I am officially past my "due date" with miss Ruby girl. I figured I should get a leg up on writing her birth story since she'll likely come in the next couple of weeks (if she is like her sisters it will be later as opposed to sooner). The best place to start her birth story is with our journey to the decision to birth at home and how we've prepared for it throughout the pregnancy.
So here's Part One of Ruby Elizabeth's story:
After AnaB's fabulous, wonderful, and oh-so-uh-mazing birth in 2010, we knew next time would be even better! When we found out (really just confirmed what we already knew) that we were pregnant with number 3, we (I) went into research mode. I knew I didn't really want to birth again in a hospital but I had no idea how we were going to afford a midwife. I searched all my options which were: go into debt for a midwife (totally worth it to me but E was not so cool with it), suck it up and go to the same hospital that I had AnaB (not a bad idea just not ideal), go to the Vandy midwives (also not a bad idea, actually better than the military hospital, but still not ideal) or go it alone (again totally worth it to me but E was not feeling it). Lots of different things to think about with each option and with 10.5 (you know how my babies like to stay in there!) months to think about it I kinda put off making a decision.
So then the holidays roll around (oh and we found out via Love my Baby Bump in Clarksville, that #3 was another sweet girl) and we figure, at almost 5 months we should probably start thinking about the birth and decide on if we'll seek out prenatal care from a provider or continue on managing prenatal care on my own. My philosophy is that prenatal care is what you do for yourself, how you care for yourself and then any medical attention sought is an added bonus or extra icing on the cake. I researched several different midwives, and interviewed the only one that I could find that traveled up here. She was great and had we been able to pay her fees on her time frame we would have hired her. She was confident and had a quiet kind of calming voice and her assistant was the more hands on almost doula-esque kind of woman. I thought they made a great team and would have fit us pretty good, but their payment schedule had them paid in full by 36 wks and which put us paying 600+ a month for 5 months... no bueno for this newly civilian salary of ours.
I reached out to a woman I found on Facebook when researching placenta encapsulation. She is a doula, assistant midwife, placenta encapsulator, and awesomeness-extraordinaire. She had great insight and lots of information for us on what our options really were. After taking in all of what she mentioned, and really doing some soul/gut searching we came up with our game plan.
In our situation, Eric being a prior military medic, me being a childbirth educator, and having a lot of resources at our disposal, we felt comfortable being responsible for our own birthing experience. E and I had long conversations and did lots of research together to get to this point. Our birth would be classified as an "Unassisted Birth" or in the birth blogging world shortened to a "UC." We decided to hire a doula who had previously had two unassisted births herself and was on her way to becoming a midwife. She was labor support only but offered a little more bang for our buck with her expertise and calming demeanor about the whole thing. We chose to leave out this detail when telling most people our plans. I don't know that our family even knows that there was not a midwife present at the birth. Anyway, along with choosing this type of birth we had to decide on prenatal care. We(I) felt a lot of the routine testing was not necessary, so we sought out a midwife who would agree to do intermittent prenatal visits so that we could basically pick and chose our care and she would not really be responsible for it. The only thing that we knew for certain was hands down a must was a Rhogam shot because of my blood type. So we all packed into the car one day and drove the 2 hours to the midwife's house/clinic, did some paper work, a little blood work to check iron levels, and got a shot in the booty. That was our one and only visit with her. Honestly, if she'd been a little closer I probably would have done a few more appointments with her just to give Eric the warm fuzzies he was in need of. For me, I know I'm not high risk, I take care of myself and live a healthy life style so I don't worry too much about "well visits" and testing for everything under the sun.
We compiled lists of birthing supplies and were given even more research to read. We watched videos on different birth complications and read emergency manuals. I scoured different sites dedicated to UC families, rummaged through forums about this and that, and gathered lots of different perspectives of the adventure we were taking on. We talked about who we would want at the birth and decided on a friend to take pictures and another friend to watch the girls at the house so we could choose to have them be a part of the birth or not when the time came. I think the hardest decision to make was not to tell very many people about our plans to have an unassisted birth. I had read stories of family members freaking out and calling CPS while mom was in labor, or people losing friends and family relationships over it. I just wanted to avoid all of that, so when asked, I tried to give very vague answers and kept the details to myself and those I felt would be trusting of us enough to leave it alone even if they didn't agree. Lastly, we made our order for all the different supplies:
So then the holidays roll around (oh and we found out via Love my Baby Bump in Clarksville, that #3 was another sweet girl) and we figure, at almost 5 months we should probably start thinking about the birth and decide on if we'll seek out prenatal care from a provider or continue on managing prenatal care on my own. My philosophy is that prenatal care is what you do for yourself, how you care for yourself and then any medical attention sought is an added bonus or extra icing on the cake. I researched several different midwives, and interviewed the only one that I could find that traveled up here. She was great and had we been able to pay her fees on her time frame we would have hired her. She was confident and had a quiet kind of calming voice and her assistant was the more hands on almost doula-esque kind of woman. I thought they made a great team and would have fit us pretty good, but their payment schedule had them paid in full by 36 wks and which put us paying 600+ a month for 5 months... no bueno for this newly civilian salary of ours.
I reached out to a woman I found on Facebook when researching placenta encapsulation. She is a doula, assistant midwife, placenta encapsulator, and awesomeness-extraordinaire. She had great insight and lots of information for us on what our options really were. After taking in all of what she mentioned, and really doing some soul/gut searching we came up with our game plan.
In our situation, Eric being a prior military medic, me being a childbirth educator, and having a lot of resources at our disposal, we felt comfortable being responsible for our own birthing experience. E and I had long conversations and did lots of research together to get to this point. Our birth would be classified as an "Unassisted Birth" or in the birth blogging world shortened to a "UC." We decided to hire a doula who had previously had two unassisted births herself and was on her way to becoming a midwife. She was labor support only but offered a little more bang for our buck with her expertise and calming demeanor about the whole thing. We chose to leave out this detail when telling most people our plans. I don't know that our family even knows that there was not a midwife present at the birth. Anyway, along with choosing this type of birth we had to decide on prenatal care. We(I) felt a lot of the routine testing was not necessary, so we sought out a midwife who would agree to do intermittent prenatal visits so that we could basically pick and chose our care and she would not really be responsible for it. The only thing that we knew for certain was hands down a must was a Rhogam shot because of my blood type. So we all packed into the car one day and drove the 2 hours to the midwife's house/clinic, did some paper work, a little blood work to check iron levels, and got a shot in the booty. That was our one and only visit with her. Honestly, if she'd been a little closer I probably would have done a few more appointments with her just to give Eric the warm fuzzies he was in need of. For me, I know I'm not high risk, I take care of myself and live a healthy life style so I don't worry too much about "well visits" and testing for everything under the sun.
We compiled lists of birthing supplies and were given even more research to read. We watched videos on different birth complications and read emergency manuals. I scoured different sites dedicated to UC families, rummaged through forums about this and that, and gathered lots of different perspectives of the adventure we were taking on. We talked about who we would want at the birth and decided on a friend to take pictures and another friend to watch the girls at the house so we could choose to have them be a part of the birth or not when the time came. I think the hardest decision to make was not to tell very many people about our plans to have an unassisted birth. I had read stories of family members freaking out and calling CPS while mom was in labor, or people losing friends and family relationships over it. I just wanted to avoid all of that, so when asked, I tried to give very vague answers and kept the details to myself and those I felt would be trusting of us enough to leave it alone even if they didn't agree. Lastly, we made our order for all the different supplies:
Plastic mattress cover
2 plastic backed sheets
15 chux pads
2 cord clamps
2 peri bottles
4 peri cold packs
blood typing kit
personal birth certificate (just for looks)
foot printing set
1 pair of sterile gloves
Dermoplast
Shepherd's purse (an herb to help postpartum hemorrhage)
Scale sling
water birth net
bulb syringe
birthing tub
new hose pipe and shower connections
extra towels
sitz bath for afterwards
alcohol
witch hazel
peroxide
condoms(to use as a cold pack-mix 40/60 water alcohol solution and freeze, fits nicely inside an adult diaper)
Depends adult diapers :P
And a cute little home birth Tshirt for Rubes
I'm going to stop there for now, and follow up with part two (labor and birthing) hopefully tomorrow.
1 comment:
I feel special that I knew it was going to be unassisted. I knew you would take all the precautions and you and Eric would make it a safe environment with everything you needed. Glad you realized that you had options and chose what best fit your family. Proud of you.
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