newborn

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Welcome to the Club - Postpartum

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Welcome to the Club - Postpartum

I remember sitting at my kitchen table while holding my newborn daughter, staring bleary-eyed at the glass of water Rollie placed before me. Rollie was an angel sent from heaven. Her wings may not have been visible, but I know for a fact they were there.

Rollie was my postpartum doula, and my husband and I don’t know how we would have survived those early days without her. When she observed on our first day together just how sleep-deprived and hormonal and besotted and bewildered I was, she asked, “how can we better prepare new mothers for this?”

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Do I Really Need to Do(ula) This? Part 2

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Do I Really Need to Do(ula) This? Part 2

As promised, we are back with Part 2 of our doula blog. We pick up from where we left off a few weeks ago when the leaves were not quite as crunchy…

In Part 1, I featured the work of the Labor Support Doula, and what she can offer during pregnancy and birth. Before anyone calls me out for being sexist, let’s acknowledge that there are currently a few men who are trained doulas around the world (and, fun fact for any Gleeks out there: Matthew Morrison’s father was a midwife!) However, since women tend to be the overwhelming majority working in these areas, I will, going forward, refer to doulas as women.

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Do I Really Need to Do(ula) This?

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Do I Really Need to Do(ula) This?

Let’s have a little doula chat, shall we? You’re pregnant, and as a result, you’ve acquired a whole new vocabulary: baby-wearing, layette, milk-duct, meconium, hybrid-diapers, effacement, linea alba – the list goes on.  One word that will become ever-present on your prenatal planet will be this one: “doula”. You’ll hear it from friends, on social media, in your childbirth class, maybe even from your local grocery store check-out staffer. So, because you have an inquiring mind of the prenatal kind (where you HAVE to know everything, but then forget it five minutes later), you are going to investigate the heck out of this doula thing. And we applaud you for that. If you want a solid intro as to why you should hire a labor support doula, please watch Anne’s video.

Childbirth Classes - What's the Scoop?

Childbirth Classes - What's the Scoop?

If you have found your way to this blog, then you are clearly interested in learning about childbirth education. And there is a lot to learn about the learning, so to speak! Please allow me to break down a few burning questions you may have, like why taking a class is so, so, so important, as well as which ones are worth your while.

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Breastfeeding - A Little Myth Busting

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Breastfeeding - A Little Myth Busting

If you were to ask 100 different moms about what breastfeeding means to them, you might literally receive 100 different answers. You could also ask 100 different babies to wax poetic on the subject, but I’m uncertain as to just how far that would get you.

I’m not here to talk about positions, nor reasons why you should consider nursing on demand, nor to expand upon the chemical properties of breastmilk nor debate the latest in breastfeeding nightgown technology. What I am here to do is to dispel a few myths that inevitably pepper nursing conversations whenever they pop up at a cocktail party (at which you will not be having a cocktail):