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Welcome to the Club

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Welcome to the Club

I remember sitting at my kitchen table while holding my newborn daughter, staring bleary-eyed at the glass of water Rollie placed before me. Rollie was an angel sent from heaven. Her wings may not have been visible, but I know for a fact they were there.

Rollie was my postpartum doula, and my husband and I don’t know how we would have survived those early days without her. When she observed on our first day together just how sleep-deprived and hormonal and besotted and bewildered I was, she asked, “how can we better prepare new mothers for this?”

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Do I Really Need to Do(ula) This? Part 2

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Do I Really Need to Do(ula) This? Part 2

As promised, we are back with Part 2 of our doula blog. We pick up from where we left off a few weeks ago when the leaves were not quite as crunchy…

In Part 1, I featured the work of the Labor Support Doula, and what she can offer during pregnancy and birth. Before anyone calls me out for being sexist, let’s acknowledge that there are currently a few men who are trained doulas around the world (and, fun fact for any Gleeks out there: Matthew Morrison’s father was a midwife!) However, since women tend to be the overwhelming majority working in these areas, I will, going forward, refer to doulas as women.

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Do I Really Need to Do(ula) This?

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Do I Really Need to Do(ula) This?

Let’s have a little doula chat, shall we? You’re pregnant, and as a result, you’ve acquired a whole new vocabulary: baby-wearing, layette, milk-duct, meconium, hybrid-diapers, effacement, linea alba – the list goes on.  One word that will become ever-present on your prenatal planet will be this one: “doula”. You’ll hear it from friends, on social media, in your childbirth class, maybe even from your local grocery store check-out staffer. So, because you have an inquiring mind of the prenatal kind (where you HAVE to know everything, but then forget it five minutes later), you are going to investigate the heck out of this doula thing. And we applaud you for that. If you want a solid intro as to why you should hire a labor support doula, please watch Anne’s video.