Moving During Labor

The second Healthy Birth Blog carnival is up on Lamaze’s Science & Sensibility blog. It is a great collection of links to posts about the importance of Healthy Birth Practice #2: Walk, Move Around, and Change Positions During Labor. For the blog carnival I contributed a post/handout I made last year called How to Use [...]

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Let labor begin on its own…

One of my blog posts that gets the most hits and is a consistently searched for topic is one that I wrote called “how do I know I’m really in labor?” I revised it recently for participation in a blog carnival at Science and Sensibility about letting labor begin on its own. Let Labor Begin [...]

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How do I know I’m really in labor?

When I was in early labor with my first son, I spent quite some time upstairs in our computer room googling, “how to know you’re really in labor” or, “signs of true labor,” or “the difference between false labor and real labor,” or, “how do I know I’m in labor,” or, “how to know I’m [...]

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What to Expect When You Go to the Hospital for a Natural Childbirth

I’ve been debating about whether to share this post or not. I’m concerned that it may come across as unnecessarily negative, pessimistic, or even “combative” or “anti-hospital.”  However, I do think it is honest and I’ve decided to share it. There is a fairly “normal” course of events for women having a natural birth in [...]

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Comfort Measures Illustrations

We spend a lot of time in my classes talking about different comfort measures for birth. In fact, one of my most popular classes is my “Labor Support and Comfort Measures” single session class in which we practice all kinds of different skills that may be of use for birthing.
I enjoy Childbirth Connection’s free pdf [...]

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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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