A new beginning

You would have noticed that we are running behind this month with our articles and newsletter. Well this had a good reason. My wonderful wife and Principal Coach at Click A Life Coach, has given birth to our first child, a beautiful baby girl called Alexa Luz. This has been a truly amazing experience for both of us and we are still filled with many happy emotions. Just looking at her face makes me almost cry with happiness.

We prepared ourselves well for the birth and we wanted to have a birth without much intervention, no pain relief, just a natural calm birth. Alexa was due on the 19th of December, but decided to wait a little longer with her arrival. With Christmas around the corner, we thought we might actually get a “Christkind” with her being born on the 24th . In the lead up to Christmas we decided to buy a turkey just in case, she would wait until after Christmas. And glad we did. We spend a nice Christmas day with family at our place and enjoyed every moment (and every sleep in).

Paola started to have contractions early morning on the 27th and we got really excited. We knew we will see our baby very soon. We have waited for this moment for a very long time and now it was about to happen. There are all the unknowns before birth (especially for the first child). How would Paola cope with the contractions, when do we ring the hospital, is the baby ok, and is it a boy or a girl? I must say Paola glowed during this period and even the contractions were uncomfortable, she was happy, she was looking forward to the moment when she could feel the skin-to-skin with our baby.

Finally the time arrived to go to the hospital (after one false alarm visit). Because Paola had lost a bit of blood the hospital rated us in a higher risk category and decided to monitor the baby’s heart beat and Paola’s contractions throughout the labour. Not what we expected from a calm birth, but we accepted their decision and knew it was in the best interest of our baby. Not long now.

The next 10 hours were very surreal. We were in the birthing room, Paola strapped to the monitor devices and spending most of her time on a swiss ball. I was sitting next to her and behind her, riding each wave (contraction) as it came. I never felt so close to her it was like we were one person. By then the noise of the heart monitor had gone in the background and all I could hear and feel was Paola. She did a fantastic job and never gave up. Throughout her entire labour she breathed as calm as possible and visualized the birth of our baby.

Her contractions were intense and came regular, but the last 4 hours she didn’t dilate much further and the midwife became concerned about mums and baby’s health and mentioned the possibility of a caesarean. This came to a shock to us as all we wanted is a natural vaginal birth for her. They told us the baby was in posterior position, the head was down but facing the wrong way, which prevented Paola to dilate fully. In the end we decided to follow the advice of the doctor and have the baby via caesarean. We went through a big part of the natural birthing experience and our goal was to have a healthy baby.

Alexa was finally born on the 29th of December early in the morning. Mum and baby were both healthy and the little one was already breastfeeding half an hour after birth.

Having a child was one of our goals for a long time and we had a lot of challenges on the way. We continued to stay on the course and took each obstacle knowing we were one step closer. We learned a lot about each other and were able to grow our business as we could concentrate on this before the baby came.