A few seconds into watching mom Diana’s home water birth video, you’ll immediately understand why it’s been viewed over 7 million times on Facebook. Because the deeply personal, and extremely emotional footage reminds us that birth. Is. Powerful. It’s beautiful. It’s everything.
The intense video, which was captured by Diana’s friend Michelle, and her friend Angie, starts by documenting her labor, that actually began hours before. As Diana told BabyCenter in an email, she was “determined to get this baby out” and not go past her due date, and be induced. So, she drank ginger root tea and walked with her sister. Soon her contractions set in.
But, she admitted, “We hadn’t done our belly cast!” As soon as that was done, Diana says, “I asked [my husband] Andy to take [the cast] off of me so I could get in the bathtub.”
The scene was set, with incense burning, and instrumentals playing. An app timed Diana’s contractions. Her son, Leonardo, was nearby. “He was holding my hand and telling me how I need to stay relaxed, he was showing me how to exhale and inhale and reminding me that I could do this.”
And here is the video that proves, through searing pain, and soul-trying moments of doubt, she absolutely could!
As you saw, once Diana’s labor picked up in intensity, her husband never left her side. Diana recalls, “Andy was already half-way in the tub with me, and I started to push.” But twenty minutes later, there was still no baby. Diana says, “There got to a point where I was exhausted and sore. I screamed and I threw a couple F bombs while Andy whispered encouraging words to me. I even bit him once!”
Diana admits she also slapped her midwife’s hand away when she went to check on the baby. “[Andy] grabbed my arm when she went to do it again!” She adds that her husband calmed her when she thought she was losing control, rubbed her, and told her she could do this, and that she needed to trust herself.
Finally, Diana could feel her baby’s head, which she describes as the most “insane and intense sensation.” She also says about pulling her baby onto her chest, “I had felt such a sense of relief and accomplishment in that moment. I couldn’t have done it with Andy by my side.”
The couple hadn’t found out the sex of their baby during Diana’s pregnancy, and now was the moment of truth. “At first I thought she was a boy because I touched the cord and thought it was a penis!” she says, adding that once she learned it was a baby girl, she “just started crying tears of joy. We had got our little girl and she was so perfect and so beautiful.”
Diana says about her experience welcoming baby Felicity into the world, “We had conquered something that day and there wasn’t a dry eye in that room. I’m so happy that I got to experience the birth of my dreams, and I’m so blessed to have shared it with the people I love the most.”
Thank you to Diana and her family for sharing their beautiful birth story with BabyCenter. You can follow Diana’s journey raising Leonardo and Felicity on Instagram. And thank you to Michelle, of Love Is Me Photography for generously sharing this now-viral video of Felicity’s birth. Follow Michelle on Facebook and Instagram to learn more!
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