually classed as the third stage. We’ll go in to your options for the third stage in a little more detail on another session. The fourth stage is your skin to skin and holding your baby for the first time and thinking about that first feed with your baby. So that’s the stages of labour. We want you to think about the breathing techniques that you might use during those different stages. It might seem a little bit funny that we’re teaching you how to breathe, of course you know how to breathe, but sometimes when women are in labour and feel these powerful sensations it can be quite common to scrunch up, squeeze your muscles and take short shallow breaths and we know that won’t go hand in hand with the release of hormones. We need women to soften themselves as much as they can. Things like birthing in water can be helpful. Massage from a partner. Just generally feeling that you’re in a safe space and then you can relax your muscles. A note to the birth partners, if during the surges you feel that your partner has hunched over shoulders, just put your hand in between the shoulder blades and that will remind your partner to soften everything back down in between each surge. Thinking about your breathing pattern, we want a nice even breathing pattern so that that helps with your heart rate and helps to keep your baby from being distressed as well. If you think about each surge lasting around a minute, you would probably be taking about 3 or 4 long breaths per surge. Start to practice them now. Your uterus is only going to get bigger and harder to breathe, particularly if you are sat down, so you need to start practicing this breathing technique. You can try it now if you want to. Just gently close your eyes and start taking some long breaths through the nose and release them out through the mouth. By releasing them out through the mouth it helps to keep everything soft and it’s like a natural release and letting go and really helps with your oxytocin production. It’s about 3 or 4 breaths per surge. If you want, you can use visualisation during these breaths. There are lots of things you can think about that keep you feeling really good. You might want to think about the gathering up of those muscles. Remember that with each surge it’s like gathering up the muscles in to this thick band so think of every surge like that and you will know each one is doing a really good job.

For the second stage, the bearing down stage, your breathing can be a little bit different, so you’ll be using these muscles and a little bit of strength to bear down. It’s a bit like going to the toilet as that’s where you put most of your pressure into the rectum more than the vagina which might seem quite unusual right now but that’s where you will feel a lot of your pressure when the baby’s head is really low. So, the breaths that you use for that part of the labour will be a bit different. It’s a quick intake of breath and slow breath out and down. You’ve got to imagine your baby moving down with each breath. So try it now if you want to. It’s a sharp breath in and then a long slow breath down and out and imagine your baby moving down with each one. Just hold that thought and the second stage can be hard and tough but just keep imaging that end moment where you hold your baby for the first time and you’ll keep on releasing lots of oxytocin and each surge will feel really worth it. So that’s the breathing and the benefits that go along with that breathing. Birth partners keep on reminding the woman to keep on with that breathing to keep everything soft and relaxed.

Baby and You - Session 1 - Birthing Environment

Mon, 06 Jul 2020 05:00:00 GMT

An accessible transcript is being produced for this video. We apologise for any inconvenience in the meantime.

Baby and You - Session 1 - Hormones

Mon, 06 Jul 2020 04:00:00 GMT

Hormones

Transcript:

So labour, like pregnancy and a lot of things in our life, is governed by a beautiful cocktail of hormones. We don’t really know what puts us into labour, we know it’s a combination of things. We don’t always know what that key factor is, but one of things it definitely is, is hormones. When we talk about the hormones of labour, the two main hormones for a nice straightforward labour are oxytocin and endorphins. Oxytocin is the hormone of love and attachment and we release gallons of oxytocin during labour and in the immediate post-natal period. During labour, there are two main mechanisms working and they are the two main parts of the nervous system. They are the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system is what we call the ‘rest and digest’, where everything is working as it should do and there’s no danger, your body is functioning exactly as it needs to and it’s just keeping you in a normal state for what you need to do. The other side of that is the sympathetic nervous system which is the fight, flight, or freeze mechanisms. The sympathetic nervous system kicks in if your brain picks up that you are in any sort of danger. The parasympathetic nervous system is the bit that we really want to be functioning very well when you are in labour because that is where oxytocin is released from.

When you are in labour, what you want to be releasing is lots of is oxytocin. The more oxytocin you release, the more surges you will get. For oxytocin to be released, you need to feel safe and secure and feel that everything is going okay. If you start to feel nervous and anxious then your sympathetic nervous system will kick in and you will release adrenalin. Our bodies are very clever because we can not release adrenal and oxytocin at the same time. If you end up releasing adrenalin, then your labour will slow down, or it may even stop. They are the two main things that interact together. We can talk a little bit about how we can prevent the release of adrenalin and improve the release of oxytocin during labour. The other thing to talk about is the endorphins that you will naturally release. When you go into labour your brain recognises that you are in labour and you will release nature’s own pain relievers which are endorphins. These give you the tools you need to deal with the power of the surges. We will talk a little bit about pain relief in the next session, but just know that your body does release its own natural pain relief in labour.

The other thing that’s worth talking about is if women are in that relaxed and confident state during the birth then we know that the blood flow will be really good to the uterus, the heart, the lungs, and all the things that are working hard to birth the baby. But if women feel that their environment has been disturbed at all, oxytocin will slow right down, and women will start to release lots of adrenalin and the blood flow changes and will often go to the limbs rather than the uterus. Sometimes we find that if mums are quite distressed it can lead to foetal distress so the environment that we can provide for women in labour is really important.

Baby and You - Session 1 - Foetal Positioning

Mon, 06 Jul 2020 03:00:00 GMT

Foetal Positioning

Sam: I’m going to talk to you about optimal foetal positioning. That means getting your baby into the best position for when you go into labour and for birthing. I’ll talk to you a little about baby and then things you can do to get baby into optimal position. You may know already, from going to your antenatal appointments or talking to your midwife or other people, about the ‘back to back baby’ which basically means that your baby’s back is towards your back. Using this model here, ‘back to back’ is where your baby’s head is towards the back of your pelvis and your baby’s spine is more towards your back. Common positions are either on your left side or on your right side or sometimes your baby’s back is towards the position of your back. Naturally, if you spend a lot of your time slouching back on the sofa, a baby’s head is much heavier than the rest of its body, so gravity is going to pull the baby’s head to lower into this position. So, the best way to get your baby into a better position is to sit up right. Kim has already talked about the ball which is a great tool to get you to sit upright because it’s very hard to sit backwards on a ball, so it forces you into an upright slightly leaning forward position. The best position for your baby and for you when you go into labour is for your baby’s back to be towards your front. So, a lot of babies will either be on the left side or the right side when you go into labour. That is the best position, but it doesn’t mean that if your baby’s back is towards your back you won’t labour or birth, because some babies do come out ‘back to back’, it’s just that we want that optimal birth which hopefully means your labour is slightly shorter and a little bit easier. To get your baby with its back to your front, get on a ball and lean forward, or walk plenty, which is hard in isolation at the moment, but walk around your garden or the house or walk up and down the stairs. When I was pregnant, my midwife told me to clean my skirting boards because being on your hands and knees is a great position to get your baby into that optimal position. What we do in your antenatal appointments to assess the position of your baby is feel your tummy. Your midwife might say the baby has slipped back to back because she can feel the little limbs at the front. So you might feel a little gap where your belly button is because that’s where the baby’s tummy is when your baby is back to back. If your baby is in a position with her back to your front, then what we can feel is the bottom and the back, either on the left side or the right side. There are lots of things you can do to get your baby into this optimum position. A really good resource for finding different positions to get into is called Spinning Babies. If you go to Spinning Babies website, they will give you other tips or positions so that you are optimising your baby’s position for labour and birth. They include kneeling on a sofa and putting your head down and lying sideways and dropping your pelvis. It’s just to give the baby the opportunity to get into a better position. From a labour point of view, the better your baby’s head is placed on your cervix, the quicker your labour will progress, but do not worry if you start labour with your baby in a back to back position because you will labour. The process of labour is not just about opening your cervix but to get your baby into an optimal position.

Kim: It’s really worth noting that, actually we have a theory, that babies know best. They know the position they need to get in to come through the birth canal depending on the shape of your pelvis and your pelvic floor. The first baby I saw being born as student was a home birth and that baby was born facing upwards and her previous child had done exactly the same so her babies new that that was the right position for them. So, don’t be concerned of it’s picked up in your labour that the baby is back to back, as Sam said, babies know what they need to do. I just want to talk to you about the uterus and the cervix, you may have heard it called the neck of the womb, just to give you a better understanding of the role of that. You might be able to see my diagram there. You can see the uterus is like a big blown up balloon. That’s a powerful bag of muscles and that’s all the uterus is. The bottom of the uterus is the cervix or neck of the womb. If you imagine in pregnancy the role of the cervix and the lower segment of your uterus is actually keeping your baby in so those muscles will be firm and taut in order to prevent you from having a premature birth. The top of the uterus has to stay thin and soft and supple in order for your baby to grow and the uterus to expand. We don’t know why women go into labour, it’s one of life’s wonderful mysteries and midwives will probably want to keep it that way to keep us on our toes, but what we know is that the two actions change during labour. All of a sudden, the lower segment of the uterus and the cervix has to start to thin out in length and start to dilate so we call it defacement which is the thinning out part, and then dilatation, which you probably will have heard of. You may have heard of 5 or 10 centimetres dilated. All that means is that, if you were to have a vaginal examination, we could tell how many centimetres dilated you are. Or, if the cervix was fully dilated, we wouldn’t be able to feel any of the cervix around the baby’s head. So, in order for you to do this, your birth hormones need to be released and that’s exactly what’s happening. This lower part is suddenly becoming softer and opening and with each surge or contraction that you have it’s almost like the muscles are gathering themselves up and at the end of your birth, at the point where you want to bear down and push your baby out, you’ve actually got a thick bound of muscle at the top of the uterus. So, it’s cleverly bound up all those muscles, and the thick bound of muscles will help you to expel or push your baby out. The body knows exactly what it’s doing as long as we don’t disturb the birth too much then the body can do what it needs to do. Just relating that back to what Sam said about the baby’s position, what we know about our babies is if the baby is in that frontal arterial position, it’s the smallest part of the baby’s head that’s going to press on the cervix, an even fit, and if baby is back to back often they’re a little bit deflexed and it’s a slightly bigger portion of the baby’s head that sits on the cervix. Sometimes, because it’s not an even fit, the feedback message to the brain, in order to make more surges or contractions isn’t always as strong. So, if we’ve got our baby in a frontal position we know we’ve got that even pressure on the neck of the womb. It’s actually called the Fergusson Reflex and is a feedback message to the brain saying make more birth hormones. It’s just worth noting that within your uterus, you’ve got your baby, you’ve got your placenta stuck to the side of your uterus, and then you’ve got two membranes that go around all of this and that’s a protective factor and helps to prevent lots of infections.

Baby and You - Session 1- Preparing your Body for Birth

Mon, 06 Jul 2020 02:00:00 GMT

Preparing your body for birth

Transcript:

So now I want to tell you a little how you can prepare your body for birth. It is really important to think about your diet, particularly in the latter stages of pregnancy. Think about your iron count. Even if your iron count has been normal at 28 weeks, it’s still worth it to think about rich diets with lots of fruit and veg and lots of fibre. Fluids are also really important. Keeping yourself hydrated, particularly in the weeks leading up to the birth where hydration is going to be really important. There has actually been some benefit found in being hydrated and helping to prevent tears. We’ll talk a little about some of the trauma that may or not happen after the birth, but it’s just something to think about. Exercise is really important. I know you are probably struggling with that because you’re at home at the moment or just in your gardens so when the weather has been nice it’s been quite easy. There are lots of things out there, even online groups and things on Instagram or Facebook. As long as it is pregnancy related. You can even get in touch with the people running it to make sure it’s safe for you to do in pregnancy. Speak to your community midwife about it if you are unsure.

We recommend that you get a birthing ball for your pregnancy. It can be an exercise ball, something you’ve ordered online. Just make sure it’s not too small. It needs to be quite big and chunky and blown up so it’s firm. Make sure your hips are higher than your knees and then you’re not squatting down. That can really help with a lot of backache that will be associated as you get further into pregnancy. It straightens out your back and gives you a really good posture, so it really helps with backache. It helps with getting your baby into a good position for birth. Sam will go through that in a moment. So, think about a birthing ball and start to think about the positions you’ll adopt in your labour. I always recommend mums to start to practice their positions for the birth. We really promote an active and upright birth and we’ll talk about the reasons behind that shortly. Being upright is going to be really helpful to have gravity on your side. Start to think about how you might use the birthing ball. Perhaps hanging off the back of a dining chair, walking up and down stairs, think about the positions that you’re going to get in so that when you are in labour, it doesn’t feel so unusual. You also need to think about pelvic floor. The pelvic floor is a ring of muscles that goes around the vagina and the anus like a figure of 8 around both. That is the protecting canopy of muscles that helps to keep your baby in and well supported all the way through pregnancy. You will start to feel your pelvic floor more as your baby starts fixing down deeply into the pelvis. Sometimes women say that their pelvic floor is a little bit sore sometimes or uncomfortable, particularly if it’s not your first child. So, thinking about the pelvic floor and preparing it for labour and after the baby is born, you need to start to exercise it as it’s really important once you’ve had your baby to prevent urine incontinence and things like that which can sometimes happen even before your baby is born. The way you exercise your pelvic floor is holding in the muscles as tightly as you can and releasing them. I always recommend to my mums to pretend it's like a lift by tightening all of those muscles and taking it to the highest point you can and then slowly start to bring it down over 3 or 5 seconds of you can. It’s a bit like holding in wee. If you can’t do it or it feels uncomfortable, just tighten your pelvic floor as much as you can, take it up and hold it for a couple of seconds and then release it. You should be doing those a couple of times a day. Do it when the kettle is boiling or when you are brushing your teeth. You can even get apps such as the NHS squeezy app which is really helpful as it gives you an indication of when to do them. It’s also important to exercise your pelvic floor as way of getting in touch with the muscles that will have to soften and release in order for you to birth your baby naturally. It’s getting you to think about not only tightening up those muscles after the baby is born, but in labour actually releasing them. What we sometimes find as midwives is that at the end of the birth when you are about to push your baby out you can feel pressure in your rectum and vagina and it can be instinctive to tighten everything up and hold everything back when what we actually want you to do is release all those muscles and try and soften all of the muscles in your body in order for your body to take over and do what it needs to do in order to birth your baby. So as much as it’s important to know how to tighten the muscles, it’s also important to know how to release and soften them. One of the things you can consider in preparing for the birth is perennial massage. The perinea are the skin and muscle between the vagina and the anus. One of the things you can use is a base oil, or olive oil, or coconut oil, but make sure to do a 24-hour skin patch test first. You can put a little oil on your fingers and put your thumb into your vagina and press against the perinea towards your rectum. You will probably feel a tug or a sting and a pressure in that area and that’s what we want you to feel. If you are feeling that sort of sensation when you do perennial massage, then you are doing it right. It is helpful in getting the skin and muscle in that area to stretch and be ready for birth. We don’t recommend you do it until at least 36 or 37 weeks and every other evening would be fine. Some people feel very comfortable doing perennial massage and other people don’t want to do it and aren’t comfortable touching that area of their body and that’s okay. It’s personal preference. But what it’s also really good at is helping you to start to feel those sensations that you are going to feel when the baby’s head is being born. So that softening and stretching of the muscles, the burning and tingling sensation, won’t feel such a surprise and so foreign when you actually give birth to your baby because you will have already started to stretch out the muscles and skin in that area. So, a few things to think about in preparing your body which is really important.

Baby and You - Session 1 - Introduction

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 07:46:00 GMT

Introduction

Transcript:

Kim: Hi! Welcome to our Baby and You class. We want to provide you with lots of information about birth and early parenthood and of course the importance of the bond between a parent and their baby. We usually do this in a group situation but of course we’re thinking outside of the box and that’s why we’re doing this YouTube video for you.

Kim: My name is Kim. I’m one of the Community Midwives in Stockport and I have been a midwife for almost 10 years.

Sam: My name is Sam and I’m a Community Midwife in Stockport. Kim and I work on the same team and I have been a midwife for nearly 2 years.

Kim: Just make sure that for this video you are sitting really comfortably, particularly for the relaxation we’ll be doing at the end. Make sure you have a pen and paper as I’m sure you will want to note down bits of information as we go along. You might have seen questions that relate to this video. Questions that relate to the baby in the uterus. Sam is just going to run through the answers to those questions with you now.

Sam: The first question is my unborn baby is completely formed at how many weeks in pregnancy? You might be surprised at the answer, but it is actually 11 weeks. By 11 weeks pregnant, your baby is completely formed.

The second question was my unborn baby is sensitive to touch by how many weeks in pregnancy? Your baby is sensitive to touch by 20 weeks. We are going to talk a little bit later on about the importance of touch in pregnancy and how that helps babies brain development.

Question 3 my unborn baby can see, hear, taste, experience, feel, remember, and learn, at how many weeks of pregnancy? That is 26 weeks of pregnancy. By 26 weeks your baby is already experiencing a huge amount which is making its brain development better and reinforcing some of those neuronal pathways in your baby’s brain. So an awful lot is going on by 26 weeks pregnant, but we’ll talk about the importance of that in a few minutes.

How many weeks old is your unborn baby when they react differently to voices of the mother, father, and other familiar people compared to unknown people? That is 29 to 32 weeks. It’s really important that you talk to your baby and that people in the family talk to your baby because it is able to respond to voices of people it knows and people it doesn’t know by 29 to 32 weeks.

Question 5 my unborn baby will start practising small breathing movements which can often cause hiccups at how many weeks of pregnancy? Around 25 to 26 weeks. An awful lot is going on at around 25-26 weeks pregnant. You may have already felt your baby hiccupping and sometimes it’s nice for partners and brothers and sisters to feel those hiccups as well and notice at what stages the baby is moving along.

At what distance will my baby be able to focus on a face or abject when it is born? That is 22 centimetres which conveniently is around the distance from your breast to your eyes. When you are breastfeeding your baby, you will be looking and making eye contact and that again is very important for brain development.

Kim: So, the next exercise we want to do is ways that you might settle and sooth your baby once your baby is born. That will represent your baby’s brain development once it is born as well. So, imagine you’ve got a baby and Sam will go through some ways you would settle or sooth a new born baby.

Sam: So, the first thing I might do is pick the baby up and then maybe talk to the baby a little bit. ‘Come on baby it’s okay. No need to cry’, and then I’m going to cuddle the baby. I might try and feed the baby. After the baby has been fed, if she’s still a little unsettled, I might change her nappy. Now I’m going to sing to the baby and try to settle her down whilst also cuddling her. Now I think I will try a little skin to skin contact so I’m going to strip her down to her nappy, take my top off and place the baby in skin to skin contact. Now I will cuddle the baby again and reassure her.

Kim: I’m sure there are many ways you can think of settling and soothing a baby, but if you can see from this diagram and all the crossing over, it represents the baby’s brain connections. Every time you do one of these techniques to sooth and settle your baby, it’s reinforcing your behaviour and your voice to your new-born and making those positive brain connections. Sam will talk to you a little bit more about that. We know that a baby’s brain development and all the neurons or little brain cells are developing from very early on in pregnancy. There’s something called 1001 critical days which is from conception to age 2. This is where all these brain connections are being made and the neuronal pathways are being reinforced. The things that really help with baby’s brain development are stroking your stomach whilst pregnant, positive touch, talking to your baby when you’re pregnant, getting partners and other family members to talk to your baby. You will probably notice when you go to antenatal appointments that midwives will often talk to your baby because we are aware of just how much that really encourages brain development. Play music to your baby, they will be familiar with sounds in the environment in early pregnancy and that does help with brain development. You can sometimes feel a little self-conscious of stroking your stomach or of your partner stroking your stomach and talking to your baby but the more you do it the more it will feel really natural and straightforward. When your baby is born, it’s really important that you respond to your baby’s needs. Human babies can’t do a great deal when they’re born unlike other mammals which can do quite a lot of other things when they are born. Other mammals can go and find food from birth, they can get up and walk or swim or whatever, but human babies can’t. All they can rely on is their cry to get your attention. You can’t spoil a new born baby. Every time your baby cries, it’s trying to tell you something so pick your baby up and you do all the things we talked about and your baby will develop those brain connections to make them feel secure and they know that their needs are responded to from very early on and that improves attachment. It may feel a bit stressful at first, particularly if you have never heard a new born baby crying or it’s in the middle of the night and you are the only parent, but what you will find is that using these techniques will probably settle and sooth your baby. What we have found is that parents can tell from the different sounds of cries what their baby needs and the way you can respond to your baby will change. Support can be really important for you, especially in those early weeks when things are going to be difficult if we are self-isolating, but you’ve got to think about how people can support you. If it’s bringing shopping or preparing food for you. There are lots of ways that people can support you.