I had first heard of Lotus Birth from the homebirth midwives that attended the birth of my second child. They offered it to me as an option but we decided at that time to cut the umbilical cord. When I fell pregnant with my third baby I wondered if we might investigate Lotus Birth this time around. When I asked friends who had given a Lotus Birth about it they didn't comment much except to say they recommended it and would never cut a baby's cord again. I looked into it further and it seemed to make sense not to interfere with nature when there was no good reason. We wanted a completely intervention-free, natural birth so we decided we were not going to cut the cord but let it dry and come away of its own accord. Since this would be our first experience with Lotus Birth, we also decided if at any time we felt uncomfortable with the whole thing we could cut the cord at that point, knowing we had at the very least delayed the cutting of our baby's cord.
My pregnancy was fairly straight forward and the birth even more so. It was January and we were in the middle of a heatwave in Sydney, NSW. I had laboured throughout the hot summer night, resting when I could, and by breakfast time the day was starting to really heat up and so were my contractions. My sister who lived only minutes away arrived to help out in case an extra pair of hands was needed. I told her if it got to the evening and I still hadn't birthed it would be okay for her to go home to her family if she wanted to. She looked at me and laughed and said " You're going to have this baby before lunchtime". My three-and-a-half-year- old daughter, Leilu, decided to go with her uncle to play with her cousins as she was getting bored already and who knew how much longer I'd be birthing. My 13yo son, Jordan, was still asleep at the other end of the house. My partner, Nico, had covered the lounge room windows with pretty Indian bed spreads which made the room dark and cosy. The birthing pool was inflated and full of warm water.
Not wanting to hop into the pool too early, I decided to continue labouring in the bath, while my partner and sister made themselves scarce. I was content to lay there, comfortable in the water. The contractions felt good, not painful but as if they were getting somewhere and I was nearly falling to sleep in between them. The house was very quiet and I felt as if I was totally in a world of my own. After some time I began to feel restless and just couldn't stay put. I went walking through thehouse searching for a comfortable place to labour and decided it was time to hop into the birth pool. It felt wonderful. I told Nico as he quietly walked by that I wanted him to stay with me. My sister hearing a definite change in the noises I was making during contractions came beside the pool. As Nico cuddled me from behind my sister caught Aalia as she emerged from my body and gently brought her to the surface of the water and then onto my chest.
I was thrilled that she was finally here and she was perfect. A little girl, of course, as I knew she was from the moment I was pregnant. She was breathing beautifully and had a little cry and we saw her skin change from purplish pink to a true pink. I lay half reclining leaning back on the sides of the pool holding her tiny naked body and offered her the breast. I later found out that she weighed 7lb - not the 9lber I was expecting. She felt warm and I was almost overheating. I had no idea of the time and was surprised to find most of the morning had passed without me realising.
After perhaps ten minutes I started to feel some more contractions so I got out of the pool to birth the placenta. Nico held a large stainless steel bowl underneath me and I crouched slightly as it slid easily out of my body. It too was perfect. It was beautiful, quite large and after a thorough inspection declared intact. I didn't know then what the average length of umbilical cord was but I have since observed many more photos of Lotus Births and Aalia's was a little on the shortish side
As it turned out my brother-in-law couldn't get his car started when he went to bring Leilu home and she missed her sister emerging by 20 minutes. Jordan had also missed the birth. Nico had tried his best to wake him when the second stage started but he couldn't be roused and Nico thought he'd better get back to me so he gave up trying. Big brother staggered out of his bedroom to find his new sister already born complaining that we hadn't woken him.
For the time being we left the placenta in the bowl while we got to know our precious new baby, keeping the bowl next to her on the bed or couch. Leilu was excited about her new sister and would clamber around the person holding her to get a better view or kiss her face so we had to be careful that she didn't knock the bowl over.
Later on that evening we transferred the placenta into a large plastic sieve that we placed over the metal bowl to drain. Everyone had a good look at it and marvelled over all the different colours and at the cord, which was already beginning to dry out. Leilu decided to play with the new digital camera and took a few great shots of the rich coloured placenta in its bright pink sieve. We got set up on the bed with me laying on one side of the baby and the bowl with her placenta on her other side. As we planned not to use nappies with Aalia she lay naked on a handmade cotton pad and I lay naked beside her. Even the nights had been too hot to wear clothes so we were able to enjoy the skin-to-skin contact. Nico was suffering from a cold, as was Leilu so we decided they would sleep together in another bed that also meant the baby and I had more room.
The next morning the cord was surprisingly dry already. Jordan said it looked like a rats tail, and it did a bit having turned from white and fleshy to thin, brown and brittle with quite a bit of the fluff from a bunny rug stuck to it. It was still a little friable but incredibly strong - a bit like beef jerky. I checked to see how it smelled which was one of my main concerns when we were planning a Lotus Birth especially with the incredibly hot weather we were having. There was the faintest smell quite similar to fresh meat. It was not offensive in the least and nothing you could detect unless you had your nose right up close.
That evening after deciding that no more moisture was going to drain out of it we prepared to wash, salt and bag the placenta. Nico held Aalia close to the bathroom sink while I lifted her placenta and started to run warm water over it. I had thought I could pretty much rinse it under the tap but it proved to be much more of a job than that. There were some pockets of blood trapped in the folds of the caul and it had to be turned inside out to make sure the whole placenta was washed on both sides. The clots had to be removed and they were tougher than I had expected to scrape and lift off. I commented to Nico that I couldn't be as gentle as I'd like to be or we'd never get it properly clean and we laughed because I had started out so tentative and was now flipping it over and back again like I did this every day. It really was big and a bit hard to manage. Eventually, I was happy that I had done a good job and we patted it dry with a paper towel and carried it to the change table for the next step.
I had a bag of sea salt, some lavender essential oil, a square terry cloth nappy and a special placenta bag that I had made during my pregnancy. We lay out the nappy and started packing Aalia's placenta with salt. Once it was covered with a thick layer I sprinkled a few drops of lavender oil over it and we wrapped the lot in the nappy and secured it with nappy pins. Aalia watched the whole process intently and paid great attention. She did this every time we resalted her placenta over the following days.
The entire package then went into the placenta bag. I had made it out of Royal Blue velvet. It had a drawstring at one end to close the opening and a cord cover out of the same velvet that secured with Velcro. The cord cover was about half the length of the cord and we wrapped it around the cord at the bag end. The velvet seemed a bit wintery in the heat wave we were having but it proved to be a most suitable fabric because there was no chance of it slipping off the bed or couch onto the floor accidentally.
Most of the time I held Aalia and we kept her very still, not moving her as much as I had my other babies. This was partly because it was not quite as easy to move a baby with the placenta still attached but also because there seemed to be an aura about her that reminded us to be very sensitive to her newness. Everybody had a cuddle at least once a day including my sister's family. My Dad, who was out visiting from England, was chuffed to meet Aalia just born and came to see her every second day. My Mum had phoned to say she preferred to wait to visit our new baby once her cord and placenta had fallen off which I happily accepted. I was not offended because I realised that many people in our society would find the practice of Lotus Birth quite confronting. When I was nursing Aalia I placed the placenta bag on the couch or bed beside us and when somebody else cuddled her we placed the bag on her tummy which she didn't seem to mind a bit. When I moved around the house with Aalia I carried her and her placenta as one bundle.
At night I would place Aalia in the middle of our large family bed with her placenta beside her and I would lay down on her other side. When she woke up to feed, in order not to disturb her, I would climb over her switching places with her placenta to give her access to the other breast.
Every day Jordan and I would resalt the placenta discarding the old salt and replacing the nappy with a fresh clean one. Every day the placenta got smaller, lighter and drier.
On the fourth day I noticed that the cord, which was very brittle by now, was making the skin on Aalia's tummy and hip quite red where it would scrape her. This was bothering me and I was starting to get tired of having to always consider the placenta especially as I often had my older daughter plonking next to me and often nearly sitting on it. Nico suggested I cut the cord if I felt like it but I couldn't bear the thought of that and decided to wait until it came off naturally. The books I had read said this would happen between 3 and 7 days.
Nico then suggested I talk to the baby and tell her I was ready for her cord to come away. Even I thought that was a little wacky but it couldn't hurt so I went to my bedroom with Aalia and told her how much I loved her and loved her placenta. How I was in awe of the fact that it was the organ that had nourished her while she was inside of me and pleased that we had not immediately cut it off when she was born. I also spoke to her about how I was looking forward to the time when it came away so I could hold her close and not worry about it scraping her skin. Well, it didn't come off then and there as I was secretly hoping but a sense of peace did come over me and I felt as if I could wait patiently for as long as it took and went to join my family in the lounge room and didn't consider it again.
For the rest of that morning Aalia kept grasping her cord between her feet and tugging at it. I wondered if it was itchy because it was healing or if she had simply discovered it with her feet. By now the cord was hanging on by one thin strand and the placenta was a third of its original size and very light. I glanced away and when I looked back I saw she had pulled it off - 4 days and 2 hours after she had been born and only a short time after I had had my talk with her. Everybody in the room went "Ooohhh" and she then had a big cry - bigger than she had ever before. The books had also mentioned that some babies cry when they are finally Lotus Born and it really seemed to us that she was finally born, that the past 4 days had been one long drawn out gradual birth. We all noticed that from the instant her cord came away she was more alert and fussy where she had previously been in blissed out dreamland.
After being a little apprehensive during my pregnancy about managing the placenta and then a little impatient on day 4 for the cord to come away I was surprisingly reluctant to leave the placenta alone once it finally came off. For a few days I kept it close to Aalia and would take it into the bedroom with us for the night. I had the feeling that it would get lonely even though by now it was disconnected and very dried out. I checked on it from time to time to see how much further it had dried out and would show it to Aalia. She would study it each time until a week after it came off she showed no interest so I decided then she had really let go of it and it was placed on the mantle piece wrapped in a small square of white muslin.
A few weeks later when I wasn't paying attention my eldest daughter retrieved the placenta and proceeded to decorate its muslin wrapping. When I came across her doing this she proudly told me she had made it look pretty and I had to agree it did look very beautiful decorated with colourful textas.
Over the next couple of months Aalia's placenta dried out even further, became lighter and eventually ended up the size of my palm. It is many different colours and is still encrusted with some of the salt and it has been commented that it resembles something you might find on the beach. Trust in nature's wisdom was one of the reasons we decided to have a Lotus Birth and now, whenever I feel myself looking with impatience for the next stage in Aalia's development, I remember how we left her cord alone. I am reminded that her progress has nothing to do with my expectations, and everything will happen in its own perfect time.
