Hmm, we need an accountant and a lawyer.

As I plug away working on the business plan for the holistic health center we're dreaming of, and study the rules for becoming a non-profit organization, I'm realizing two things - we need an accountant, and we need a lawyer. Handling money (and pretty much anything to do with numbers) is not my strong suit, so while I have the best of intentions and a clear vision for how this whole thing needs to be set up, somebody who is specifically trained in handling money should give their professional insight before we get started. Same thing goes for the lawyer. I want to make sure we're following the law along the way so we don't run into problems later, and especially where health care is concerned I just want to make sure we're doing everything the way we are required to. There will be a lot of legal documents along the way and I want to have someone who speaks that language on our team.

So just to put this out there, if you or someone you know has financial or legal expertise and an interest in holistic, natural health care, and would be willing to collaborate and share your insight on this project, we would be so very appreciative. It would have to be pro bono at this point but when we are up and functioning and have a budget to work with these will be available as paid positions! Nobody wants to work for free but maybe there are a couple of people out there with these qualifications who can share our vision for a beautiful, rural setting with several small, quaint office buildings where natural health practitioners such as naturopaths, massage therapists, midwives, counselors, and more can meet with their clients in a peaceful environment that is far from the typical medical office atmosphere. Surrounded by community gardens and areas for group events, where clients pay one low monthly co-op fee and have access to a wide variety of holistic practitioners, to promote a lifestyle of wellness and disease prevention, using more natural options when some kind of treatment is necessary. A birth center with full-time midwives and on-staff doulas, a center for pregnancy care, natural birth, and postpartum care for the mothers of Ramona and the surrounding communities. Sliding scale payment options to make natural health care an affordable choice for low income people, as well as a full time on-site case manager to help coordinate services and support for individuals and families who need it. If this is something you believe our community would benefit from, something you have an interest in and would like to help make it a reality, please take a moment to fill out this form and let us know how you'd like to help. Even if you don't know the first thing about accounting or legal documents, if you have an idea for how you can help with this, we'd really love to hear it.

Click here for the form where you can enter your contact info and what you want to help with. So far everyone we've talked to about this idea has been very supportive and positive, and I truly believe that we can make this happen!

My dream - a health care and birth co-operative.

For years now, since my pregnancy with our second child, I have had this little idea in the back of my brain that has grown and taken different shapes and forms, and sometimes I haven't thought much of it for long stretches of time but it's always there. It's a combination of some of my biggest passions - holistic health, natural birth, community-style living and work, family support, good quality health care available to ALL people - and the best part is that my husband is fully on board and supportive of this plan. So after a great deal of discussion and brainstorming, we've decided that it's time to put one foot in front of the other and start moving forward towards this plan, even if it's at a snails pace. We have a name and a vision and even a pretty solid plan that we've talked out, so I don't feel like we're flying blind. I'm not fooling myself into thinking it will be easy - in fact I think it will be a ton of very hard work. But we're ready to try!

What I'm envisioning is a large piece of land where we can set up multiple buildings, where we can live and also where we can have office space to rent out. My main vision is of a health center with a focus on pregnancy and birth, but I'd love to be able to offer whole life services if we can get enough interest and participation from providers. We would provide a beautiful space - complete with community vegetable gardens, workshops, and other activities to get people together and helping each other - where natural health care providers can come together to serve clients, outside of the standard idea of a hospital or clinic. A place where we can come together to promote wellness and good health, and take a holistic approach to managing health care by making it easy for the entire team to come together to help the ENTIRE client. Are you feeling me? I'm very excited about this, and I'm even more excited about how into it my husband is! I can see this being something our whole family would work together on.

One place for your natural health care. This plan originated when I learned about The Farm in Tennessee, the midwifery center which was started by the wonderful Ina May Gaskin, a pioneer in modern midwifery in the US. As soon as I learned about what she does, I wanted to create a place similar to that where women and their families could come to ease into a comfortable and safe place for birth, a haven where they would have access to midwives, doulas, maybe aromatherapists, massage therapists, counselors, and more. And yes, recently I've gotten into the show Private Practice (late to the party, as usual!) and I love the idea of a health care co-operative. Expanding beyond pregnancy and birth services and offering options to all age ranges - pediatrics, family practice, in my wildest dreams even hospice services, because I believe that we all deserve a peaceful birth and a peaceful death.

Services to support the entire life span. Workshops, not only about health and wellness related topics, but also about good old fashioned life skills. Community gardens, and workshops where we can learn how to work in the gardens and what to do with the food we harvest from them. Cottage style homes so that we could offer the different practitioners an on-site place to live, or at least a comfortable place to stay while waiting on a laboring mama. Birthing rooms, or birthing cottages, where the entire family can be comfortable for the whole duration of labor, where supportive and safe people are on premises to help care for the older children while the parents work through labor and birth together. The ability to have sliding scale payments or bartering services so that low income families can have access to the same good quality health services. 

This is an enormous plan and feels overwhelming, but we'll never get anywhere by sitting and thinking about it, so after a great deal of discussion we've decided to go for it. And it still feels overwhelming, and I'm still not quite sure how to get it going, but we've been gathering lots of information about how to create a nonprofit organization and we're slowly heading down that path.

What we need now is to know who will be enthusiastic and supportive of this plan with us. Who will our supporters be? Anyone who would want to be involved with a project like this. A practitioner, a client, a lawyer, an activist, or "just" a caring community member. And ultimately we'll need to start fundraising. It will be slow going because I will be carefully looking into laws and regulations at each step along the way to make sure that we're doing things properly right from the start. But I believe in this plan. I believe that this is something that will fulfill a major need, and I believe that it is possible to make this happen. I believe that it will be a TON of work, but that it will be well worth it when we see it take shape.

My birth journey, part 3 - my second home birth

And here, in its raw original form just as I wrote it about 12 hours after her birth, the story of the birth of our Baby Girl. My birth story comes full circle, from an unplanned c-section to an unplanned "unassisted" birth. What a powerful experience, to birth a baby with only ourselves in attendance! The Man said that it was sort of funny to be there with me as I went back and forth between "midwife mode" and "mother mode" as I barked out random things like "Skin to skin now" and "don't touch the cord!" Many people jokingly asked if we got a refund from the midwife, but I'll tell you what, the way she and her student came in and did all of the after-care and my postpartum followup care was worth every penny!

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The changeover, from the prodromal labor I’d had for a couple of weeks to true early labor, started on Tuesday evening when I was 40 weeks 3 days. That was when I started having strong and sometimes-regular contractions, with increasing cramping and back pain. I started needing to use my meditations and did my breathing “techniques” through them when they got very strong. They usually weren’t regular, but they would become regular sometimes, and I only got them in the evening. I woke up a few times and walked through contractions during the night, but they weren’t incredibly strong and I was able to rest through most of them, and got a good stretch of sleep.

40 weeks 4 days, I had them much more strongly throughout the day, and I was getting excited thinking it might be that night. I had some signs that I was starting to dilate a little bit. I made it through the day though, and as the afternoon and evening went on I started to contract less and be more energetic and social. By the time The Man came home that night he could tell it wasn’t going to be the night, and I knew it too. I was thankful for a night of having the energy to hang out with my kids and read bedtime stories and just have a somewhat normal evening, though. I got super hungry and ate a LOT - fueling up for the marathon, I think. I slept well and didn’t wake up with any contractions during the night.

As soon as I stood up the next morning, on the day I was 40 weeks 5 days, I was hit with an intense and fairly long one. I had a couple more before I stood in the kitchen making breakfast and sobbing to The Man while he got ready for the day. I was a disaster, and for the rest of the day I had contractions and sobbing episodes pretty regularly. I tried my best to keep BooBoo entertained with busy work like drawing or play-doh, and he thankfully got busy with his toy kitchen and other toys in his room. He watched a couple of movies. I did what had to be done to get through the day. ;-) I did a bunch of chores around the house, washed all the sheets and blankets, swept all the floors, caught up on dishes. The contractions got more intense all day but it helped so much to walk around, so I kept busy. I can’t remember what made my husband decide to come home but he called to check on me a couple of times and I burst into tears each time, so I guess finally he decided it was time to head over. He got home and immediately took the kids out and I laid down and rested the best I was able to.

I wasn’t hungry for dinner that night, I ate lightly and was really starting to become irritated with things like noise and light. I remember getting annoyed because I kept turning off all the lights and it felt like everyone else was on a mission to walk behind me and turn them back on, every time I got “comfortable” some random light would turn on. Of course our house is very tiny so light would shine into my “space” no matter where in the house it was turned on. He got the kids bathed and put to bed and I kept walking and moving. It hurt to sit down so I stayed upright, and sometimes squatted while holding on to something like the counter or the couch arm. I was listening to music, and since I felt such a powerful need to stay upright and keep moving around, the music helped a lot as I would rock and sway to the tunes.

The contractions were much stronger than they’d been but I still didn’t believe that they were the real thing. My husband was quietly timing them while I did my thing, and he didn’t think I was in active labor either. They were coming irregularly the whole time. Around 11 they slowed down and then stopped. I sobbed for a while thinking of another day of stalled out labor. He made me a bowl of yogurt and strawberries when I realized I felt a little hungry, and I ate the whole bowl. He convinced me to try to sleep. I insisted that it felt better to stay upright, and he pointed out that I wouldn’t be able to use gravity to force labor to start if it wasn’t time. I washed up and laid down for bed, but couldn’t sleep and was moving around like crazy every time I had another contraction. The couch is right at the foot of our bed and I’d get up and lean over the back of it, which helped a lot with the pain.

The Man was lying in bed trying to sleep too, and every time I got up with another contraction I’d see him with the light from his phone. For some reason I thought he was texting with my midwife, but he was just timing them again. When I asked him about it the next day he said they still weren’t coming regularly. They’d be 3 minutes apart and then 8 - 10 minutes apart. I remember checking the clock in the kitchen every hour or so, and I distinctly remember looking at the clock around 1:30 in the morning and having another round of crying because it was so late and I was thinking how exhausted I’d be the next day after a night of laboring and no sleep. When I got back to bed I laid down one last time and tried to sleep.

With the next contraction I was back out of bed and honestly I can’t remember why my husband followed me that time. Until then he’d been trying to sleep in between all of my commotion, thinking that they’d peter out yet again and he’d have another day of work in the morning. Suddenly everything that had been taking days to get started, started happening VERY quickly. It wasn’t too long after that, that I started uncontrollably starting to bear down at the end of the contractions. I was definitely making a different range of sounds than I was earlier, and I was moving like crazy around the living room. I’d find one position for one contraction, but then would be totally uncomfortable and would find a different position for the next one. The Man had my midwife on the phone at this point and he was running around putting chux pads down, and I spread out a towel.  She told him to have me check myself to tell her how far up I could feel the baby’s head. She told me later that she could tell by my sounds over the phone that it was pretty close to baby time. The only thing I could answer was the classic transition in labor phrase, “I don’t know, I don’t know.” I was finally lost in labor-land and was focused only on breathing and moving through each moment of it.

The Man said that he knew things “got real” when I asked him to help me take off my pajama pants. Within a couple of minutes I felt like I had to pee, and I started to head towards the bathroom but didn’t get far before another big contraction, during which my water broke in a big gush. The only reason I know this is because my midwife told my husband to get a strip of the test paper to see what the fluid was, and it turned black which meant it was amniotic fluid. She was already grabbing her stuff to head our way, after we'd woken her in the middle of the night to tell her to COME QUICKLY! I was still on my hands and knees when the next contraction started, and he was in the kitchen washing his hands. I somehow managed to yell to him “Come help me” and he came running in just as I had another huge urge to bear down. He looked behind me and he realized about a second before I did that the baby was about to arrive. I don’t even know whether I actually had breaks between the pushing urges or if I was just making myself slow down every so often. I reached behind me and felt the head starting to crown, and I consciously told myself to slow down and stop pushing for a second because I didn’t want to tear like I did with BooBoo. The head rested there for a moment, I sort of held it in place with my hand and put pressure on myself to relieve the intense pressure from inside, which helped a lot. Very quickly I was ready to push again, the biggest part of the head was out and I felt the rest of the body slide out into my husbands hands.

He wrapped the baby immediately into a receiving blanket and put her on my chest, and helped me take off my shirt so we could have skin to skin contact right away. I piled a couple of other blankets and towels on top of us. I felt under the blanket and was shocked that I didn’t feel “boy parts” on her, which I was fully expecting. Since I couldn’t look at that angle to actually see, because of the umbilical cord and the way the towels and blankets were positioned, I asked him to look. He lifted up the blankets and with tears in his eyes he said to me “A girl. A girl!!” I cried, of course, like I cried about everything else in this labor. I told him I didn’t believe him and told him to look again, and he confirmed it. He called my midwife back and said “It’s a girl!” She gave him some quick tips about what to do with the placenta, not to touch the cord, and so on. She was already on her way to us.

The placenta took longer to deliver than it did after BooBoo’s birth, I’m not sure of the exact time but it was probably about 30 minutes. I remember that with BooBoo it just seemed to slide out, but this time I had a few strong contractions and then had to actually push a couple of times to deliver it. Once I delivered the placenta we put it into a bowl, and The Man laid down some pads on the bed and helped me over to lie down on it, while I held the baby who was attached to the placenta in a mixing bowl. I laid down in bed and drank my Vitalyte and nursed our little girl for the first time, until my midwife and her apprentice arrived.

The only “complication” if you can even call it a complication, was that she basically flew out of the amniotic sac when my water broke, and left the sac behind, and it “suctioned” shut and got wedged up by my cervix. When my midwife examined me she found that the shriveled amniotic sac was stuck up there and needed some help to be delivered. Massage and gentle pushing from my end with gentle tugging from her end wasn’t enough to get it down, so I ended up getting a couple of doses of herbal tinctures to help with expelling any remaining pieces. The placenta itself was very healthy and intact but Heather was afraid of a piece of this sac being left behind and causing infection, so she wanted to be very careful to get all of it. She sat with me for quite a while, massaging my belly and helping me ease it out, and eventually the whole thing came down. I laid back fairly comfortably on the bed and snuggled the baby while she took care of me, and it didn’t feel like a scary complication at all.

Our baby, our beautiful daughter, was 8 pounds 4 ounces, and 21 inches long. Her head circumference was 13 inches. When I was pregnant with her, her hands were ALWAYS up by her face, and one concern we had was that she’d be born with her hand up there, with more of a risk of tearing me on her way out. Sure enough, she had a pretty good scratch under her chin and distinct red markings on her face, which line up perfectly with her little hand when it’s positioned there. I didn’t have any tears (yay!) but there was some bruising up by my cervix that my midwife said she’s seen when baby is coming out with a hand by the face, so she was definitely trying to get through my pelvis with the hand there. Fortunately she wasn’t actually born in that position but the positioning of the hand was enough to make labor pretty drawn out and painful, and I’m sure that’s why I needed to do so much moving around to help with positioning her and opening up my pelvis. My midwife’s theory was that as I started to push her out she pulled the hand down at kind of the last minute.

The whole experience was absolutely wild and primal and beautiful. When I look back at the pictures from her first few minutes of life, I’m almost overcome with emotion from it! This time around I had very strong and classic feelings during the transition stage. “I’m never doing this again” and “I don’t think I can do this” and all kinds of other doubting kinds of statements, all in the 15 minutes or so before she arrived. It was a very painful labor and I had to work hard with my breathing and positioning to get through the contractions, but it was incredible the way I really felt like she and I were working together through it. In between contractions and even in between pushing I’d feel her moving and I’d rub her through my belly and talk to her as we got ready for the next one. We worked very hard and then it all happened so fast in the end. I felt so in tune with her and with my body. It was just the most incredible experience and I’m still so in awe of this little girl every time I look at her.

Bellies and babies...

I guess this is as good a time as any to say that I'm kind of a birth and baby junkie. I've written a lot about pregnancy, birth, and babies in the past and I'm sure I'll write lots more. Fair warning, I hope. ;-)

Thinking about goals

Before Baby Girl came along I'd been starting to think about my professional development, and now that she's here and she's an amazingly calm and chill baby and we're getting into a pretty good routine, I've been starting to think about that again.

It's funny, until last year I've always said that I wasn't particularly interested in being a birth worker of any kind. But for some reason I started thinking about it while I was pregnant with her, and now thinking about being with birthing women and newborn babies just seems like the natural thing for me to do. So one of my major goals is to be a doula. I'd like to work with women and their partners during the pregnancy, be there to support them at the birth, and then (this is actually the part I'm most excited about) help out in the postpartum period, with whatever she needs help with as she gets used to life with the new baby for the first 8 weeks or so.

Before that, my number one goal is to register with the NAHA as a trained aromatherapist. 

There are other things I hear about and look into and have a great deal of interest in. But for now those are my two major goals. Some of my other interests include massage, reflexology, herbal studies, nutrition, yoga, and pretty much anything to do with newborns and mothers - infant care, breastfeeding, baby wearing, safe sleep, and so on. Some of those, I'm sure, will be worked into my career and some won't. My plan is to be self employed so that I can work directly with families and have a great deal of flexibility in my schedule.

For now my main plan is to be present with our young kids, particularly BooBoo and Baby Girl, who are still home with me while Bug is in school during the day. But I'm thinking that within this year I'd like to get enrolled in an aromatherapy program, and I've even started scoping out different programs at various schools. It's exciting to think about being in school again, eight years after graduating!