Midwifery Care For All

07/25/2025

Celebrating today as a proud member of the Lean Rocket Lab LOCAL Fellows Program! I am truly blessed to be part of this exciting, empowering — and at times intense — journey that pushed me to grow, learn, and connect in remarkable ways.
Thank you Alex and Sierra for your continued support.
Thank you to my husband, Brian and kids for their continued support along with my beautiful sister, Abba and Kevin Reeve and my amazing friends Seneca, Katie, and Justin.
Love you all. ♥️

06/26/2025

Are you expecting? Or know someone who is expecting?
Please reach out! Talk soon!

06/24/2025

A day in the life of a traveling midwife:
2 prenatal appointments, one blood draw with lab dropoff, a total of 150 miles, some charting, and a fresh salad from my garden for dinner. Oh and awaiting my first delivery! Happy Tuesday everyone. 😊

06/17/2025

Big things happening in Jackson.
I love how it was able to talk about Midwifery Care and my goals for the future!

Airdate: June 17th, 2025 Lean Rocket LOCAL Fellow Osha Humphrey, Midwifery Care for AllJune 17, 2025Lean Rocket Lab Celebrates Opening of Cafe FUELJune 17, 2025Nicole Johnson, M3 Mortgage & Logan Burns, Century 21 AffiliatedJune 17, 2025Head Coach Heather Brown, Jackson College Women’s BasketballJ...

06/04/2025

My birth assistant came over today and we finalized my supplies and labeled everything!
First birth coming up.

06/03/2025

Good morning!
Imagine if a provider came to you and saw you in your home!
That's me! Please reach out if your interested!

05/05/2025

Happy International Day of the Midwife!
Love this group of individuals!
We are all making differences in a world that needs change!

05/01/2025

What topics do you want to know more about related to preconception, pregnancy and postpartum??

04/30/2025

What could we potentially prevent with optimal vitamin D levels?

Preterm labor, preterm birth, gestational hypertension, preeclampsia, gestational diabetes?!

What? The correlation may not be strong, but it is there. We do not fully understand correlation, but vitamin D is an immunological marker and inflammatory mediator. A lot of these disease processes are related to inflammation!

Entering pregnancy with optimal vitamin D levels, yesterday’s post states what optimal levels are, will help prevent these disease processes from occurring.

Will taking too much Vitamin D hurt --- it doesn’t seem too.

While listening to Dr. Chappas podcast “Clinical Pearls” he quotes from Society of Maternal Fetal Medicine (SMFM) in 2018 “Vitamin D deficiency is associated with several adverse outcomes like preterm birth and preeclampsia.”

So, like my wonderful and amazing midwife preceptor Krista Runyan states we need to enter pregnancy as healthiest as we can.
Let us challenge our health care providers to run our vitamin D levels at preconception.

I would also like you to challenge your mind – if darker pigmented individuals are a higher risk of having a deficiency in vitamin D levels (as I stated on Monday’s post) and these individuals are at a higher risk of developing PTB, PTL, preeclampsia – shouldn’t we as healthcare providers be automatically running vitamin D levels?

**Now I am not saying optimal Vitamin D levels is the “cure” all but it could help fit one of the missing puzzle pieces in preventing some pregnancy related conditions.**
I hope everyone enjoys this beautiful Wednesday and look the sun is out!
10 to 15 minutes of sun exposure gives your body about 1,000 IU's of vitamin D! 😊

04/29/2025

Continuing the Vitamin D conversation.
What labs to draw and the results?

At this time ACOG does not recommend universal screening for all individuals. ACOG recommends screening for individuals in certain ethnic minorities, live in cold climates, reside in northern latitudes, wear sunscreen and protective clothing or are vegetarian. Which here in Michigan is everyone and virtually 2/3 of Americans live in cold climates. So really everyone should be screened.

The blood draw is called “25-hydroxy vitamin D.”

What is an ideal range?

Getting a base level in the first trimester of pregnancy to calculate the supplementation is ideal. Most laboratory results state that “normal” vitamin D levels are anything above 30 ng/ml but recently most experts say levels need to be well above 50 ng/ml.

How much supplementation?

Ideally a pregnant individual should be supplementing with 4,000 IU’s daily. This is best calculated based on your lab results and monitoring throughout pregnancy.

Supplementing between 2,000 and 4,000 IU’s daily postpartum while breastfeeding has proven effective for baby’s vitamin D levels to be in a sufficient range as well! 🤱

04/28/2025

So what is vitamin D?
Vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin that is stored in our adipose tissues for future use. When our body needs said vitamin, it is released in the active form for our needed requirements.

How do we get vitamin D?
Through sunlight, foods, and supplementation.
☀️Sunlight: There is a compound in our skin called 7-dehydrocholesterol. When the UVB radiation lights are absorbed in our skin this compound changes to previtamin D3. The previtamin D3 changes to vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol) under heat exposure. Vitamin D3 is then carried throughout our bloodstream bounded by a carrier protein.
**I want to point out: individuals with darker pigmented skin are at a 6-fold higher risk of being deficient in vitamin D levels. This is due to the higher levels of pigmented melanin in the skin that stops vitamin D production from sun exposure.**