You know what’s a lot of fun? Telling your kids the story of how they were born. I especially look forward to telling my youngest how I was very sure she was going to be born on the side of the highway since I was already starting to push a bit as my husband was barreling along, trying to get to the hospital in time.
But my own children’s birth stories won’t be as interesting as this woman who can tell her kids that her third child was born in the bathroom stall at Sesame Place!
She had …read more

When I went into labor with my second child, I was remarkably calm about it. My water broke and I quietly roamed around, packing up some toys for my oldest to take to her grandparents’ house and packed up my own stuff – I had a hospital bag packed but I needed to add last minute items like my toothbrush and contact lens solution.
By the time I was getting in the car, I was less calm because we were about 20 minutes away from the hospital and I was feeling an overwhelming urge to push. Honestly, the whole …read more

I received an e-mail from one of my dearest friends today: at long last, she has begun her own blog!
She is studying to become  a midwife, and has some great knowledge, stories, and support to share. Please visit Kat often as she builds her blog on Empowering Birth. I’m so excited to have her here in the blogosphere. She’s also a great source of information for positive ways to raise your kids, and her two are great friends and surrogate siblings to my one.
hugs to you, lady.

I’m not a very tall woman. My son, when I was pregnant with him, decided to build himself a luxury condo. Sometimes, I think he was trying to move to a penthouse suite, the way he climbed my ribs. Mostly, he did a lot of rearranging of my insides, kicking and pushing and trying to make more room. I called him Squiggle Butt, cause he’d stick his butt against my abdomen and squirm when I patted it.
By six months, I was too big to sit at my potter’s wheel. I couldn’t reach around my belly to throw clay anymore. By …read more

He’s almost four. His mami told him when he was a little guy that the daddy plants a seed in the mommy and a baby grows.
Now he wants to know how. How does the seed get in there? how does the baby grow? Where does the baby grow? I’ve been deflecting most of these questions to some success but tonight, he wouldn’t be diverted. “But how, mama? How does the papa put the seed inside?” I sighed, looked into those bluer than blue eyes, took a deep breath, and told him. “With his penis.” (There, now inside motherhood is filtered …read more

As if we mothers didn’t have enough to worry about already, a Fox News talking head has turned wild speculation into a chance to tell us what we already know: having a baby can kill you, even after the fact. It’s called ‘maternal death’ in case you didn’t know, and we’re all at risk. No, it’s not a guilt trip some mothers lay on their families, but a true phenomenon that runs through our fertility, the risk of death inherent in bringing about life.
What is maternal death? According to the Wikipedia Website, the WHO defines it this way: “A maternal …read more

My friend Kat and I were talking about the articles circulating the Web that try to cast this, that, or the other as the Next Dangerous Thing, to the exclusion of all rational thought or well-informed conversation. The lastest doozy? Vaginal birth causes babies’ heads to bleed internally!
First off, whose brilliant idea was it to inflict an MRI on newborns not yet ten minutes old? Cause I’m here to tell you, sister, I’d rather have that babe nestled on my skin for those first ten minutes, thank you very much.
A properly prepared, vaginal birth is by far the best way …read more

Now that the boycott is over, I wanted to share with you my experience with babywearing. Well, um, I love it!
I wore all of my kids until they were about a year, non-stop, and then after that we gradually lessened it, just because they got heavy, and by two I was mostly done. However, I treasure those days being so very close to my babies and having both hands free to pat their back and squeeze their little toes. There is something so special about nuzzling your baby’s head, and wearing a sling, for me, made it …read more

We had our last Hypnobirthing class on Saturday and we know all we need to know about having a calming, relaxed birth. In theory, at least. After the class was over, three of the five women in it expressed lingering fears about their impending births. They are all first time parents-to-be so I think it’s perfectly natural to be scared about what’s to come. After all, having a kid is a life decision involving a huge plunge into uncharted territory and modern women have been conditioned to think of birth as a highly medical, painful process over which a woman …read more

The hub-unit and I attended our second hypnobirthing antenatal class on Sunday afternoon. It was interesting, as was the first session the previous week. There were more relaxation exercises, this time between husbands and wives, which was a new experience because it involved me having to stifle my giggles at having the husband bring me to a level of hypnosis – and take him seriously as he was doing it. He succeeded, though!
I was thinking about the first round of antenatal classes that we attended when we were expecting our daughter, and the difference between that and the ones …read more