Active Birth Video

Lamaze and Injoy videos have teamed up on a nice new website called Mother’s Advocate. The site has a variety of handouts and a booklet to download based on “6 Healthy Birth Practices” (which, in and of themselves form a nice little birth plan for a normal, healthy birth!). I especially enjoyed their video on [...]

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Why I became a childbirth educator…

The Passion for Birth blog had a contest recently on this topic. You can see my response on the PfB website here. My essay is the fourth one down called “Women and social justice and that feeling.” I won a copy of The Idea Box, which I’ve always wanted. Yay!

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Personality and Birth

From Sheila Kitzinger’s book The Experience of Childbirth:
In a normal, straightforward labour a woman’s attitude of mind, her approach to the task that awaits her, and her preconceptions concerning the nature of the work that her body has to do, are more important than any sort of physical preparation she can make in advance. Whatever [...]

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Birth & Apples

What does birth have to do with apples? Well, I read two things this week that made me think of both apples and birth. First, in an Ode magazine editorial that was about “apples and entrepreneurs.”  The editor introduced me to the word “pleonasms” –used to refer to words that contain unnecessary repetition. He was [...]

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Using the right ingredients…

I seem to be able to relate just about everything I ever read to birth. Some time ago, I read a book called Things I Learned from Knitting and in it the author recounts a story about her attempt to make her friend’s delicious stroganoff:
“The recipe was for a fantastic mushroom stroganoff that I thought [...]

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What Does Coping Well Mean?

Occasionally, I hear people telling birth stories and emphasizing not making noise as an indicator, or “proof,” of how well they coped with birthing–”I didn’t make any noise at all,” or “she did really well, she only made noise towards the end…” Women also come to classes looking for ways to stay “in control” and [...]

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Movement and pain

A brief quote from Biance Lepori an Italian architect who specializes in the design of birth rooms:
“Even pain dissolves with movement; pain killers are a consequence of stillness.” (emphasis mine)
This architect specifically designs rooms that support physiological birth–birth that unfolds accords to the natural biological processes of the woman, on her own timeline, and under [...]

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Lamaze: Pregnancy, Birth, & Beyond

In addition to the Healthy Birth guides I posted about in my last post, I also received my first shipment of Lamaze’s new publication, Lamaze: Pregnancy, Birth & Beyond. This magazine is excellent! I was very favorably impressed. It is brief, but provides an excellent, positive, overall overview of pregnancy, birth, and early parenting. I [...]

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Healthy Birth Guides

I recently received a shipment of The 2008/2009 Guide to a Healthy Birth published and distributed free of charge by Choices in Childbirth in NYC. I ordered a stack of these nice little booklets for only the cost of shipping ($11 for 50 booklets). I really like the content and plan to distribute these in [...]

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Birth as a creative process

I recently finished reading the book Rediscovering Birth and there was a section in it that I absolutely LOVED about birth as a creative process. The author quotes another writer, Dr. Michelle Harrison. She forms an analogy about women giving birth as like dancers on a stage and how just as routine interventions for the [...]

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