First baby - any good online antenatal classes/videos?

[croft85]

I’m 28 weeks with my first and starting to feel really unprepared with the lack of hospital classes etc. Does anyone have any recommendations of good online classes or videos that my husband and I can watch?

My midwife sent me a couple of links but I can’t tell you how terrible they are! Uninspiring, weird graphics and slow, I literally learnt nothing about birth or after baby born by watching them. They mainly focused on relying on support once baby here - I won’t really have much support available so they made me feel even worse.

Any recommendations would be great.

Thank you 💛

I'm just commenting on this thread as I would like some recommendations also, this is also my first pregnancy and feel the lack of appointments/clinics due to covid has got me feeling unprepared.

I would search on youtube for real birthing videos. The positive birth company is also excellent. It's hypnobirthing but goes into the science and biology behind what happens to your body and why. it's also got breathing exercises to help with giving birth. I loved it.
If you want to breastfeed, La Leche League and the kellymom website are good resources

I second the positive birth company, cannot recommend it more

I third the positive birth company for preparing for the birth!
Also follow amotherplace on Insta- she has an online course she runs to prepare new mums for motherhood, and she is incredibly raw and honest so I imagine it’s a good’un (not done it myself so can’t vouch, didn’t discover her until after I had my son sadly as I’d have jumped at it for an honest prep of life with a new baby!!)

I haven't watched that many so there might be better ones but I found this quite useful: www.youtube.com/channel/UCQxlSOrlkzk8-qbErtA7sig
There are 3 videos in total covering pre-natal, labour and post-natal.

It's a Canadian midwife giving a class to a group of people but most of the things mentioned I thought were relevant.

Sorry not an online suggestion but The Positive Birth Book by Milli Hill is is excellent for preparing you for birth and has lots of links to other online resources (birth videos etc). I would also recommend her other book Give Birth Like a Feminist. Some bits from the first book are repeated but I found it absolutely fascinating. Both books have made me feel really confident and prepared for what I'm going into.

Online positive birth company will make you so much more prepared for labour and birth.

There’s a fab comp at called ‘Blossom’ too that are currently running free breast feeding courses via zoom. I’ve got mine tomorrow evening :)

We have done a couple of the My Baby Academy classes and found them brilliant. They have a free baby care one and a free breastfeeding one which we found really useful (I also did the Blossom breastfeeding one which was helpful but a bit less polished and more preachy, I found). Both were a couple of hours and they do a longer half day course on each covering a bit more that you can pay for too

If you can afford it then sign up to do NCT on zoom. Although not ideal, I've made great friends and we've built a great support network since giving birth four months ago.

Thanks so much everyone - has made me feel a lot better! Going to look them all up tonight. Xx

Bump and baby club were really good. Classes over zoom and also had videos and extra info in an email.

I did the A Mother Place online video course last year. I found it easy to watch in nice 20 minutes ish sections. It's a mum and her obstetrician dad so you get a bit of anecdotal stuff from her and medical side of things from him

We used the baby academy, they did a free session to see if we liked it then a full day that's paid for. Found it really useful and informative would definitely reccomend.

I wouldn’t recommend NCT personally unless you know literally nothing about labour. It’s much harder to connect with people via zoom despite everyone trying their best, for us was a complete waste of money. I found the Blossom breastfeeding course (which is free!) much more useful than the NCT course I paid for. Blossom do a range of courses that are much more affordable so I would give that a go.

What actually happens with the online breastfeeding courses eg la leche league...I am a bit nervous!