Birth Stories

I had a cesarean section to have my daughter in 2018. Though I ended up having an emergency one on a day I didn’t schedule, the original plan was to schedule it because my daughter was breech. I was surrounded by other pregnant women while I was pregnant. Many were doing everything in their control to have a natural birth. They talked about it a lot and I enjoyed listening. I was always intrigued by natural birth but never saw it as a journey I wanted to embark on. Here’s the thing... I quickly found out there’s a subgroup of women in the natural birth category that believe how you birth your child is not only not your personal business and decision,...

Welp, here I am, almost 30 weeks pregnant with twins! It’s truly crazy how fast it has flown by. As the months have passed, I’ve talked to my doctors, read a book or two, and scanned plenty of posts from other twin moms. I have openly accepted that this birth will be much different from my last two. I will either deliver the twins via C-section or vaginally with an epidural, and I will deliver them in the OR either way. I am ok with either scenario. It will mostly depend on the position the babies are in. But I thought I’d share my experience with natural birth and impart my advice if there are any moms out there...

My nature, for the most part, is to worry, collect data, worry some more, create multiple scenarios in my head, worry even more, make a plan for each possibility I can imagine, and then act. Works great in my profession, not so much in everything else. I spent most of my pregnancy in this cycle, but there really weren't a lot of actions I could take, only to wait. From pregnancy to birth, my son helped me realize an important lesson: learning to surrender. This baby had been breech the whole pregnancy. At 38 weeks, one day before we were going to schedule a section, he flipped head down on his own. So now we wait for labor to spontaneously...

My older son will be 4 years old in a week and, like so many parents, each year I find myself looking back at pictures and reflecting on his birthday. What does his birthday mean to us? How has this day impacted us? How have we spent every birthday before this one? In June of 2014 we got the exciting news that we were expecting our first child. We went through the first half of our pregnancy thinking everything was perfect. At my 20 week anatomy scan, we were told that our son had a two vessel umbilical cord. Most babies have three blood vessels: one vein, which brings nutrients from the placenta to the baby, and two arteries that...

I opted for natural childbirth with my first-born. I never really questioned if I would be able to do it – that’s the stubborn in me, I guess. We took the Lamaze classes and I read all the books. Without really knowing what to expect, I was “prepared.” I just kept telling myself it was like running a race, mostly all mental. And it certainly was a mental game of focus. But it was obviously very physical, too. Nearly a week late, the little man wasn’t leaving his cozy home without a fight. Or at least a hand on top of his head to get him stuck a few times on the way out. It was nine hours of...