Birthing Parents Club - Hypnobirthing & Doula Support

29/05/2025

Goodbye Birthing Parents Club 👋🏻 hello Claire and The Calm 💫 A little name change for my pink & yellow corner of the internet.

This is not to say I am the calm. This is all about my quest for calm as well as my work to support families in creating calm in their pregnancies & birth experiences.

Calm looks different for everyone, but it feels the same. It’s the moments when we feel at home in ourselves.

Stick around for this new era - I’m even going to resurrect the podcast 😱

08/05/2025

Some stories I shared back in September about ‘the s**tty bits’.

We rarely see other people’s s**tty bits now as there’s much less communal parenting, so it’s easy to forget that other people have them and just think we are doing a s**tty job.

But everyone has s**tty bits, and they don’t define us or our parenting story.

**ttybits

25/02/2025

Found this little brain dump in my notes. I’m sure this will resonate with many of you:

Here’s something that’s boggling my brain at the moment:
I’m a mother to a six year old and baby twins. The twins are 7m old and we are in the thick of it at the moment. It’s bloody hard.

And I’ve just found myself staring at the tiny hand holding mine (as I’ve fed the girl baby back to sleep for the 2nd time tonight and it’s only midnight and I’ve also fed her brother back to sleep 3 times) anyway staring at this tiny hand feeling so sad about the future nights when I won’t be feeding babies back to sleep.

It’s so fleeting this stage, I know that, I’ve done it before, I know it’s going to be gone in a matter of months (or maybe a couple of years who knows), but in the grand scheme of things it’s really not long, the small stage, however being in - it it feels never ending and it’s really hard and so much work and bloody hell I would just LOVE a full nights sleep but I’m also sad thinking about the nights I won’t have these two tiny bodies cosied up to me in the dark.

It’s so hard and I’d love a wee break but ohhhh make it last forever but also please sleep my babies.

14/02/2025

Six years of motherhood today 🥳

Been in my feels today (no doubt the past 6 weeks of shocking sleep properly catching up with me) and actually had such a hard / infuriating / painful day with the babies.

The wee fu***rs are in their s**tty sleep era. We’re having super short naps that take ages to to settle them for so I get 5/10 mins without a baby hanging off my ni**le. Legit the kettle isn’t even boiled before I can hear one of them on the monitor. And we’re having HEAPS of wakes between me putting them down and me going to bed.

Not great but we move.

Everything’s a phase right?! 🫠🤪

Anyway, if you see my wholesome family snap of us celebrating Clemmie’s birthday, please know it was a classic Insta v Reality kind of day ♥️

22/01/2025

20/01/2025

Lies my brain tells me when I’m not getting enough rest.

And by rest I don’t just mean sleep - though we’re not getting much of that here at the moment 🫠.

Rest can be sitting on the couch; reading a book; having a bath; going for a walk; being alone. I’m talking about resting your brain. Rest from the constant to do lists, the washing up & cooking & making sure people eat; rest from all the touch, the little hands always pawing and the slightly bigger hands needing held and the many many questions needing answered. And all the other stuff.

12/01/2025

We’ve had a nightmare trying to get medicine in to our girl baby, so I asked for tips and got heaps! Lots of people also asked me to share anything useful so I’ve compiled a wee list ♥️

Anything you would add?

08/12/2024

Things I remember about Christmas as a kid:

🎄the absolute buzz of putting up the tree

🧦 feeling my stocking on the end of my bed, having magically filled up in the middle of the night

🔔 straining my ears to listen for sleigh bells

💃🏼 dancing at the church Christmas party

🍫 my brother eating all the chocolate out of both our advent calendars

🎥 watching Miracle on 34th street and The Real Santa Claus

I don’t really remember any of the presents we got (other than my baby born doll that came with real food to eat so she could really s**t her pants and sadly the food mine came with was out of date so we could t give it to her…… OUT OF DATE FOOD FOR A DOLL?!?! Well played mum 😏😂).

I don’t really remember going places or doing big Christmas things or visiting Santas or anything like that. Maybe we did them, maybe we didn’t, but Christmas is still my favourite time of year. So much so my bridesmaids organised me a Christmas themed hen do… in March 😄

We did very little for Christmas last year because I was so ill, that it’s very tempting to go wild this year but it’s insanely expensive. So I keep telling myself that the buzz of Christmas is the magic you make yourself, not the going places and buying stuff.

It’s staying up late, eating chocolate for breakfast, singing songs with your cousins, decorating the tree, snuggling up and watching everyone’s favourite Christmas film (me Love Actually; Daddio Home Alone; Clementine The Grinch).

Favourite bits of Christmas that don’t cost an arm & a leg?

27/11/2024

Feeling pretty chuffed with myself this afternoon.

Got myself and these two wee elves up & ready & out to door to go to my lovely pals for breakfast.

We genuinely don’t go anywhere at the moment, especially when it’s just me & them because *stressful* but today we did so GO ME! 🎉

26/11/2024

Insanity is doing the same thing over & over again and expecting different results.

Yesterday I spent my entire day repeatedly trying to put the babies down for a nap; doing the same thing over & over; they never went to sleep or stayed sleeping for long. And it drove me fuuuuucking insane.

Putting babies to sleep is such a melt - trying so hard to do the thing that they need; they’re so furious because they need to sleep but they won’t. And hours are passing and all that you’ve done is try to put the babies to sleep.

It’s not like you can just give up and go do something else because they’re losing their s**t because they’re so tired.

So you keep trying to get them to sleep.

Keep trying. Keep trying. Keep trying.

And then they will fall in to the deepest, most contented sleep. And you will be so happy. Finally everyone relaxes.

Then you realise you need to do the school run in half an hour so you need to wake them up in 10 minutes because it takes 20 minutes to leave the house.

Insanity.

19/10/2024

I saw this thing once that said ‘it’s never too late to turn a bad day around’.

But that’s a lot of fu***ng pressure. And actually I think that probably just makes people who have bad days feel like s**t when they tuck up in bed.

All day today I was like ‘whoooaaaahhh gotta turn this around’ and I tried and tried but my team mates just weren’t on board. The babies cried and cried. And the big girl’s ears were completely broken.

And I cannot tell you how much milky spew there was everywhere. So. Much. Spew.

“If I can just get us all out in to the sun it’ll be fine” but it wasn’t. It was the same. And so I just let let the rest of the day be s**t, because I was so tired of wrestling it. It was just a s**tty day.

Doesn’t mean I did a s**tty job, actually I think it means I did a great job because I battled through the s**tty day, and everyone still got fed and loved and put to bed.

But there was no fu***ng way it was getting turned around, so I made peace with that and l’m not giving myself a hard time.

Some days are just bad days and that’s that.