Three months ago, Ferne McCann invited OK! into her home to introduce tiny baby Finty to the world.
She’d been born a mere six days earlier, and the new family-of-four were so blissfully happy in their baby bubble, that the birthing pool remained inflated in the garden!
Despite the doting new mum being delighted that she was able to fulfill her dream of a home birth, she did tell us that the experience was nothing like she imagined and that the plan “went out of the window”.
This week however, fans of the reality star will be able to witness the magical moment little Finty came into the world on Ferne’s brand new ITVBe show, My Family & Me.
Opening up about her daughter’s birth for the first time, Ferne says she’s “buzzing” to finally share her story.
“Talking about it now makes me feel incredibly proud and emotional,” the 33-year-old reveals. “I had such a clear vision in my mind about how I wanted it to happen but you can only plan so much. I wanted a home water birth. I got my home birth – but it did take an unpredictable turn!”
Just like her five-year-old sister Sunday, baby Finty arrived a week early on 6 July, weighing 7lbs 1oz. Little did Ferne know just how quickly Finty wanted to make an entrance.
After experiencing what Ferne felt to be a contraction, she went for a check-up, only to be assured that she wasn’t in labour. But she left the hospital convinced that Finty was on her way.
“I just plugged into my intuition,” explains Ferne. “We got home and I had a raspberry leaf tea, which apparently can help bring on labour. Then we decided to go to a Thai restaurant. By the time the sizzling beef arrived, I was having a contraction every 10 minutes.
“I was just breathing through it. I don’t know if my pain threshold has changed since SAS: Who Dares Wins but I just thought, we’ve still got ages and I need to eat before giving birth – I just wanted to tuck into my salt and pepper squid!”
They left the restaurant at 7.30pm and by the time they got home, the contractions were coming on thick and fast.
While Ferne was using a warm shower to ease the pain on her lower back, Lorri was downstairs setting up the birthing pool.
“We’d gone back and forth throughout the series about how I wanted a home birth, and he wanted a hospital birth. Obviously I got my own way in the end,” Ferne laughs. “He was so on board with my vision. He blew up the pool, laid out towels, lit all the candles, put on wave music and had my coconut water ready. He was superb.”
But despite Lorri’s best efforts, baby Finty just couldn’t wait. Just one hour and 50 minutes after leaving the restaurant, the couple were holding their little girl for the first time.
“Once I got out of the shower it was like gravity had taken its course,” Ferne explains. “Lorri called the midwife and she said she’d be an hour. If I felt the urge to push, we would need to ring an ambulance. As soon as I got downstairs my waters broke and that was it.
“I moved onto the sofa and found myself in the most incredible, meditative state. I was almost in a trance. I just knew I had to wait for the paramedics to turn up, so I was just holding on, crossing my legs.
“As soon as I could hear their voices, I surrendered to the pain and let it take over my body. I literally breathed her out. It was the most euphoric experience I’ve gone through. It was a full-body experience.”
Ferne notes she’s had “some stick” since sharing details of the birth on This Morning, but she stands by the importance of sharing her birth story.
“People have said it’s an unrealistic representation of birth,” she explains. “But I can only speak on behalf of my experience. We shouldn’t take away women’s rights to share their birth stories, positive or negative. For me, I want to shout it from the rooftops because it was amazing.
“I said I was just a vessel and Finty birthed herself. She really did. I knew I had to surrender and I had read so much about this going into the birth because I wanted to understand the science behind the hormones because I’d heard about women who had breathed out their babies, so I was really interested.”
She continues, “I know adrenaline fights oxytocin. We need oxytocin to dilate the cervix, so I just knew I had to breathe through the pain. I felt her coming down the canal. I let go to the force that is birth, and it was amazing.”
Ferne admits that sharing her birth on camera wasn’t an easy decision, and there was a lot of “back and forth”.
But ultimately, she wanted other women to know that having a positive birth experience was possible. She has no regrets and would be open to doing it again – this time live!
“I’d 100% live stream my next birth,” Ferne reveals. “I just feel so passionate about sharing how beautiful and positive birth can be. You can be in control. I don’t want to come across as smug, or for people to think, ‘It’s alright for her’. But in the same breath, I don’t want to not tell my story because of the fear that people might think that way of me.”
During our shoot at Ferne’s Essex home to announce Finty’s birth, she said she’d happily have another baby “tomorrow”. We wonder if she still feels the same way.
“I think I was being slightly dramatic about having another baby tomorrow,” she laughs. “But, if I had another birth like that, I could. For now, I just want to enjoy Finty. She’s so calm. I don’t want to jinx it, but the last two nights have been unbelievable. She went to bed at 8.30pm and woke up at 4.30am. It’s a bloody miracle. At the start, she was waking up every hour.”
Dad Lorri, 32, who has a son from a previous relationship, is also enjoying being a hands-on dad.
“He feels so privileged because he gets to spend so much time with her, as we work from home,” Ferne explains. “I’m breastfeeding but she will have one bottle a day, so he gets that bonding moment with her. They’ve bonded so much. She’s definitely a daddy’s girl!”
And Ferne’s eldest daughter Sunday – who has just started Year One – is also relishing in her role as big sister. “I took Finty on the school run yesterday and Sunday and her friends were all crowding around and cooing. Sunday goes, ‘That’s my sister!’ It was the first time I’ve heard her say that to other people. She was so proud. It was really sweet.”
Ferne reflects on how motherhood is different to the first time round with Sunday, who she shares with an ex-partner.
“It was such a different experience,” she says. “Sunday and I had such a tight bond, it was me and her. Now I have Lorri. A lot of single parents will understand that when you’re a single parent, the bond you have with that child never leaves. It remains intimate.”
Understandably, with a newborn in tow, wedding planning has taken a backseat. Ferne – who got engaged in the summer of 2022 – isn’t too bothered about when it happens, and hints that there could well be baby number three before then.
“We really want to focus on our babies for now, and our mental health app Shoorah that we launched while I was pregnant,” she says.
Ferne adds, “I don’t know when it’ll be, but it needs to feel like the right time. I still want it to be intimate and abroad, and to have all the children there with roles on the day. Maybe we’ll have another baby before we get married, who knows.
“When you’re younger, you think you’ll be married at 23, with a baby at 25. I know all too well you cannot plan life, my goodness.
“You get to that age and you think, ‘God, this is so young!’ We are going with the flow. We just want to focus on the other stuff right now. I don’t want to be a stressed bride – I want to be chilled. Give us a few years!”
Ferne McCann: My Family & Me airs weekly on Wednesdays at 9pm on ITVBe and ITVX.
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