Lotus Birth

[vanislandmama]

Wondering if any mamas here have had a lotus birth. I'm considering it as an option and would love to hear of others experiences.

[kettunainen]

I just posted my experience thus far in this thread: http://www.mothering.com/discussions...1#post15485867

[fancyoats]

my friend from irl playgroup had a lotus birth. i'll pm her the link to this thread so she can share if she wants to.

[rootzdawta]

Moved from I'm Pregnant to Birth and Beyond.

[Lily's_Mom]

We had a lotus birth in November. It was simpler than I thought it would be, and I would do it again if we have a third child.

Here's the link to my thread about it.

After the placenta was born, my midwives rinsed it off, and we wrapped it up in a receiving blanket. Every time I changed my son's diaper, I would wrap the placenta in a fresh diaper (prefold) as well. Any cloth would work fine for this: prefolds, receiving blankets/flat diapers, towels etc.

After the first 24 hours, I put salt over the placenta at each change. After a day of salting, my husband declared there was enough salt (the bed was getting a bit of salt on it from the diaper changes!) so I stopped adding salt.

Almost exactly 3 days after the birth, the cord separated. On the third day I was getting a little impatient for it to separate, so I could dress my son and try wearing him, so luckily it came off the next day.

I had researched lotus birth a bit during pregnancy, and thought of using some herbs or essential oils on the placenta, and at least some nice sea salt! But in the end, we hadn't prepared those things, so we just used the box of table salt was sitting in the cupboard. The placenta smelled totally fine. I actually liked the smell. It was a nice 'birth' smell.

Funny story about 'disposing' of the placenta! We had it in our freezer ever since the birth, and last month we moved from Canada to Switzerland. The last night before our flight, it was like, "We really need to figure out what to do with this placenta!"

My husband went to the hospital (I think he went to the maternity ward) and told them he had a placenta to dispose of. The doctor asked, "Where did you get it from?" And my husband replied, "My wife." He told the whole story of the lotus birth, complete with the explanation of the salting, and how we wanted to plant it but now we were moving overseas. The doctor and nurse just stood there dumbfounded! After my husband was finished telling the story, the doctor told the nurse to just put the placenta in the biohazard waste and, "You don't need to start a chart for this."

Here's a link to our birth story as well, with a pic of our son with his placenta. Our midwife called it his twin!

You want to make sure that the cord is in a position that is out of the way for diaper changes and not otherwise getting in the way. I had Oliver's placenta to his left side, and the cord looping above and over from the naval (you can see the pic in his birth story). I just made sure that when it was still soft I always placed it this way so that it eventually dried in this position.

[lovermont]

Originally Posted by fancyoats

my friend from irl playgroup had a lotus birth. i'll pm her the link to this thread so she can share if she wants to.

Yes, we did a lotus birth with our dd. I stumbled across the idea somewhere online while pregnant with her. It made sense. Cutting the cord is creating a wound that is exposed, all the blood loss, etc. etc.
It wasn't as ideal as we'd hoped because they wanted a blood sample from the cord to test for blood type as I'm negative. Next time I would just get rhogam and not bother testing the baby's blood. So the midwife said she did a "loose clamp" (what does that even mean?? It's clamped or it's not!). We kept it attached (freaked out the pp nurses) for 30 something hours. We were finding that the diaper was re-softening the cord when we didn't get the diaper in position low enough at changes. So we were concientius about that. It's safe to cut without clamp after 24 hours. We saw that the part near her belly was still damp and the end near the placenta was still damp but the part in the middle was dried completely. So we cut that.
We would definitely do lotus again!