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....

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.

There lots of lists of the “Special Gifts for the Women in Your Life”. But these lists are AWFUL! Full of fancy perfume we’ve never heard of, lotion sets full of garbage, jewelry that looks like the entrance of every department store? Who WRITES this stuff?

So, here are some REAL gift-giving ideas moms will appreciate, use and remember!

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!

Herbal baths have traditionally been used by midwives to help mothers and babies soothe and heal after birth. Sometimes however, birth does not go as hoped and planned. There may be grief about small details, or tremendous pain from difficult circumstances. It was in response to these challenging times that mothers and I came up with “The Do-Over Bath.” In this case, the herbal bath is also used as a ceremonial time to honor the closing of a chapter, and to make room for an emotional reset.

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!

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!

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!