Doing it her way! Gisele Bundchen couldn’t be talked out of having a home birth — even against her doctor’s warnings.
The 38-year-old model was set on delivering her first child with husband Tom Brady — son Benjamin — at home in 2009, even though she was almost talked out of it during her four-month checkup.
“The doctor told me that it was too dangerous for me to have a home birth,” Bundchen writes in her memoir Lessons: My Path to a Meaningful Life. “He said that Benny was in an unusual position, my hips were too small and the odds weren’t in my favor. He said it was probably best for me to schedule a c-Section.”
But the Brazilian native was set on giving birth oy her own terms, and although Brady “wasn’t enthusiastic” about the idea at first, he eventually relented. “My plan was to give birth in my bathtub, although I’d overlooked an important fact: I’m 5’11” and the bathtub was, well, not a lot bigger than that,” she explains. “I was in labor with Benny for 16 hours and the last three I spent in the bathtub.”
Bundchen, who also shares 5-year-old daughter Vivian with the football hunk, opened up about her home delivery back in February 2010. “[It] wasn’t painful, not even a little bit,” she told Brazil’s Fantastico TV show at the time. “The whole time, my head was so focused. Every contraction, the baby is closer, the baby is closer. So it wasn’t, like, ‘Oh, what pain!’ It was, ‘With eery contraction, he is getting closer to me.’”
She also told the show why she chose not to use pain medication while she was going in labor. “I wanted to be conscious and present for what was happening,” the author explained. “I didn’t want to be anesthetized. I wanted to feel.”
Bundchen bounced back quite quickly after welcoming her son. “The second day, I was walking, I was washing dishes,” she recalled. “I was making pancakes in the kitchen.”
Lessons: My Path to a Meaningful Life is out now.
