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Listen to your intuition

I recently received a comment on my post on the umbilical cord which I thought everyone should read:
My son was born 7 years ago with 4 nuchal cords. Shortly before his birth, I noticed tremendous movement. The only way to describe it was it was as if my baby was panicking and flailing the same [...]

O-kaaaaaay

Pulling this out of my “weird” file:
Swiss restaurant to serve meals cooked with human breastmilk.
Now, as much as an advocate I am for breastfeeding, I think that sorta needs to stop at least by adolescence, m’kay?
I have heard of someone who pumped her milk for years (at the time I heard this, she was still [...]

Typical C-section, from the nurse’s perspective

One of the L&D nurses’ blogs I keep with recently had a post about what happens during a C-section from the perspective of the nurse, starting with the prep. It was quite interesting to read, and since about 1/3 of American women who plan a hospital birth will end up having a C-section, you may [...]

Gotta love the British understatements

I think I may have blogged about this before — that of the British baby named Brandon who was diagnosed prenatally with a rare brain disorder, and doctors declared that he would be blind and deaf and only live a few hours. But he’s not blind nor deaf, and very much alive. An MRI done [...]

Kinder, gentler Cesarean

Go over to the blog of Jennifer Block (the author of Pushed) to see a picture and brief discussion on how some British doctors are making surgical birth kinder and gentler on the mother and baby. It’s along the lines of what I blogged about here.

Diapering

While this isn’t exactly childbirth education, once your child is born, you will have to deal with changing diapers, unless you’re planning on going diaperless.
Before my first child was born, I contemplated using cloth diapers (because it was in The Tightwad Gazette, which is also where I got the bulk of my cloth-diaper knowledge until [...]

Not “not” [...or "be positive"]

When writing a birth plan, one of the things that may help keep the doctors and nurses on your side is to keep things phrased positively, rather than negatively. For instance, instead of “I don’t want to stay in bed,” you could say, “I want to be allowed freedom of movement.” Instead of “I don’t want continuous fetal [...]

A World Apart

One of my fellow childbirth educators (actually a co-moderator on my independent childbirth educators email list) has recently come back from another trip to Sierra Leone. Her group is called Midwives on Missions of Service, and their goal is to reduce maternal and infant mortality by improving the standards of care pregnant women get.  They [...]

Epidemic?

Yesterday I linked to the anesthesiologist who couldn’t stand the audacity of patients to actually make decisions about their own health care. Today I am going to link again to the blog of the doctor who posted the anesthesiologist’s letter, and highlight what the doctor said in writing the lead-in to the letter:
Call me old [...]