Leah Seibert, Registered Midwife

12/01/2021

Every year the midwives at Pomegranate put together holiday hampers for our clients who may need some financial support to make the winter season a little brighter. One of Pomegranate's clients, Tammy, always helps us raise funds in the memory of her beautiful daughter Mara whose short life has touched so many. Please read Tammy, Rob, and sister Fiona’s story here and consider donating.

Let's make this holiday season a little more sweet for others If we can.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/7th-annual-maras-midwives-holiday-hampers?utm_source=customer&utm_medium=copy_

01/30/2021

Valuable message from Ease Your Body: Whole Body Core and Pelvic Floor

12/02/2020

We are very lucky to have Keisha back with our team this year.

“Charnley grew up hearing stories from her family about her great-grandmother and the ways in which she cared for the people around her.

“She was blind and overcame many challenges in her life, as a lot of Indigenous matriarchs do,” says Charnley.

“They told me that my great-grandma Mandy was a midwife and delivered many babies,” she says. “A blind midwife — and that just added to the sparkle in my eye that I have for her.”

Charnley says the community still refers to her great-grandmother as ‘Aunt Mandy’, and she feels the nickname “speaks to her impact on her extended relatives and family.”

Not only did Mandy deliver babies in the community as a midwife, but she was also gifted at preparing food using a wood stove, despite not being able to see.

Throughout her life, Charnley’s own mother, great-aunt and grandmother shared the kinds of meals her great-grandmother used to prepare, including lots of pot roasts.

This intergenerational knowledge and sharing of stories has culminated into Charnley’s practice as a birth worker, where she draws inspiration from her great-grandmother to cook a postpartum roast for families after supporting them through labour.

“Many of the stories I grew up with in my family are centered around food and the power of food to bring people together,” says Charnley.”

Read the whole article, featuring our amazing friend and founding member, Indigenous doula and student midwife, Keisha! Link: https://indiginews.com/vancouver-island/birthworker-carries-on-traditional-teachings-provides-postpartum-potroast

11/23/2020

Exciting news from Jodie and the Full Circle Physio team!

Hello Full Circle Physiotherapy Community!

It is with great excitement that I am sharing with you the shifting of Full Circle Physiotherapy to a Pelvic Health Collective and together return to more engagement in this space. This is a fun and exciting expansion of solo practice into one of teamwork and collaboration. We are a group of sole practitioners who share the same vision of high quality pelvic health and whole person wellness from a biopsychosocial and trauma informed lens. We also share the same vision of a practice model that does not work to profit off of each other but to grow with each other and share common infrastructure. We want to be accountable for each other's ongoing professional development and turning that into meaningful clinical care. We are building our own community of providers to support the health and wellbeing of the people in our individual communities.

We will be creating a few posts in the coming weeks to share more with you about how we will be practicing, how we will be engaging in the social media realm and who we are as clinicians and humans in the world. In the meantime, feel free to head over to check out our new website, read the blog and learn more about how we are going to be practicing

With much Love,

Jodie and The Full Circle Physiotherapy Crew

11/04/2020

It's that time of year again. Except this year has witnessed unanticipated hardships that we could not have imagined. Pomegranate Community Midwives ais committed to supporting our birthing families through our hamper program during these difficult months. This year, in order to maintain COVID safety we will only be accepting gift cards or cash as donations.

Our dear friends and clients Tammy Dewar and Rob Mackay hold an annual fundraising party in the memory of their beautiful daughter Mara to raise money for our hamper program. It is a wonderful way of giving back to the community while remembering the love we have for baby Mara. COVID has prevented this wonderful family from hosting Mara’s Midwives Memorial Fundraiser this year. Tammy has created a go fund me campaign as a way for her friends and family to donate to the hamper program in Mara’s name and the wider community is welcome to donate here as well.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/mara039s-memorial-for-midwives039?utm_source=customer&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_campaign=p_cf+share-flow-1&fbclid=IwAR06SvQoW0iedFKavmYDkgi72e5A5_iFNlHAeUjbLD_o94wt5jFgAm5mEiw
Your love and support is so appreciated.

10/16/2020

October 15th is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Day.
I often witness the joy of a family welcoming new life, but I've also midwifed grieving families when that new life ends too early. Candle is lit tonight in memory of the babies I've known and cared for who died before, during or after birth. Holding those families and babies in my heart, always.

07/24/2020

Emily Jarrett gave birth to her son, Thomas, on Nov. 28, 2019. She knows her pregnancy and labour would not have gone the same without the help of her registered midwife. When she found out she was…

07/02/2020

Jill is the go-to CPR and infant first aid instructor for Pomegranate midwives and clients! Congratulations Jill Colpitts - Birth Support and Education and Safe Beginnings First Aid.

06/30/2020

Its a bitter irony that midwives don’t get parental leave. In the 15 years since Pomegranate opened, the Pomegranate midwives have collectively had 28 babies and paid for own our own leave. That means 28 years of unpaid leave, just to create and support our own families. Show your support by contacting the government and requesting that they !

06/22/2020

Did midwives support you or someone you love for hours in labour? Did we come to your home and teach you to nurse your baby? Did you call us for reassurance in the middle of the night? If we made a difference for you, please take a few minutes to make a difference for , who are negotiating for a fair and equitable contract.

https://www.bcmidwives.com/supportbcmidwives.html

Three hundred midwives deliver 22 per cent of all babies born in the province. But successive governments have failed to provide us with even our basic needs. We operate with zero benefits or retirement security, and cut our own parental leaves short. And unlike physicians and nurse practitioners, we have to pay 100% of the costs for operating our clinics and providing our services.

Midwives deliver for BC families every single day. But access to midwifery is already limited, and will get worse if the NDP Government doesn’t act now.

05/01/2020

This blurry shot is not a bad simulation of the sometimes foggy view from inside our PPE. Happy to have had attended two lovely homebirths in two days with my friend and Pomegranate teammate Amanda. Here we are, carefully (endlessly!) sanitizing our equipment.

Life goes on and so does birth. Welcome babies! We are so glad you have joined us in this beautiful world.


Pomegranate Community Midwives
Masks To Midwives - Vancouver
Sew With Claire - Northshore Handmade PPE

04/06/2020

Jessie Harrold's birth preparation workbook is thoughtful, flexible and reflective. This upcoming Free workshop on birthing during uncertainty is sure to be wonderful.

CALLING ALL BIRTHING PEOPLE

On Thursday April 9th I am hosting a workshop called:

Birthing in Uncertainty: using Birth Principles to birth in your power

This is a *free* online workshop for people who are birthing during this unpredictable time, whose birth plans have been radically changed, and who want to focus on what they CAN control when everything is up in the air.

We will be using the Birth Principles Workbook, a resource I created five years ago which has since spread like wildfire around the world, being featured on the and being used in prenatal classes from Bolivia to Bristol.

The Birth Principles Workbook is a “soulful alternative to a birth plan,” which helps you prepare more deeply for the unpredictability of birth. It’s an especially valuable resource now that the landscape of birth is changing so rapidly for so many people.

The workshop will take place over Zoom. There will be a recording if you can’t make it live. REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED - see the link in my bio to register.

Please share this with any pregnant people you know who might benefit - there are already nearly 50 people registered but I’m not capping the numbers so the more the merrier (as long as Zoom has the bandwidth to hold us!)