homebirth with young child present

hi i am planning a home birth with my second baby - first was also a homebirth although not planned. however my first will be 20 months old and i do not have any family close by to look after her and she has never been away from us.

i guess what i am asking is has anyone given birth at home with there other children present and how did it go?

this may be totally off the mark but i would be worried that the older child might not like the new baby because they think thats he/she is hurting you? im all for keeping your child around home if you want them there, could be kinda cool but i say definitly have someone there who is not involved with the birth so they can solely be there or your other child and can keep them away and the right times. i have no experience of this at all though so its merely an opinion and holds no weight whatsoever. good luck though :)

Oh, I also wanted to add that I was babysat 4 times in my life - once when each of my 2 younger brothers were born and once when each of my 2 younger sisters were born. I don't have any traumatic memories associated with that at all. We had no family close by either, so were babysat by a close friend of my parents that we knew quite well. My parents would pick her up on the way to the hospital and she and us kids would stay in a motel opposite the hospital with her for the night and my dad would be back once the baby was born. We lived an hour from the hospital though, else I imagine we'd have just stayed at our place or hers.

Personally , the last thing I wanted when I had my second was my daughter nearby , I hated the thought of being out of control and saying things to her Id regret ,or her hearing me scream /yell /cry in pain , which is exactly what I ended up doing ., my view is she can witness her own babies birth .
When shes thirty ;-)

However, my daughter's stepmum had their older two , (aged 3 and 2 ) at home when she had her planned homebirth , and they had someone there , (her bestfriend I think ) to keep an eye on them , in the end they weren't in the room anyway (they were more interested in playing in the sandpit )

You may be quite a calm person in labour , in which case it probably would not affect your daughter that much , I just know that since im not , my children would be better off not seeing it .

hiya we had our 7, 4 and 17 month old present for one of our homebirths, I had baby in a birthing pool in the lounge, they watched tv and popped over for a 'look' every now and then while I was in labour. Im pretty calm and quiet when I give birth (just my way of dealing with the pain) so they never realised that it was actually hurting and because I knew they were there I was probably more quiet. It was awesome to have them there and after he was born I hopped out of the pool and lay on the couch and all the kids hopped up with me and there new brother.

I agree with the others though if you can have someone there to help out it would be good, also think about if complications arise and you need to transfer, for this we had a friend/neighbour on call while I was in labour just incase we needed someone.