Birth Stories

Get The OR Ready! {An Unlikely Birth Story} I loooove to plan! I thrive on knowing when things are going to happen and try to be prepared for them as much as possible. It's irony at it's finest when we know from experience that real life works in the exact opposite way.  Well, I couldn’t have learned a greater lesson on this until this past October. Here’s a little background about one of my first lessons about "expecting the unexpected." When I was 16, I quit dancing to become one of the world’s worst basketball players. Truth. I was 5’3, playing a post position and I ended up taking a nasty fall and rupturing two discs in my spine. Fast-forward to...

  Even before I was pregnant with my first child, I knew I wanted a natural birth. I watched The Business of Being Born and I was hooked. I wanted to experience all the sensations of labor and childbirth, and I was willing to forgo any and all pain relief. So when I finally did become pregnant, I did what any natural birth pregnant mama would do. I read Ina May's Guide to Childbirth and was inspired by all the birth stories. I took a totally hippie natural childbirth class (we lived in San Francisco at the time, so when I say it was "hippie" I mean it was h-i-p-p-i-e!). I told everybody that I was going natural. I meditated. I did yoga. I hired...

When a child loses his parent, they are called an orphan. When a spouse loses her or his partner, they are called a widow or widower. When parents lose their child, there isn’t a word to describe them. This month recognizes the loss so many parents experience across the United States and around the world. ~Ronald Reagan, 1988 This month marks awareness for Pregnancy and Infant Loss, with October 15th being the official day of remembrance. There are so many families that have the devastating experience of losing a child during pregnancy or after birth. Often times, the suffering is done in silence, but we want you to know that those precious lives {and you} are never forgotten. However short their time here on...

{For just this week, we are handing over our computers to the men in our lives and turning this little piece of the world wide web into Red Stick DADS Blog!  Read along with their joys and their struggles, and find out why we are so very thankful to have these awesome dads in our lives.} ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- What a trip! As I traveled back from Northeast Louisiana, I had nothing but the highway and great manly memories from the guys hunting trip I was leaving. The trip was a mix between Duck Commander and Mountain Men with a side of Rambo. Despite not physically traveling to a far destination, we were one with John Rambo’s persona. Our arsenal included AR15’s, pistols, knives, axes, machetes,...

“You’re hiring a what?!” was the most common reaction I got when I mentioned I was hiring a professional birth photographer. And I was living in Austin at the time…you know, the place where people ride around topless on purple unicycles (slight exaggeration), and yet I was the weirdo who wanted to record my baby’s birth. This Louisiana girl just trying to keep Austin weird, y'all! Yes, most people thought I was crazy to even consider this. Birth photography is a fairly new trend that has become immensely popular over the past few years. As someone who has utilized this service, here are some answers to a few questions I often get asked on birth photography: So what exactly is...