As a midwife, I’ve spent considerable amount of time with young parents to-be in their springtime season. In this hopeful chapter, they often expect to birth their baby and mostly get back to their busy lives with a baby in tow. “But babies,” I tell them, “are not on iPhone time.” I teach them that we need to slow down for our babies, and take the time to be with these fresh little humans. Pretty consistently, the mothers who take the time to spend the first few weeks a little more quietly with their babies on their chests, especially with some “skin-to-skin” time, seem to ‘luck out’ more often with calm, bright-eyed babies who pretty comfortably settle into life along side their families....

It’s become common to tell all women who are birthing in medical facilities that they need an IV placed in their hand or arm “just in case.” However, when this routine medical intervention is examined more closely, it becomes clear that it’s massively overused, and unnecessarily complicating labor and postpartum for far too many mothers.

Through the winter holidays, it's fairly common for breastfeeding mamas to call with a whole string of nursing concerns because they feel their milk supply has gone down. Temporary circumstances can lead to a minor and temporary dip in milk supply. Here are some basics that can guide you to sorting out what might be going on in your case.

This question gets asked a lot around the holidays. Here’s my midwife perspective from helping mothers birth, and navigate family holidays, for over 40 years.

Midwives, apprentices and doulas are uniquely positioned to have an extraordinary affect on the postpartum period of families, and therefore on the family’s entire parenting experience. When we educate mothers and their families about the exquisite importance of a healthy and protected postpartum and how to have realistic expectations, our impact will echo deeply in women’s lives forever beyond the actual birth.

Time is a frequently unnamed and unacknowledged medical complication plaguing most births currently taking place in hospitals and even birth centers. Considering the fast-paced nature of modern culture, perhaps it follows that the issue of time is having a never-before-seen, and increasingly disastrous effect, on pregnancy, birth and postpartum recovery.

There are many things that you can do in the immediate postpartum to help your newborn maintain their birth weight or start gaining. This is the information I make sure every one of my birth clients have received over my 40+ years in midwifery as a midwife and family natural health coach, and the majority of their babies GAINED weight by their one week check-up!

PART 1/4: This is a frank discussion to teach homebirth midwives and other birth professionals about effective naturopathic responses to excessive blood loss in childbirth. In addition to the obvious physical improvement in mom’s immediate recovery, unusually rapid long-term postpartum improvements have been confirmed with labwork. Here I discuss which remedies and why - homeopathics, essential oils, flower remedies, liquid iron supplementation, food as medicine, and the power of including visualization as an emergency technique. “Her hemoglobin five hours later was 7 g/dl, something quizzically deemed “impossible” by the medical staff.“ Early nutritional and remedy-based intervention does make a significant difference in recovery!