Birth Updates

AND 30% OFF Invite into my paid community

Hey Beautiful people!

This is a free newsletter from me, to you,

which includes a pregnancy and almost birthing update,

Some photos and a special offer for any of you who are currently free subscribers but on the fence… and may need a little celebratory nudge into my other subscriber community.

I am 38 weeks today, and feeling great.

Mostly. Mostly great. Still a happy hermit in my bubble, rarely leaving home.

In fact, I feel as though I’ve craved this type of slowness for a long, long time.

It’s not that we don’t intend on living slowly.

The intention is there - often. Sometimes our lives look slow, but have an energy of “rush” about it.

And sometimes, it looks busy with a delicious flavour of slow weaving within it.

It’s felt challenging to completely slow down, as you can probably imagine, Tully working full time from home, a beautifully energetic 3 year old who really, really loves undivided attention, Myself whispering (sometimes begging) my creative brain to take a back seat for just a hot second so I can enjoy these last days and weeks with my family as we are now.

alongside Tul and I both organising, nesting, cleaning etc.

Bless this man, honestly, I send him all up and down the coast to support my facebook marketplace obsession with antiques or quality quirky things.

He said to me the other day “Babe, we’ve officially entered the stage of - Keep the preggy mama happy”.

I’m here for it.

I’m also here for having a husband who has the biggest heart and genuine desire to support my creativity whether it be within my home making, or writing or basically ANYTHING I say I want to do, he’d drop everything and ask how I need to be supported in bringing the vision to life.

Anyway, I’ve got a self commitment going to just rarely leave the house at this point.

It feels good, watching the sun move across the whole room throughout the day.

Not trying to get a toddler in and out of the car.

I had to go into town the other day alone with Rafi.

I received an … obviously empathetic smile from a woman, as she watched me walking down the hill, 37 week pregnant waddle, Rafi clinging to my back, me telling him he’d better hold on or I’ll drop either him OR the box of groceries I was carrying.

It was a sight. I didn’t mind it too much. Instead of crying, I giggled and then did quickly comfort myself with the promise of staying home for the rest of the week.

We had a family movie night the other night - Raf’s pretty sensitive when it comes to movies and honestly I find it way too hard finding age appropriate movies that don’t have too much subliminal messaging and everyone is speaking to each other nicely… and ideally no villain. We settled on “Up” but had regrets and had to do a lot of debriefing before sleep.

Does anyone have a list of “3 yr old feel good movies”?

I baked cookies, we had an early dinner of spaghetti Bolognese (which has been my craving this entire pregnancy and I have honestly never eaten more spag bol in my life up until these last 9 months.) and snuggled on my favourite ever velvet green couches, that I’m praying weren’t just a pregnancy obsession once the placenta leaves my body.

He went to sleep, and Tul and I were in the mood.

In the mood to laugh,

We put on “Inspired Unemployed Impractical Jokers” on paramount. A new series on these 4 friends who are tradies. They went viral on Instagram and Tiktok as your classic aussie tradie bloke archetypes, and landed themselves a deal to make each other do funny pranks in public and self humiliate.

I’d love to tell you I’m more into a classy stand up comedy skit, and though I do enjoy Amy Schumer and some others… I just love pranks and public cring embarrassment.

I binge watched the original Impractical Jokers back in the day, and my own childhood was filled with ways to prank my parents or siblings (Though I fast learned I could actually give others legitimate micro trauma so stopped quickly and now live through others such as this show).

Tul and I sat on the couch laughing for a long while and it was great.

My body is absolutely getting ready to birth.

Friends hosted me a mother blessing on the weekend which I’ll share pics and write about at some stage.

It really helped me rest into the birth space again, and since then my braxton hicks are a lot more regular, and a lot more strong.

I’ll have waves of nervousness, but overall I’m feeling excited to lean into birth again.

The mother blessing reminded me of my vision, and my ability to birth.

Women are amazing.

The way they can remind you of your own magic simply by looking at you.

We also blew the birth pool up today. Rafi kept announcing how grateful he was that we blew up the swimming pool “for him” and he spent an hour or so “diving” like a cute little awkward dolphin into his pile of teddies.

Seeing the pool in our space brings back all sorts of memories, and beauty and anticipation. It really feels like we are getting close, and though absolutely we could go to 42+ weeks, I’m going to go ahead and say the 39th week is my prediction.

And though we had struggled to slow down,

I do feel like we now have. We’ve spent days at home as a family, without work being a focus, getting on top of washing. Tul did 4 loads, Hyperfocused on the laundry. I reorganised the pantry, and am yet to do the fridge.

All baby things are washed and organised, and overall the deeper parts of our home are in order, so the daily maintenance doesn’t feel so pointless.

The only other aspect is attempting to organise our outside space for Rafi.

I would love for us all to stay home in the first 2 weeks after baby is here.

That feels important and golden. To do that, I feel like it’s also work making a space for Rafi where he can rotate gentle activities and feel like in some ways he can nest too.

We hope to build a large sandpit this week and retire the blue clam shells.

I also will likely pick up a small basic mudkitchen from marketplace that he can get dirty and enjoy.

Other than all of that,

I haven’t been meditating or stretching or really any form of “birth” prep other than a bit of rebozo and perineum massage with Tully at night.

Though, I have reached a level of peace and trust with myself and this birth, and my baby that I was honestly worried I wouldn’t arrive at.

I’m not sure when it switched, maybe alongside the mildly psychedelic hormone release as we get closer to birth.

Maybe my mothers blessing,

Or maybe it was simply always going to arrive, just significantly later than I had anticipated.

But we are here.

We’ve arrived at the alter of the next phase of life.

We are in the delicious limbo… that only now feels delicious as I’ve stopped resisting or questioning it.

And I feel genuinely excited for what’s to come and to see how the next part of this story unfolds.

In other updates:

I have a beautiful private gallery coming I’ll share here with my paid subscriber community. We had a friend Cora (@coraphotography_ on IG) come over and capture Tully, Rafi and I in our home the other morning.

The GUEST WRITERS series are due to start being published towards the End of August. Some of the topics you can expect from beautiful writers around the world are:

• Primal Pregnancy

• Confidently following our creative pursuits

• Alternative education & Philosophy

• Psychically connecting to our children to mother

• Spirit babies

• Nervous system devotion

• Privilege and spirituality

• Vaginas

• How plants communicate to us and how we can use them in the everyday medicine of our lives

• Not wanting kids to wanting kids.

• The grief transition of maiden to mother

• Motherhood as an expander not a limitation

And many more. These will be available for my paid subscriber community because I’m continuously heart storming ways to have you feel more and more like a VIP here in this little cosy nook of the internet. Ways I can add value and say thank you for supporting me here.

ANOTHER way I’d like to say thank you

Is to celebrate the 44 publications here now recommending me openly on their profiles.

I have over 40% of my community here on substack, coming FROM the substack networks, not instagram. And that feels incredibly valuable and special to me.

It’s thanks to those of you who are taking the time to forward one of my articles to a friend or gift a subscription, or simply clicking ‘show on profile’ when it asks if you’d like to when you subscribe, or those of you restacking the articles of mine you enjoy.

Each of these make a difference and I will do another “shout out” post to those recommending me, to say thank you, and to also guide my community here to find you here on substack too.

You can see the last one I did below and I encourage you to take a look and connect with some other beautiful people here on substack.

and FINALLY to celebrate Both the above ^^ AND that we are about to birth a baby,

I’d love to offer ALL FREE SUBSCRIBERS the option to upgrade to a PAID subscription and be apart of my community here in that way.

I’d love to give you 30% off for the year, if your subscription is updated between now and the 17th of August (This week).

I really hope this opens a little more access for those of you who are on the fence (I so get it, another subscription. Time is precious.)

To remind you of my intentions here on substack

Is for you to firstly have a slower and more nourishing experience than the fast paced world of social media.

A way not only you can read and get to know my work deeper, but also have the space to engage, comment and share more of yourself with me too.

I have my GUEST WRITERS series starting at the end of this month that will be exclusively available to paid community.

I also will be having a MOTHER MAKER written interview series launching in the second half of this year, again, available exclusively to my paid community.

My birth story, and intimate post partum sharing will be exclusive also to my paid community here.

As a paid subscriber you also have access to my FULL archive since October 2022 to present and upcoming publications , to indulge in whenever you delight.

You’ll also have access to comment and engage on ALL articles, and have access to both my “free” chat and “paid” chat (Kinda like a text going out to my sub stack community, which is a lot more casual than a full article. The intention for chat is to have discussions, conversations and hear from each other.

If this feels like something you’d like to be apart of, I so encourage you to jump on the limited 30% off offer.

I’d also like to mention that

1. I have a FREE trial available for all subscribers when upgrading to paid, so you can get a feel for my style of creation here.

2. If money is completely a barrier for you but you’d really love to be apart of this, please get in contact with me xx

3. You can unsubscribe at any time, no hard feelings.

Love Kat