Blog Posts

Should your parents be invited to the delivery room?

12/31/2017

After three years of attending births, one of the things I see pregnant people commonly stress out about is deciding whether or not they should have their parents or parents-in-law at the birth.

For some, the answer is clear: Either they would love to have their relatives at the birth or they feel absolutely confident on not having them around.

But for the ones who feel hesitant, how do you decide?
Here are 6 questions to consider when making a choice.

1. WHY?
Ask yourself why you are considering asking your relatives to join: Is it because their presence brings you comfort? Do you feel obligated? Do you want to be polite? Do you think they have “the right to be there”? Do they think they have the right to be there? Do you want to avoid confrontation? Are you afraid of hurting someone’s feelings? If their presence is not going to bring you comfort and you answered yes to any of the other questions, you might want to look into this issue a little deeper.

2. ARE THEY BRINGING FEARS OR NERVOUSNESS?
Childbirth is a deeply intimate experience and you need to be surrounded by people who trust the process wholeheartedly and who support your decisions 100%. If your relatives are bringing nervousness or fear into your space, their presence is not going to benefit you and therefore, not going to benefit your baby.

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This is what you deserve to know when choosing birth control

12/9/2017

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Guest blog post by Michele Drake.
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Disclaimer: This blog post is not intended to dissuade anyone from using hormonal birth control (as each person’s needs are unique), but rather to empower all people to make the best possible decisions they can for themselves.

My name is Michele Drake, and I am a reproductive health educator and advocate. I am particularly focused on female fertility and the menstrual cycle. I also work as a facilitator for an organization called The Fifth Vital Sign whose mission is to empower women with unbiased information about their bodies so that individuals can make the best possible choices about their health.

Photo by Kristen Renee Photography

One of my greatest concerns is a trend that I have observed in the stories that many women have shared with me: a lack of information and explanation that patients receive from their healthcare providers about their bodies, symptoms, medications, and procedures. I’ve heard countless stories of a woman’s pain being normalized, of concerns being mocked, and of women discovering, after the fact, that they truly didn’t understand the potential consequences of the medical intervention they consented to.

I was surprised to learn--at twenty-five-years-old--that my birth control implant works, in part, by suppressing ovulation. This may not seem significant, so let me elaborate. I had been using hormonal birth control for ten years, five of which were with the use of an implant. I am college educated and went to public school in New York State since kindergarten. Why did it take a decade of hormonal contraceptive use before I learned how and why it works? How had I missed this?

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This is how my babywearing passion started

10/3/2017

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INTERNATIONAL BABYWEARING WEEK
It’s International Babywearing Week, which has me thinking about how grateful I am for babywearing and the many ways it has made my life as a mother so much better. In our dear Olympia babywearing is quite popular, but it’s not so common in other places. When I was growing up in Mexico the only people I saw babywearing were the local indigenous tribe: Rarámuris. Nowadays the global ancient wisdom of carrying our babies is being popularized again and for a good reason: it’s a game-changer! So today I’m going to share with you my babywearing love story.

Young rarámuri girls wearing her sibling in my home state, Chihuahua, MX

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The Pride and Shame of Feeding a Baby

8/8/2017

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World Breastfeeding Week recently ended and I realized that although breastfeeding has been such an important thing for me as a mother and as a woman, I have never written anything about it in this blog. I don’t know at what point I started to think about it as a controversial topic and preferred to avoid it. The obsession with what "the best" is, can be a dangerous territory and it's hurting us.

FEEDING A BABY CAN BE A STRUGGLE
Some people who are very dear to my heart struggled with breastfeeding, one of them being my own mom. She nursed me for an incredibly painful month and a half and decided to stop when she found me spitting blood from her injured nipples.

She had absolutely no support. There were no lactation consultants she could talk to and her own family was very far away, on the other side of the country. She is, of course, not the only one who has been failed by a system that tells parents breastfeeding is best but gives them no tools to overcome the many challenges they might face.

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Does your baby's sleep make you a better parent?

8/3/2017

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YOUR BABY IS NOT A BLANK SLATE
One of the biggest mistakes that we make as parents is thinking that everything our children do, positive or negative, is a reflection of who we are.

It’s hard to become a parent. We have to give so much! Our own identities often become diluted as we pour every bit of ourselves into caring for our children. So when people say, “he is such a good baby,” “she is so sweet,” “they are so smart!” our chests swell with pride. Those comments can feel like an affirmation on the worthiness of our hard work as parents, which so often goes without recognition in nowadays individualistic culture.

Equally, if someone turns their nose to our kid, criticizes their manners, temper or behavior, it feels like a punch in the gut. For many of us, it’s easy to internalize that judgment (imagined or not) and start labeling our children and ourselves negatively (even if it’s a joke). Hot mess mom. Bad mom. Difficult child. Etc.

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CALL THE FOOD DOULA: POSTPARTUM NOURISHMENT CAN BE THAT EASY!

6/28/2017

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Before I became a mom I used to love cooking. I was even good at it! My old friends still remind me how much they loved my creative dishes. Nowadays it’s hard to imagine how I used to come up with time and imagination to prepare that food. Most days even making a sandwich seems like a challenge. I do cook for my family and sometimes I enjoy it, but it’s a lot of work. I need to research recipes (hello Pinterest!), make lists, write meal plans, do the actual cooking and psychologically prepare to accept the fact that my three year old might still reject a lot of my food (we’re working on it).

I knew that I was particularly going to need help after the birth of my second child and luckily, the help I got surpassed all my expectations. Not only did my loving community brought me amazing food for weeks after the birth, but I also got to experience one of the most nourishing and comforting services a postpartum mom could ever enjoy: a food doula!

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DEAR IMPERFECT PARENT: YOU ARE NOT A FAILURE

4/10/2017

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© Gajus | Dreamstime.com

This is a wonderful guest blog post by Raya Weaver.
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BEING A PARENT IS HARD
Being a parent is hard. Anybody with kids can agree on that. We all want what is best for our children, and most of us seem to have pretty strong opinions on what that might be. Sometimes, those opinions don't line up with reality. Twists and turns in our lives can throw us curveballs, and the way we end up handling our bumpy paths in life may turn out to be drastically different from the way we pictured ourselves handing things. And that is okay. Actually, it's not okay, it's awesome.

DEALING WITH JUDGMENT AND GUILT IS PART OF IT ALL
In a way, being a parent can sometimes feel like being under a microscope (especially in public). Starting in pregnancy, we get judged on all sorts of ridiculous things. Did we give up coffee? Did we remember to take our vitamins every day? Did we attend birth classes? Write a birth plan? Eat healthy? Do prenatal yoga?

The list goes on and on, and if we fail on any of those fronts, we can be made to feel like we are the worst parents in the world. It bleeds into birth with our guilt regarding epidurals, cesareans, long labors and other complications. Then into postpartum and beyond. Our harshest critics, of course, are ourselves.

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Why you need to set up a meal train for postpartum

3/15/2017

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LIFE WITH A NEWBORN IS BUSY

It’s crazy how the most basic things become so difficult once you’re caring for a newborn. Taking a shower, peeing by yourself, eating with both hands and other things we take for granted on the pre-baby days all of a sudden become luxuries during postpartum.

Newborns are a lot of work. Many want to be held all the time and those little stomachs can’t hold much food, so they need to eat and poop often. If you’re breastfeeding, you might find most of your day is spent nursing. So, when are you supposed to cook and prepare all the nutritious meals you will be needing to recover from childbirth, cope with sleep deprivation and keep a healthy milk supply?!

Even if you have an awesome partner who is committed to taking the best care of you, the demands of parenthood are many and it’s easy to put our nutritional needs on the back burner. Taking care of babies wasn’t meant to be a one or two person job. You will keep hearing it over and over and even if it sounds cliché it’s true: it takes a village! So hey, there is a very easy thing you can do to make this transition easier: let people help!

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This is what happens when you go floating during pregnancy

3/11/2017

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Pregnancy is different for everyone and even for the same person each pregnancy is unique. But most people who have grown a human inside their bodies will tell you it can often be quite uncomfortable, especially towards the end.

Time has been flying by and I’m now 34 weeks pregnant. I don’t remember my first pregnancy being as achy as this one. I have been doing a lot of things to try to help my body cope with all the changes: prenatal yoga, Dancing For Birth™, hula hooping, swimming and visiting the chiropractor. It does help, but I still struggle, particularly when it comes to finding myself not able to enjoy sleep at night since every turn and shift seems like a gigantic effort.

So when a friend told me about Oly Float here in Olympia, I was immediately attracted to the idea and decided to look more into it.

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Does Birth Really Have To Be Painful?

1/24/2017

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WHAT HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT BIRTH?

I still remember the first time I heard someone talking about birth in a positive light.
I was living in Mexico City at the time and I went to visit a friend’s country house over the weekend. My friend's sister was there with her kids. She had a very friendly and smart three-year-old son and a sweet little baby girl around 2 months old.

I had just graduated college a few months earlier. Having babies was the last thing in my mind at that point, so I’m not sure how we even got started on the conversation about labor. I think I mentioned something about how painful I imagined birth to be, based on all the stories I have heard. She shook her head gently and told me about her experience. “It was a unique sensation,” she said, “but I wouldn’t call it pain.” She went ahead and told me about giving birth in a big tub of water and how lovely it was. She said she had been so relaxed that she had often fallen asleep in between contractions.

Well, she definitely blew my mind a little bit. First, I didn’t have idea that babies could be born underwater and second, painless birth? You gotta be kidding me!

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