Birth Stories

01/06/2025

2024 recap and 2025 availability.

11/07/2024

01/31/2024

Life with a baby can be overwhelming even at the best of times! Check out these great ways to show your support.💓 Which one is your favourite?

Have questions about your milk supply or latch? Need support to find a comfortable position to nurse in? Planning for your baby's arrival and looking for information to help make the first few days of breastfeeding or chestfeeding easier for both of you? We're here to help! Visit the link in our bio to connect with our FREE Latch & Learn Workshops, Prenatal Lactation Class "Me Breastfeed" and more!

01/31/2024

Why go upside down in pregnancy? In the last two trimesters of pregnancy (not the first!) the uterus may position itself better in the body after the ligaments supporting the uterus have this gentle stretch and release. Then the improvements in uterine space may allow baby to get into a better position.

01/31/2024

“When you first have children they talk about the challenges of parenting....the struggles of a baby waking in the night,
the toddler who won’t stay in their bed, the cost of childcare, injuries from sports...

Having to take off work to pick them up from school when they don’t feel well, helping them with homework, a messy house, the never ending laundry, the cost to buy school clothes, packing their lunches....

You watch their eyes light up on Christmas morning....and try to soak in the magic of those moments.

You coach them in sports, rushing to practices and ballgames...and tote them all over the country to let them play the game they love...no matter how exhausting or expensive it becomes.

Life is just so busy that you rarely even stop to think what the end of those days look like.

In fact, it’s not really even something you can wrap your mind around.

You go into it thinking that 18-20 years sounds like a long time....

Then suddenly hours turn into days...days into months...and months into years.

That little person that used to crawl up next to you in bed and cuddle up to watch cartoons...suddenly becomes this young adult who hugs you in the hallway as they come and go.

And the chaos and laughter that used to echo throughout your home....gets filled with silence and solitude.

You’ve learned how to parent a child who needs you to care for and protect them....but have no clue how the whole “letting go” thing is supposed to work.

So you hold on as tight as you can...wondering how time passed so quickly...feeling guilty that you missed something....

Because even though you had 20 years.....it just somehow doesn’t seem like it was enough.

You ask yourself so many questions...

Did you teach them the right lessons?
Did you read them enough books as a child?
Spend enough time playing with them?
How many school parties did you have to miss?
Do they really know how much you love them?
What could I have done better as a parent?
....When it’s time for them to go, it all hits you like a ton of bricks.

And all you can do is pray....hope....and trust that God will protect them as they start to make their way into the world alone.

Parenting is by far the most amazing experience of your life....that at times leaves you exhilarated....while others leave you heartbroken.

But one thing is certain.....it’s never enough time...💕

So for all the parents with young children...whose days are spent trying to figure out how to make it through the madness...
Exhausted day in and day out...

Soak. It. All. In.

Because one day....all those crazy days full of cartoons, snuggles, sleep overs, Christmas morning magic, ballgames, practices and late night dinners...

All come to an end.

And you’re left hoping that you did enough right, so that when they spread their wings....

They’ll fly...💕💕💕”

Credit to the Amazing Author:

01/31/2024

“It’s all fun and games
And sexy breathing exercises for birth
And romantic plans about how he’ll take the baby while you do yoga every day

Until you’re 10 days postpartum
Still bleeding and soaked in breastmilk
Riding a roller coaster of hormones and sleep deprivation
And your lovely partner forgets to pick up a smoothie on his way home from the grocery store

And you lose your sh✨t
Like sobbing into the bathroom sink
Like cursing his mother
Like wondering why you ever procreated with someone capable of such unimaginable selfishness

And then, when the storm has passed, and you’ve had a snack- you realize
Two shaky, raw, sleep deprived humans
Trying to be life rafts for one another
While sinking into the depths of exhaustion and stress
Keeping the tiniest, most fragile, precious being afloat
Is hard AF

We weren’t meant to do this alone
We were not meant to be sent out to sea on a tiny little life boat with no map
Even the most loving, stable partnership can sink under the weight of operating in survival mode while finding your footing as parents

So, if you’re out there, treading water
Buried in laundry and breastmilk
Surviving on freezer pizza and three hours of sleep
Thinking mildly unkind thoughts about the person you chose to parent with
Because he can’t seem to calm the baby or remember your smoothies or grasp the depths of the earth shaking transition you’re navigating
You’re not alone
And it will get easier
One sleepy, shaky day at a time.”
Image and words by:

01/31/2024

And we wonder why A_tis_ is so high….

11/15/2023

Want to shout it from the rooftops!

If you work in a hospital as a midwife or obstetrician, you may be expected to ‘get the baby out’ within 60 seconds of the birth of the head. There can be an expectation that the baby be born within the space of one contraction.

I have personally been mentored by private midwives and have only watched physiological births at home to learn how to sit with birth, so for a long time I assumed that everyone just waited for the second contraction for the shoulders to be born… turns out, many midwives and obstetricians will put their hands on the babies head to try and put traction/pressure on the babies head to bring the shoulders out within the same contraction.

One of the concerns is that if the shoulders aren’t born soon after the head, that they must be stuck and that the baby is experiencing a shoulder dystocia…but that can’t be true, because most of the births I attend follow a two-step method where we just wait for the second contraction for the shoulders and all those babies didn’t have a shoulder dystocia

There is research on this (of course) and Zhang et al in 2017 did a randomised controlled clinical trial to compare a one-step method with a two-step method.

The control group had the one-step method where the clinician used their hands to speed up the birth of the shoulders, the study group had a two-step approach where the clinician just allowed the baby to be born over 2 contractions

The two-step group had ZERO incidence of shoulder dystocia and no increase in neonatal asphyxia compared to the one-step group. The one step group had 4 shoulder dystocia incidents.

The two-step approach allows physiological birth to unfold, acknowledges the cardinal movements of the baby through the pelvis and allows the time for the shoulders to get into position before they are born to allow for a less complicated birth.

By speeding up and trying to manually manipulate the baby out if it’s mother we interrupt the babies manoeuvres through the pelvis and potentially create incidences of shoulder dystocia.