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April 2009 |
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 Dear {FIRST_NAME|Friends},
I was privileged recently to attend a three-day seminar for childbirth educators offered as part of the certification process for Lamaze International. Three days spent with a group of seasoned professionals - including labor and delivery nurses, doulas, childbirth educators, and midwives - who believe passionately in birth’s capacity to be an empowering rite of passage in the lives of women and their families.
Each time I go to a birth related educational event, I come away awed by the power that birth has to transform those it touches – mothers, fathers, family members, birth attendants, educators. Like the proverbial window to the soul, the act of birthing a baby (or witnessing a birth) allows us to tap into a deeper part of our humanity. I have yet to meet a woman who was not transformed in the process of becoming a mother. And I am continually inspired by the dedication of the people who are called to work in the field of birth.
One of the key topics addressed during the Lamaze training was how to help women learn to make informed decisions with regard to their maternity care. Many of the interventions practiced in modern obstetrical care, while helpful when their use is indicated, may increase the risk of certain problems when performed routinely in low-risk pregnancies. As a lay consumer, it can be very challenging to sort out what is “best practice” from what is routine or accepted practice, especially when the information you’re looking at is new to you. So we’re reprinting an article from 2007 outlining an easy to remember process for making informed decisions.
How infants sleep is a concern that consumes most new parents, and has been a particularly hot topic in the postpartum classes this past month. Noted parenting author Elizabeth Pantley offers suggestions for coping with newborn sleep habits during in this month’s postnatal article.
I hope you find this information helpful and wish you a spring filled with light and love.
Namaste,
Leslie
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Birth Announcements
Congratulations to:
Sara B and daughter Lena Sadie
born January 16, 2009 |
Katrina S and son Kenji Morgan
born January 18, 2009 |
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Michela W and daughter Jordan Rose,
born January 25, 2009 |
Beth F and son Brycen William,
born February 9, 2009 |
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Jenny S and daughter Avery McLean,
born February 23, 2009
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Kristen F and daughter Salinne
born March 12, 2009 |
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Hilary G and son Will Eric
born on March 21, 2009 |
Cinde E and daughter Jude Elizabeth,
born March 29, 2009 |
We'd love to announce your yoga baby's birth!
Send your photos and birth stories to Leslie Lytle at inspiration@OmMama.com. |
What's New
We still have a few spaces in the following programs:
Birth Talk, a circle of trust and support for pregnant women and partners interested in an unmedicated hospital birth, will begin meeting at OmMama on the third Monday of each month beginning April 20th. Birth Talk meets from 6:30 – 7:00 pm for guest speakers, and 7:00 – 8:30 pm for circle. For more information contact Jennifer Kyzer at 440-2498 or email safe-n-happy@iglide.net.
Topics:
- April 20th: Childbirth Education Options
- May 18th: Benefits of Doulas/Labor Assistants
- June 15th: First Two Weeks Postpartum
- July 20th: Cloth Diapering
- August 17th: Pregnancy Celebrations
- September 21st: Babywearing
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Birth Story
Jordan Rose
 Brian and I welcomed Jordan Rose into our lives at 0915 on January 25, 2009 in our home. She weighed 7 lb 6 oz and was 21 inches long. Since this was my first pregnancy, I wasn't exactly sure what to expect and wasn't even certain I would know when labor actually started.
My midwife had been preparing me that it would at least 2 days since my body didn't appear to be "ready" to have the baby immediately. She also suggested that I try to ignore labor for as long as I could and it wouldn't seem as long. Well I took her advice to heart and ignored the first 12 hours, because I didn't even realize I was having contractions. . .
Read Full Birth Story |
Prenatal Article
BRAIN: An acronym for informed decision-making
by Leslie Lytle
“I’m pregnant!”
 The moment you realize you have entered this significant phase of your life can be a heady one, equal parts excitement, joy, fear and an awareness that unbelievable life changes are about to unfold. If you are like many women, you alternate between excitement about the upcoming arrival of the newest addition to your family, and apprehension about labor, birth and life with a newborn. Some women are concerned about their own capacity to deal with the pain of labor; others are anxious about the potential for unnecessary interventions. With a US Cesarean rate of 30.2% and climbing, most women are concerned about avoiding unnecessary surgery.
For many women, pregnancy marks their first significant foray into the healthcare system, and so they do not have a lot of experience navigating this complex structure. Suddenly you are making all kinds of health-related decisions for yourself and your baby, from whether or not to undergo a diagnostic test or ultrasound, to figuring out what pain management approach to use in labor, to deciding whether or not or when to vaccinate your child. The information you hear from your care provider, your friends, and the media is confusing and at times downright contradictory. It can feel overwhelming.
Whatever healthcare choices you are contemplating, you can positively impact your ability to make sound, personally appropriate decisions by learning to be an informed healthcare consumer. “BRAIN” is a helpful acronym to assist you in gathering the information needed to make informed decisions about your own and your baby’s health. Use this simple acronym the next time you are contemplating health-related decisions:
Benefits
Risks
Alternatives
Intuition
Nothing
Benefits
What are the benefits of the particular diagnostic test, pain management approach, medication, procedure, protocol, etc. being considered? This is an important question to ask in today’s healthcare climate, where so many choices are available. Corollary questions might include: What problem will this solve? How will this be helpful? If a test suggests a problem, how serious is it? If a treatment is suggested: How is this usually done?
Risks
What are the risks of a given test, procedure, protocol etc? What are the risks relative to the benefits? Are there any side effects? If this is not successful, what is the next step? What sources of information do you suggest I use to inform myself about this issue?
Alternatives
What other approaches might be taken? Particularly in pregnancy, where we are usually dealing with a healthy process rather than a disease process, there may be multiple approaches to a similar situation or condition. Teasing out potential options early on helps us to identify alternatives that fit with our particular circumstances, so that we feel empowered, rather than pressured, in the decisions we make. If alternatives are available, go through the BRAIN acronym for each one offered.
Intuition
What is my gut saying about a particular test/ procedure /intervention/ protocol? Intuition is an important and often overlooked piece of information: taking the time to listen deeply for what our intuition is telling us helps us to make decisions that are rooted in our own values and experience. Including intuition in your decision-making process leads to decisions that have an internally derived logic, integrity, and authority. Decisions made in this way are rarely regretted later.
Nothing
What would happen if I do nothing? Corollaries to this question might include: What would happen if we wait an hour? A day? A week? You might apply the first part of the BRAIN acronym to doing nothing: What are the benefits of doing nothing? What are the risks? What are the alternatives? What does my intuition tell me?
Taken together, the questions in this acronym provide a logical, comprehensive framework for eliciting information from care providers and yourself, creating a broad context for decision-making. This simple acronym is also useful in many arenas you will be entering as an expecting or new parent: it can be used to look not only at health care decisions, but childcare related decisions, approaches to parenting, etc. Congratulations on your pregnancy and good luck with your decision-making! |
Postnatal Article
Newborn Babies and Sleep
by Elizabeth Pantley, author of The No-Cry Sleep Solution
Congratulations on the birth of your new baby. This is a glorious time in your life – and a sleepless time too. Newborns have very different sleep needs than older babies. This article will help you understand your baby’s developing sleep patterns, and will help you have reasonable expectations for sleep.
Read, Learn, and Beware of Bad Advice
Absolutely everyone has an opinion about how you should handle sleep issues with your new baby. The danger to a new parent is that these tidbits of misguided advice (no matter how well-intentioned) can truly have a negative effect on our parenting skills and, by extension, our babies’ development…if we are not aware of the facts. The more knowledge you have the less likely that other people will make you doubt your parenting decisions.
When you have your facts straight, and when you have a parenting plan, you will be able to respond with confidence to those who are well-meaning but offering contrary or incorrect advice. So, your first step is to get smart! Know what you are doing, and know why you are doing it. Read books and magazines, attend classes or support groups – it all helps.
The Biology of Newborn Sleep
During the early months of your baby's life, he sleeps when he is tired, it’s that simple. You can do little to force a new baby to sleep when he doesn’t want to sleep, and conversely, you can do little to wake him up when he is sleeping soundly.
Newborn babies have very tiny tummies. They grow rapidly, their diet is liquid, and it digests quickly. Although it would be nice to lay your little bundle down at bedtime and not hear from him until morning, this is not a realistic goal for a tiny baby. Newborns need to be fed every two to four hours — and sometimes more.
Sleeping “through the night”
You may believe that babies should start "sleeping through the night" soon after birth. For a new baby, a five-hour stretch is a full night. Many (but not all) babies can sleep uninterrupted from midnight to 5 a.m. (Not that they always do.) This may be a far cry from what you may have thought "sleeping through the night" meant!
What's more, some sleep-through-the-nighters will suddenly begin waking more frequently, and it’s often a full year or even two until your baby will settle into an all-night, every night sleep pattern.
Falling Asleep at the Breast or Bottle
It is natural for a newborn to fall asleep while sucking at the breast, a bottle, or a pacifier. When a baby always falls asleep this way, he learns to associate sucking with falling asleep; over time, he cannot fall asleep any other way. This is probably the most natural, pleasant sleep association a baby can have. However, a large percentage of parents who are struggling with older babies who cannot fall asleep or stay asleep are fighting this powerful association.
Therefore, if you want your baby to be able to fall asleep without your help, it is essential that you sometimes let your newborn baby suck until he is sleepy, but not totally asleep. When you can, remove the breast, bottle, or pacifier from his mouth, and let him finish falling asleep without it. If you do this often enough, he will learn how to fall asleep without sucking.
Waking for Night Feedings
Many pediatricians recommend that parents shouldn't let a newborn sleep longer than four hours without feeding, and the majority of babies wake far more frequently than that. No matter what, your baby will wake up during the night. The key is to learn when you should pick her up for a feeding and when you can let her go back to sleep on her own.
Here’s a tip that is important for you to know. Babies make many sleeping sounds, from grunts to whimpers to outright cries, and these noises don’t always signal awakening. These are what I call sleeping noises, and your baby is asleep during these episodes.
Learn to differentiate between sleeping sounds and awake sounds. If she is awake and hungry, you’ll want to feed her as quickly as possible so she’ll go back to sleep easily. But if she’s asleep – let her sleep!
Help Your Baby Distinguish Day from Night
A newborn sleeps sixteen to eighteen hours per day, and this sleep is distributed evenly over six to seven sleep periods. You can help your baby distinguish between night sleep and day sleep, and thus help him sleep longer periods at night.
Have your baby take his daytime naps in a lit room where he can hear the noises of the day. Make nighttime sleep dark and quiet, except for white noise (a background hum). You can also help your baby differentiate day from night by using a nightly bath and a change into pajamas to signal the difference between the two.
Watch for Signs of Tiredness
Get familiar with your baby's sleepy signals and put her down to sleep as soon as she seems tired. A baby who is encouraged to stay awake when her body is craving sleep is an unhappy baby. Over time, this pattern develops into sleep deprivation, which complicates developing sleep maturity. Learn to read your baby’s sleepy signs -- such as quieting down, losing interest in people and toys, and fussing -- and put her to bed when that window of opportunity presents itself.
Make Yourself Comfortable
It’s a fact that your baby will be waking you up, so you may as well make yourself as comfortable as possible. Relax about night wakings right now. Being frustrated about having to get up won’t change a thing. The situation will improve day by day; and before you know it, your newborn won’t be so little anymore — she’ll be walking and talking and getting into everything in sight…during the day, and sleeping peacefully all night long.
Excerpted with permission by McGraw-Hill/Contemporary Publishing from The No-Cry Sleep Solution: Gentle Ways to Help Your Baby Sleep Through the Night by Elizabeth Pantley, copyright 2002 http://www.pantley.com/elizabeth |
Events of Interest
Third Annual
Northside Kid Stuff Sale
Saturday, April 18
St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church
3602 Hawthorne Avenue
8am-1pm
Sip-n-Shop
Friday April 17
5pm-8pm ($10 includes first-pick shopping and refreshments)
gently used baby and children’s clothes and shoes,
toys, children’s books, cribs, high chairs, strollers, car seats and car seat bases, maternity clothes, videos and dvd’s, baby gear, blankets, bibs, pregnancy and parenting books
Check out our “Boutique Racks”
All proceeds will be donated to:
Holton Elementary PTA
St. Thomas’ Church
Ginter Park Library
Childsavers
For more information or to donate items, call Tracey at 804-658-4298.
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Prenatal & Postnatal Resources
Check out the new Pregnancy Connection Directory for local maternity care and service providers. It’s growing all the time.
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