Welcoming a new baby is an event that is celebrated by parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, and extended family members. Every pregnancy and birth is different but reading this book between my first and second birth was a game changer.

This sort of thinking might be ok for the few people she's coached, but as its hard to identify the 2% of babies who will have haemorrhagic disease the more people who look at this sort of advice of just cross my fingers because I don't want my baby having an injection is goign to result in more dead babies. Really, IMO, hypnobirthing skills are mostly a collection of pain management/labour skills that you can also gain elsewhere, especially in a midwifery model (breathing techniques, touch/massage, affirmations, visualizations, movement, muscle relaxation, focus on reducing adrenaline and increasing oxytocin, etc. None of the content of this book is rocket science, especially if you've done any yoga or meditation in the past.We came away feeling much more confident and armed with useful knowledge for the birth and arrival of the baby. If your personal situation isn’t reflected, we still hope that you find something helpful in the main ideas about developing close, connected relationships between parents and children and welcome your feedback to improve its relevance. If so, this card is the perfect way to say that you have been listening to their hopes and ambitions and support them with love. Instead of focusing their attention on the raising of children, they can spend all of their time loving them. Your message to the baby might be one of the first things a new mom or dad will read to their child.

Preparing in a calm, relaxed, confident way can only help, no matter what happens once we're at the hospital! No two courses are exactly the same but all will include the following module content and will help prepare you for however and wherever you birth your baby. You can even include them in the message by mentioning their names and telling them 'congrats on your new little brother/sister! Not forgetting a speedy arrival in the corridor and a car-birth outside a birth centre (both whilst away on my very eventful final year placement as a student midwife! Send this sweet message to an adoptive couple who are adopting for a second (or third) time, or a couple with one child and an adoptive child on the way.Obviously proof will be in the pudding once D-Day actually arrives but for now, I feel equipped with tools to get there and a stronger understanding of what my body is doing. Understanding pregnancy, labour, birth and your baby is designed for all parents in any situation, but you might find that perhaps you begin to feel you would benefit from more personalised or specialist support, and so there are some additional resources signposted throughout to guide you. Also I had to wait until I got to the end to find the mp3s (they are the last two chapters everyone! Although I won’t be sticking affirmations around my home, the YOU ARE STRONG vibe doesn’t do it for me in particular, I really appreciated how informative this book is overall - I had no idea about how the muscles in my belly will move, nor what function they have; nor any knowledge about what rights I have when in hospital (something I was nervous about asking my midwife); nor what happens immediately after birth and the options available to me at that point (vitamin K for the bambino? Hollie de Cruz is a great teacher - everything is explained simply with the assistance of diagrams where required.

I feel overall it was a book that tries to take a few good psychological points and really stretch it out a bit too thin.After all, just because you don’t kno w your neighbors or members of your religious group very well, that doesn’t mean that you can’t offer happy thoughts in their direction.