Thirteen hours of water birthing
I practically ran back into the bedroom and woke up my partner Joe, feverishly excited I beamed, “My water broke!”
A water birth story
I floated through my labor, literally and figuratively. I spent seven hours in a big round tub, making my own waves as each contraction made waves through my body.
Hypnobirthing isn’t really hypnosis, and it’s not just for birth
A couple months into my pregnancy, my mom gave me and Andreas a gift certificate for 12 hours of private Hypnobirthing training with a certified instructor. The initial lessons were challenging, not because the practice itself was all that difficult (both Dre and I have had lots of exposure to and belief in focused breathing […]
You did not fail just because your birth didn’t go as planned
We often think we have control over our lives — but ultimately each of us has to grapple with that which is beyond our control. We have to learn about surrender.
Why I threw out my birth plan
Long before we made that ‘end-of-the-first-trimester-safe-zone’ announcement, I set out to arm myself with information. I bought twenty or so different books, ranging topically from c-sections to homebirths, joined every pregnancy website I could find, pored over every birth story I could get my greedy little hands on, and began deciding just how things would go this time around…
Eleven weeks early and a fighter from the start
From the very start of my pregnancy, I knew that my little one would come before her due date, maybe a week or two early. Never in my wildest imaginings did I think she would be ELEVEN weeks early! It was Tuesday, March 3, 2009. I woke up with the most intensive heartburn I had […]
Miracle baby proves there’s no such thing as a 100% diagnosis
From the age twelve years I have been told I would never carry a child to term. There were days of depression, fears of never having my own children, feeling like an oddity that I didn’t menstruate like my friends and all around not feeling like a “real” woman. Eventually I came to the conclusion […]
Yeah, so my son was born in the backseat of a taxi.
Summer wanted a natural childbirth free from medical interventions. Well, she got what she wanted, right there in the back of a taxi cab on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway.