Royalty Birthed from Frustration and Stress
The Story of a Home Birth Tub Rental – from the Founders
Royal Birth Tub co-owners Dan and Sarah Magill have had two kids. The first was born in a birth center, and the second at home in a birth tub – the exact same kind Royal Birth Tubs now rents.
Both children are a great joy and blessing.
But their experience of renting the tub that helped bring the second child into the world left them wondering what might have been. Eventually, ‘what might have been’ turned into ‘what should have been.’
You’re about to give birth to a new human life. This is one of the greatest acts – if not THE greatest – that your body can perform. A baby grows from almost nothing, inside your body, and develops into a fully functioning human body. When you give birth naturally, it is an empowering, physically demanding feat of strength, will, and beauty.
Giving birth is dramatic, unpredictable, messy, and yes – excruciating. And midwives and doulas are superbly skilled professionals to guide you through it.
So, after their substandard birth tub rental experience, Dan and Sarah were left wondering:
Shouldn’t the birth tub rental make giving birth at home easier?
Shouldn’t it make it more relaxing, more peaceful, more comfortable, and less stressful?
Here’s how they describe their experience:
Co-Owner’s Dan and Sarah Talk about Their Home Birth Tub Experience
It’s a wonderful thing to wake up in your own house, give birth, and go back to sleep in your own bed.
Our midwife reassured us how great this would be, and that it would be as good or better than our previous experience at the birth center. So, we embarked on the journey of a home birth.
Our first step – find and secure a birth tub for rent. We thought this would be easy. After all, our midwife recommended a company that had been renting tubs for many years. However, she told us they could be hard to get a hold of sometimes.
Hard to get a hold of?
We called. We called again. We sent emails. Nothing. Never heard back.
Their website said they delivered tubs to your home within 24 hours of your birth. Basically, just call when you go into labor, and they’ll bring the tub. But – if we haven’t yet even reached a person to secure the due date, how can we know they’ll answer the phone when we call while in labor?
That’s stressful.
We gave up on them, and tried a few other services. We filled out contact forms. We sent emails. We tried multiple places that said they offered birth tubs.
Nothing. Either they didn’t respond, or they said they only rented birth tubs to their own clients (these were midwives and doulas, usually). What that told us is, you don’t really want to be in the birth tub rental business. You’re just offering it on the side because some of your clients want it. But you aren’t devoting the effort and commitment it takes to make the rental experience everything it should be.
Finally, we found a person who would rent us a birth tub, and we could pick it up two weeks before our due date. That’s a start!
But to get it, we had to drive 45 minutes away to pick it up ourselves because they don’t deliver. If you’re in your last few months of pregnancy – you have enough to do, right? Do you really want to add a 45 minute drive (both ways) to pick up a birth tub to your already hectic pre-birth schedule?
We didn’t. But we didn’t have a choice, because no one else even called us back.
When we got there, the tub was sitting in the driveway. We never met the person renting us the tub. Just a bag in the driveway, getting rained on. What if we had questions? What if something was missing?
That’s stressful.
45 minutes later, we got home, and unpacked the bag. The directions for setting up the tub were almost unreadable. It looked like a copy of a copy. Changes and updates had also been added in at some point, so the numbered steps weren’t in order.
We did not have confidence that we would be able to set up the birth tub properly and in time. Once labor started, we were sitting there trying to figure out how the hose attaches to the faucet and other challenges of setting up the birth tub and filling it with water.
At which point, we learned that our water heater only had enough hot water to fill the tub about 4 inches deep. Uh…no.
That’s really stressful.
What if we can’t even fill the tub up in time?? Now we have to wait until the water heater heats up another batch of water. But that will only get us 4 more inches! So we resorted to heating water in huge pots on our stove and pouring that into the birth tub.
During labor.
Does that sound like the birth tub rental experience you would want?
We sure didn’t.
We think you deserve a far better home birth tub rental experience than that.
Royal Birth Tubs – Your Path to a Stress-Free, Delightful Rental Experience
Royal Birth Tubs is our response to the stressful, confusing, last-minute, poorly communicated, unresponsive service and tub setup experience we endured while in the throes of labor.
Everything that went wrong for us will go right for you – as far as the birth tub is concerned (you do still have to actually deliver the baby!).
That’s our promise, and the reason we exist.
Delivering a baby is HARD work.
Preparing for a new baby is HARD work.
Renting a home birth tub should be EASY.
With Royal Birth Tubs, you will receive the easiest, most enjoyable, most surprising, most personal, most celebratory birth experience possible.