Kiwi reality TV royals Matilda and Art Green have welcomed their third child, “a little angel” named Penelope.
The new mother-of-three shared the details of Penelope’s birth on her parenting podcast Untidy, which she co-hosts with author Hannah Davison.
Matilda said she thought she might have to give up her hopes of a home birth as Penelope arrived 11 days after her due date.
“We’ve got a girl!” The smitten parents are delighted with wee Penelope.
“Things were starting to get a little antsy,” Matilda explains. “I was prepared to go just over two weeks, but we got the scan just to make sure everything would be fine and we’d be able to push it for that long.”
However, when she got home from the scan, Matilda started to feel a few cramps and, in the end, Penelope joined her siblings Milo, four, and Autumn, one, the next day.
Matilda shares that she got through the birth by “doing all the techniques”, including “acupressure points, the visualisation, the music and lavender oil”.
“I was doing the positive birth breathing,” she recalls. “We have an ensuite and, at one point, I was like, ‘I’m going to get in the shower and just see how it feels.’ And it felt phenomenal!”
In the end, it was a very speedy delivery. “It was real fast,” Matilda recalls. “She was born just before 5am. It would have only been 10 minutes of pushing and she was out. It was a beautiful birth and a lot quicker than I was expecting!
“I was kneeling beside the bed and Art caught her, then passed her through my legs up to me.
“I was like, ‘We’ve got a girl!’ It was just such a cool moment. I sat back and held onto her – I just didn’t ever want to let her go.”
