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Podcast Episode #11: Trust Your Gut

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In this episode of Ask the Doulas, Alyssa talks with Cindy about the importance of trusting your gut instincts as a mom.  You can also listen to this podcast on iTunes.

Alyssa:            Hi, welcome to Ask the Doulas.  I am Alyssa, co-owner and postpartum doula at Gold Coast Doulas.  Today’s show is sponsored by Cindy’s Suds, and we have Cindy here again with us today.  Hi, Cindy!

Cindy:            Hey, how are you?

Alyssa:            Good.  We are talking about trusting your gut instinct as a mom.

Cindy:            Yes!

Alyssa:            And you recently had an incident with your son that I wanted to ask you about and to share with everybody – you found out he had Lyme disease?

Cindy:             Yes.

Alyssa:            And so tell me how that started and how you as a mom figured that out before the medical professionals did.  Well, you are a medical professional.

Cindy:            I am, yes.  I’m a physician assistant by trade, but let’s take that off the table.  Completely take off the fact that I’m a PA.  So I’ve got three kids.  This is my middle son.  He is going to be 16 this month.  I’ve got a boy, girl, girl.  No, oh my gosh, I’ve got girl, boy, boy.  Holy cow!  Sorry, children!  My two boys are very active outdoors.  They hunt; they’re outside all the time; they camp.  So that’s just kind of our lifestyle.  We live on acreage, so they’re constantly outside.  So my almost-16-year-old this past summer was camping with some friends, and when he came back, he was like, “Oh yeah, I had a tick on me.”  I’m like, “Seriously?  That’s great.”

Alyssa:            At least he told you.

Cindy:            Right, right.  So that was April or May, I want to say, and didn’t think anything of it.  Nothing happened.  So then in June, he goes on another camping trip, and another situation where he’s with other families, other kids; has a blast, gone for the weekend.  He comes home, and about three days later, just very, very lethargic, very achy, full-body aches, high fever.  And so his fever was about 104, had gotten up to 104.5.  Really, really high, and just, you know, my joints ache, you know, I’m so exhausted, sleeping all the time.  And this is an almost 16-year-old; very out of character, obviously.  So I’m starting to think, “Well, gosh, what has changed?  What’s different?  He just got back from camping.  You know, I wonder if there’s anything – what if he got bit by something?”  Mosquito, tick, you know.  So I did a brief skin survey, just meaning that I’m kind of looking at his skin; is there anything out of place, anything weird?  And on his back, there was a little, teeny, tiny bite mark that I’m like – for whatever reason, it’s just that mom-reason where I’m like, “That.  I need to watch that.”  So I took a picture of it, and then throughout the next 24 hours, really, I was just kind of monitoring that little spot, and it was growing, and it was growing, and I’m like, “Holy cow, this looks like the bullseye mark that they are describing when somebody has Lyme disease.”

Alyssa:            So the tick wasn’t in there?

Cindy:             No.

Alyssa:            It was just his bite mark that you could see?

Cindy:            Right, right, but he had been camping for like, three days, and so, you know, I guess at some point during that time, he had gotten bit by a tick at that spot, but no tick; no physical tick there afterwards.  But granted, two months prior, he was like, “Oh yeah, I had a tick on me.”  So I think maybe I was even a little higher alert because of that.  But honestly, it was just this gut instinct as a mom that I knew something was wrong; I knew something – it wasn’t just minor.  I knew it was something bigger, and I just knew that I had to kind of do the skin survey and look.  It was just this feeling that I know there’s something going on, and then following up with that.  So I watched the spot on his back slowly grow, and I was taking pictures to document it just so that I knew that yes, it is growing, and just kind of watching him.  So his fever was still really high, 104.  It would come down to about 101, 102 with Tylenol or Advil, but he – this is like a kid who’s the size of an adult, you know?  At almost 16 and a boy, you’re big.  But I’m like, he still is my kid; he still is my baby, and no matter how old they are, I think a mom is still so in tune with their child whether they’re a newborn or almost 16.  So I brought him in to an urgent care facility, and was very, very frustrated because the provider that saw him said, “Oh, yeah, I don’t think it’s Lyme disease,” because I came in saying, “I think my son has Lyme disease.  He was exposed because he was camping.  He’s had a fever.  He’s had the body aches.”  I mean, I basically laid it out.  Here’s Lyme disease on a platter.  And she left the room, came back in and said, “Well, I just looked it up, and it doesn’t sound like he has Lyme disease.  I think it’s a virus.”

Alyssa:            “I just looked it up”?

Cindy:             “I just looked it up.”

Alyssa:            So basically, I just Googled Lyme disease for a minute.

Cindy:            Yeah, I basically just Googled Lyme.  And I was like, “What?”  And she’s like, “No, and also that rash on his back is supposed to be greater than 10 centimeters if it’s truly Lyme disease.  So you don’t have it.  So he’s just got a virus; go home.”  And I was like – I was just kind of dumbfounded, like, “Are you kidding?”  So I went home, and my gut is churning.  I’m like, there is no way.  So instead of going back to an urgent care, I went to the emergency room, and the first provider that I saw there, too: “I think it’s a virus.  I just don’t think that it’s Lyme disease, and I think you should send him home and give him fluids.”  I’m like, “This is day six of him having a fever this high.  No.  There is something going on.  He has Lyme disease.  I need to get this treated.”  So thankfully in the emergency room, before you can go, they have the attending physician come in and see you.  The person that had come in first was a resident physician, so then the attending came.  She walks in the door, and I actually knew her from when I worked in a local emergency room 20 years ago before I went to PA school, so I knew her.  I knew that she was a smart cookie, and she had all these years of experience.  So she walked in, looks at my son, looks at me, and says, “He has Lyme disease.  We’re treating him right now.”  And I burst into tears because – and I think she thought that I was crying because I’m just given this sentence, he has Lyme disease.  I’m like –

Alyssa:            Finally!

Cindy:            Finally!  Somebody understands that what I am presenting to you, this is the truth!  And discounting the fact that I’m a PA, I just feel like we as moms, you have to trust your gut because we were given this maternal instinct for a reason, and we were given this protection for our kids that is above and beyond anything that medicine can teach you or that anyone can teach you.  It is this primal instinct that, if you feel like something is going on with your child, whether it’s a food allergy, or I think my child may fall somewhere on the autism spectrum, or whatever, you as a mom, you need to pursue that, and you need to be the biggest advocate for your child because that is what – it’s this amazing gift that we’re given, and you have to pursue that because it’s real and it is 100%  just – it is so real.  I just can’t even describe it.

Alyssa:            I know.  It’s almost tangible, but not.  It’s like we know how this should feel, and when something feels wrong, our kid is not acting right, you just know.

Cindy:            Yeah.  And even when I was practicing as a PA, if a mom would come in and say there is something wrong, you throw out anything that you think the medical books are saying could be right or could be wrong because that mom knows her child.  And I think the older that I’ve gotten, I’ve gotten so much more pro-advocacy for your child because I feel like nowadays, there are so many people who think they know what is best, but they don’t.  I mean, you as a mom, you know what is best for your child hands-down, and so I really want to encourage moms that if they have a feeling, you have to believe in that feeling because that is very powerful.  It’s just such a powerful – I can’t even describe what it would be.

Alyssa:            Yeah, it’s almost like you were connected for so long that that doesn’t – just because there’s no umbilical cord there, there’s still this connection that’s kind of indescribable.

Cindy:            It is, yeah.  And whether they’re a newborn or 16, as a mom, you just know.  And so I feel like that part of us that is prone to doubt, I would just encourage moms: don’t doubt because that is something that you were given; it’s a gift to know if there is something that you should pursue further for your child and to really trust it because I feel like there are so many times where maybe, especially as a young mom or a new mom, you might think, “Well, you know, so-and-so says that it should look this way or should go that way.”  But if you’re feeling differently, I would really encourage that young mom to kind of internalize what she’s feeling and put it out there because she knows.  I mean, you’re given this feeling for a reason, and it’s complete protection for your child.

Alyssa:            Yeah.  And I think, like, with you, that doesn’t mean that you distrust all medical care providers, but you need to find one that you do trust, and if that means going to three, then you go to three, or five, or you find one that you trust to listen to you and work with you instead of just discounting how you feel.  And they are out there.

Cindy:             Exactly, that is perfectly said.  They are.

Alyssa:            They’re out there; you just have to find them.

Cindy:            Yeah.  And I said that to someone just the other day.  Someone said, you know, “I’m not sure if I’m going to like such-and-such provider.”  You may not, but you know what, you will find that person who you connect with and who you really trust for the care of your family.  And that’s with so many things in life, whether it’s a medical provider or whether it’s a school, even.  You know, you may say that this school – you really love the way that this school works with your child vs. this school, and I mean, it’s just got to be something that as a parent, you’re really connecting to and feeling like you can really give over your son or daughter’s little parts of their life to somebody that you trust that’s going to help shape them the way that you know is best.

Alyssa:            Well, I tell clients to interview.  Why wouldn’t you?  The doctors, schools, dentists.  This is a job for them.

Cindy:            And I said that, too.  I was just telling somebody.  You have to interview because there are so many people out there.  You’ve got to connect with your person and your group of people, your little tribe; you’ve got to connect with them, so you interview every little thing.  And it may seem silly, you know.  I did three or four interviews for preschool for my daughter, which seems so silly, but you know, it’s not, because you want to feel like who you’re entrusting your child to has the same values and beliefs and goals and good juju, whatever it is; you want that to mesh with yours.  And so interviewing is by far the best thing that you could so that you feel a connection.

Alyssa:            And you’ll know right away.

Cindy:             Absolutely.

Alyssa:            When I was pregnant, I was interviewing pediatricians, and I would just sit down and, you know, you can find online to ask them these questions.  I had my own questions, and I knew instantly who I felt comfortable with.  And I had no problem firing the other guys, even though those other guys were the ones everyone said is the best.  “We love so-and-so.  You have to go here; you have to go there.”  So I interviewed them all, but I also found a couple others.  And I chose who I felt comfortable with for me and my daughter.

Cindy:            Exactly.  And that is something that I love because like you just said, you can sit down with somebody.  You will know instantly if you have connection or not.  It’s not going to be like, oh, gee, I’m not sure.

Alyssa:            You can’t tell by reading Google reviews.

Cindy:            Uh-uh.  Yeah, it’s got to be a face to face interview, and so I love that suggestion, and I completely, 100% support that too, is you go out and you interview so you feel like you’ve made this connection because that’s what it’s all about.  You’ve got to really – you’re entrusting the care of your most precious person in your life, besides your spouse, to somebody.  You want to make sure that they’re on the same page as you.  And you also want to trust you gut because that is something that will not steer you wrong at all.

Alyssa:            I agree.  Awesome advice again.

Cindy:             Thanks.

Alyssa:            We’re going to have you on again soon.  If you have questions for Cindy, you can email her.  What’s your email?

Cindy:             Cindy@cindyssuds.com, or check out our website, www.cindyssuds.com.

Alyssa:            Awesome.  Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, and give us a five-star review.  We will talk to you soon.

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Newborn Survival

Podcast Episode #10: Dealing with Modern Medicine and Your Mother-in-Law

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On this episode of Ask the Doulas, Alyssa and Cindy talk about dealing with input from family members, including your mother-in-law, about parenting and about the role modern medicine plays in being a parent.   You can also  listen to the podcast on iTunes. 

Alyssa:            Hi, welcome to Ask the Doulas with Gold Coast Doulas!  This is Alyssa.  I am co-owner and postpartum doula at Gold Coast.  Today’s episode is sponsored by Cindy’s Suds, and we actually have Cindy with us again today.  We had a question from a client about dealing with in-laws in their home, and Cindy and I have had an interesting conversation with her background as a physician’s assistant and dealing with parents bringing their children in and then maybe the role of the in-laws in that situation.  And then I obviously deal with that in-home in postpartum support.  So let’s start by giving some background on you as a PA and then how your outlook changed after doing a lot of research and creating your natural product line.

Cindy:            Okay.  Well, I worked in family practice, and so that means that I saw everything from birth, pregnancy, all the way to, obviously, the elderly.  So I kind of saw the whole gamut, which I loved because I love that I could see somebody starting out in their 20s, then getting married, and then getting pregnant and starting a family.  I absolutely love that because I could grow with them and get a window into their world and see how they’re transitioning from being a single person to being married to being a mom.  So, super fun; I completely loved it.  I worked in family practice for about 14 years.  In that time period, when I started, I was a single person.  I hadn’t been married yet, and so it was interesting even for me professionally to grow from “this is what you do” to all of a sudden being married and being like, wow, there’s a whole dynamic here, being married.  And then wow, wait a minute, now as a mom, my whole “this is what you do” completely changed because no longer is it what the books say that you should advise a patient on.  Now it’s like, well, let me give you some background.

Alyssa:            I have some experience now.

Cindy:            I have experience in this now, so it’s really great, and I think that was just a really neat part of being a PA is being able to bring in my own experiences.  And that’s part of, I think, life anyway.  We’re all given so many different experiences; we can come along each other and say hey, this is what I’ve learned and if I can help you, then we can kind of help each other grow.

Alyssa:            In a supportive way.

Cindy:             In a supportive way.

Alyssa:            Because I can think it can end up being judgmental as well.  Here’s my experience –

Cindy:            Right, you do it my way or the highway.  And I actually saw that sometimes because sometimes a patient would come in with her brand new baby, and in tow would be either Mom or Mother-in-law, kind of this hovering presence, and instantly, as a provider, I would walk in and go, oh, I’m feeling the dynamic in the room; I’m feeling the tension in the room because you have Mom with her new baby, who is navigating the waters of what does it look like to be a new mom; what do I make of this; how do I do the best thing for my child?  And Grandma, who I know is well-intentioned, and Grandma has the biggest love and heart for Baby, too, but the way that it was done 40 years ago is not the way, even scientifically speaking, that we’ve learned may be the best way nowadays.  And so Grandma may come in with this preconceived idea of, “You do it my way, and if you’re not doing it my way, you’re going to ruin this kid’s life.”  And it’s really, really hard for the new mom to figure out how she can’t – you know, what do I do so I don’t offend my mom or mother-in-law, but also what do I do so that I’m being true to my own feelings and my own desires of how my husband and I want to raise our new baby?  And I feel like a lot of new moms are really pulled in different directions because they’re reading, and today’s mom is so informed, and they’re so much more educated in what it looks like to be a mom vs. when you had a baby 40 years ago.  Sometimes you were still knocked out; you woke up; baby’s in your arms.  This is what you do because this is what was always done.  It’s a very new world nowadays in parenting, and you have perhaps maybe a mother-in-law or mother that is coming into the situation with very different preconceived ideas than where you want to go parenting-wise.  So there’s a lot of – you’ve got to be kind of gentle on both sides because you need to do in your heart what is best for your new baby, but you also somehow need to teach Grandma that we really love your support, but this is the way that we’re choosing to do things.

Alyssa:            We actually created a class called The Modern Grandparent for that exact reason.

Cindy:             Love it!  Love it!

Alyssa:            We’ve had clients say these are really tricky waters to navigate.  “I want my mother or mother-in-law to be around.  They’re great caregivers, but they’ve been out of the game for 30-some years.”  And so the class actually, in a very gentle way, teaches them that this is your son or daughter’s family.  You have to let them parent the way they want to parent, and then update them on health and safety things.  You know, even talking about SIDS and that we keep the crib clean and we don’t lay them on their tummies anymore; it’s Back to Sleep, and just going over all these – you know, car seat safety, and really, really updating the grandparents so that Mom and Dad can feel comfortable with their parents as caregivers.  I think that’s huge.

Cindy:            Absolutely.  It’s huge because as a new mom, we all know how important it is to still keep that relationship strong with our husbands and still have a date night once in a while, but if your mom or mother-in-law is the babysitter that night, and you’re trying to have a nice dinner with your husband out, and you are terrified that Grandma is going to put baby to bed on their tummy or do things that you have specifically chosen to not do as a parent, it can really be upsetting, and you’re not going to be able to really let go.

Alyssa:            You don’t enjoy yourself.

Cindy:            No, you don’t.  Not at all.  So I think it’s great that you guys are offering this class because there’s a lot of education, I think, that needs to happen to grandmas, whether it’s your own mom or your mother-in-law, so that a grandma can now be a supportive person to you instead of more like a hovering “you do it my way” kind of personality, and that can just be so hard.

Alyssa:            How would you deal with that in the medical world?  Like this family comes in and you have the hovering grandmother?  Is she sometimes trying to tell you how to do things, or what’s best for baby?

Cindy:            A lot of times they can be fairly vocal and say, “Well, when my daughter was a baby…”  And then I kind of would gently say, “Well, gosh, you know, you’re absolutely right.  When you were parenting your daughter 35 years ago, that is exactly the standard that they said was the best.  But now there’s a new standard, and research has shown – etc.”  So I always try to validate that; “Oh, my gosh, you’re so right.  That’s exactly what was best protocol then” – because you don’t want Grandma to feel like, you know, what are you thinking by doing this or that?  Because she honestly is wanting what’s best for the baby.  So if you validate, “You’re right.  That’s exactly what was the right way to do things back then, but nowadays, they’ve really made some new headway in research, and they’ve discovered this, and they’ve discovered that.”  So kind of validating and then redirecting to the newer research and the updated research so that Grandma doesn’t feel like an idiot, number one, because she’s there to help and she loves the baby and she loves her own child.  So you really want to validate Grandma, but then steer them into the latest facts so that they know that there has been a change because they’ve been out of parenting little babies for that long.  So you really want to kind of gently segue into, “The latest research shows; the latest studies show–” so they don’t feel bad.  So that was my role as a provider.  Then the pressure’s taken off of the new mom.  So the new mom is no longer feeling like she’s battling with her mother or mother-in-law.  It’s kind of taken the weight off of the new mom, and I see that as a doula, that’s a perfect role too, because as a doula you can come in and say, “That’s so great that you want to help Baby.  That’s so great that you want to be a great caretaker.  Have you heard that some of the new research shows, blah blah blah.”  So that way, the new mom doesn’t feel like she’s trying to pick sides between baby and her parent.

Alyssa:            Yeah, and I think that’s so important.  You don’t want them to feel like they’re being attacked, and you don’t want them to feel silly.  Like, oh, I’m stupid because I’m looking at data from 40 years ago.  I think validating that is really important; saying, “You obviously did a really great job because look at your kids.  But now, you know, here’s what’s changed, and let me show you why.”  Yeah, that’s great advice.  So when you started your company, were you still a PA?

Cindy:            Yes, yeah.  So I was still working as a PA, and I had my company on the side, and so the very early years of my company, I very, very intentionally kept it small because my role was mom to young kids because my kids were all quite young at the time.  I was working as a PA, and I also homeschool, so that’s a factor, too; that was another job, right?  And so I very intentionally – I kept feeling like I had horse reins that I would pull back, pull back, because I knew how it could quickly snowball to growing so fast, and I didn’t want that because my kids were little.  I was working as a PA; I was homeschooling.  So yeah, I worked as a PA for several years as I had Cindy’s Suds, so I did the two things for a while.

Alyssa:            And so you’re researching, studying medicine, and very westernized medicine, and having this mindset, and then you start to research this more holistic, natural – these remedies for very common ailments.  How did that affect how you treated clients, and did that become hard?

Cindy:            It did.  It really, really did because so many people want the quick fix, and so they would come in and say, “I don’t feel good.  I need an antibiotic.”  And I tried to be gentle and sit down and educate and say, “Well, let’s first see if there’s anything bacterial going on because if there’s not, really, viruses take about five days to completely run their course, and you just need rest.  You need to give your body some time to heal.  You can symptomatically treat if you want to with Tylenol or Advil, but you don’t need an antibiotic.” And I actually had several, several patients get angry.  “Well, I want one.” And being very adamant with, “This is what I want.  I came in; I need to be fixed.” And so it was hard because I’m trying to educate them on the fact that there are natural options out there; there are other things that you can do to stay healthy, to be healthy, and not necessarily turn instantaneously to prescriptions.  But I think there still is a large part of the population that is resistant to that and they want the quick fix.  We live in such a quick-fix-me world that people want that.

Alyssa:            Yeah.  But do you think just like with the mother-in-law who had a baby 40 years ago and thinks things are this way – is it that same age group thinking that well, an antibiotic fixes everything?  And they don’t know that, okay, let’s get enough sleep; let’s eat healthy; let’s cut out processed foods; let’s drink a lot of water and exercise; probiotics; all this good stuff – they have no idea.

Cindy:            Yeah, for sure.  And I think that’s where a lot of the education was coming in, that I would sit down and I would try to educate them on these things, but a lot of it is generational.  And so generationally, if this makes no sense to you, if you sound like you’re talking voodoo to them, they just – sometimes they just don’t get it, or maybe their minds are a little bit more closed off.  They may be a younger person.  Sometimes they do try to learn and be like, “Oh, I had no idea.  I’ll try that.”  But there are also others that were generationally – they were kind of set in their ways and their thought patterns, so it really depended on the patient, but it did get hard because I really felt torn because I really felt like there are so many great things to try first, and I’ve not turned my back on western medicine.  There is certainly a time and a place to use prescriptions and all the great things that have been discovered and new medications that are out there.  But first do no harm.  First try things that are safe.  First try things that are natural, and if these aren’t getting you to a place of healing or wellness, then start looking around.  What else could be going on?  And obviously if it’s something that’s obviously needing to be treated, you go right to that treatment first.  I mean, you’re not going to turn your back on, oh, this person has pneumonia.  Go home and rest.  But obviously you’re using your head in those situations, but a lot of times for the smaller, easier things, it’s just –

Alyssa:            Well, I think that’s preventative, right?  A lot of it is just, let’s prevent this small stuff.  I mean, there’s obviously big things.  Like you said, they’re going to happen.  You can’t just rub coconut oil on it and have it go away.

Cindy:             Right, exactly.

Alyssa:            So then your transition from the medical world to just doing your business – and you had said in our last episode that a lot of it was friends.  You had this overabundance of supply.  Your friends were like, “Oh, you should just sell this.”  You got into craft shows.  How much of that, like leaving the medical world to do this, had to do with this pull from, “I can’t really do this western medicine anymore.”  Or was it just more purely business?

Cindy:            It was actually several factors.  So I wouldn’t say that, oh, I left being a PA to exclusively focus on Cindy’s Suds because that’s not entirely accurate.  There were many things changing within the whole physician assistant profession that was bothersome to me.  The insurance companies were dictating so much of what we could and couldn’t do.  So you would come in and see me, and I’d go, oh, you know, listen, this is what you have; you need to get, say, a cat scan of your shoulder, whatever.  I would first have to look at your insurance and go, oh, gee, you’ve got this insurance.  I can’t do that yet.  I have to go to step one first, and then if step one fails, I have to go to step two.  So there were so many legalities that had changed –

Alyssa:            Even though you knew what you needed to do.

Cindy:            Oh, my word.  And it was – you felt like your hands were tied.  So even though – when I started practicing in 1996, it was a very, very different world than when I left in the late 2000s because you had to really check into what the insurance company wants me to do first, and I really felt that I could not practice with my head and my heart knowledge anymore.  I had to go see what this third party said that I could do to you and for you.  That was very frustrating.  At the time, my boss wanted me to work more, and that was also a factor.  My husband and I had decided we weren’t going to allow that to happen to our family because we had set up an amount of hours that we felt comfortable with me working per week, and adding to it was just not in the equation.  So it was that, and it was growing my company, as well.  So it was multi-faceted.  It was not just one thing, but the frustration with the current state of practicing health care was very, very high on the list, just that frustration of “I want to treat you this way, but I just can’t.  My hands are tied.”  And so that became a big factor in it, as well.

Alyssa:            I feel like that probably hasn’t gotten any better since you left, right?

Cindy:            It hasn’t, no.  My friends that still practice – it’s a very frustrating aspect of trying to practice modern medicine nowadays.  Very frustrating.

Alyssa:            Well, I think you gave us some really, really good tips in many areas.  So thank you for sharing your wisdom.

Cindy:             Absolutely.

Alyssa:            We will have you on again soon.

Cindy:             That sounds great.

Alyssa:            And you can find Cindy at www.cindyssuds.com.

Cindy:            Absolutely.  We’ve got our website there; you can look on the website.  There’s product descriptions.  You can also contact me via the website or at cindy@cindyssuds.com if you have specific questions that I can help you out with.

Alyssa:            Awesome.  And you can find us at goldcoastdoulas.com.  Email us at info@goldcoastdoulas.com.  And you can find us on Facebook and Instagram.  Don’t forget to subscribe to our iTunes podcast.  Thanks.

 

Podcast Episode #10: Dealing with Modern Medicine and Your Mother-in-Law Read More »

Tricia Buschert Doula

Podcast Episode #9: How to Handle a Six-Week NICU Stay

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On this episode of Ask the Doulas, Tricia talks about her experience with her twins staying in the NICU for six weeks.  You can also listen to this podcast on iTunes.

Alyssa:            Hi, welcome to another episode of Ask the Doulas with Gold Coast Doulas.  I am Alyssa, co-owner and postpartum doula, and today we’re talking to Tricia.

Tricia:             Hi.

Alyssa:            She is a post-partum and birth doula with us and also our multiples expert that teaches the multiples class.  Tell us about your multiples.

Tricia:             They are two.  I have identical twin girls, Keira and Rosalind.  They also have a big brother named Gideon.  He just turned four.

Alyssa:            Okay, so for a while there, you had three under three?

Tricia:             I had three under two.

Alyssa:            Three under two!

Tricia:             They are 23 months apart, so yeah.

Alyssa:            Wow, you are wonder woman.  So when the girls were born, they had a significant NICU stay?

Tricia:             They did.

Alyssa:            And I know parents get really nervous about NICU, and Kristen had talked about how her daughter had a three-week stay.  How long were your daughters in the NICU?

Tricia:             They were in just over six weeks.  Keira was in for 41 days, and Rosalind was in for 45.

Alyssa:            Okay.  So tell us a little bit about the birth story and how they ended up in NICU and what you and your husband felt.

Tricia:             My girls shared a placenta, so we had issues for a little while.  They were monitoring really closely.  One of their placentas was velamentous cord insertion, so it was palm-shaped, and it was attached to both the placenta and my cervix.  Keira started detaching off of the placenta.

Alyssa:            So there were two placentas?

Tricia:             No.  One together; they shared.  One had two cords.  So they had separate sacks.  There are three different types of twins.  We were the second-safest, I guess is the best way.  MoMo, they share a sack and they share everything.

Alyssa:            Okay.  One sack, one placenta?

Tricia:             Yeah, which runs risks because umbilical cords can twist around each other.  We had the safe kind of identical – well, safer.  Two sacks, but they shared one placenta.  So yes, they started to do a twin-to-twin blood transfusion back and forth, and so the placenta just kind of died, or was starting to.  So Keira came out pale and not breathing at 32 weeks, and sister came out 30 seconds later.  We had an emergency C-section because Keira was originally breech, so she was going to be a C-section regardless.  She was Baby A.  But it became more emergent when they realized that she was having issues with her placenta cord or her umbilical cord.  So they both were intubated within seconds.  Their scores were super low.  I want to say Keira’s was a one and Rosalind’s might have been a two or a three.  So super low at birth.  I think the scariest part was we had our son first, so we knew that they come out crying and happy.  And the doctors, when we came into our C-section, were talking about vacations, and by the end of it, the entire room of 30 people was, like, silent.  So yeah, my husband really had a hard time with that.  We both started crying.  Both girls were fine.  Keira was pretty much whisked straight down to NICU.  Rosalind was a little bit more stable, so they were able to have her lay next to me.  I have a photo of her little finger in my finger as they stitched me up, and her just kind of sitting there.  But then she was sent back down with sister.  Thankfully, I had a postpartum doula sitting there.  My husband left for about an hour.  It was very traumatic for him to have both of his girls and me and the whole – so he went and had his time.  I really still to this day, two years later, have no idea what he did.  I know he went through a drive through, and I know he sat in his car and cried, but I had my support for me, so we both were able to be where we needed, and my support was amazing.  Having that doula there was – I honestly could not imagine being in a room with no babies; no husband, because he needed his time, and yeah.  She was phenomenal.  And we had a NICU nurse come upstairs a couple hours; it was a good couple hours and brought pictures and had weights.  And both girls at that point were stable.  Both were intubated, great.  The NICU doctor was a little concerned.  Keira’s hemoglobin was at an 8, and Rosalind’s was at an 18.  They think it happened within the first, like those last couple hours when the umbilical cord started being funky and the placenta, because it can go so quickly.  And they really don’t think it had to have been a couple hours because I was having contractions for a good 48 hours before the girls were born.  They just weren’t consistent.  But we had steroid shots prior.  They weren’t going to start labor, because at that point they didn’t think that it was – when it was going to happen, it was going to happen.  But she felt that Keira would do a lot better if she had a blood transfusion because her hemoglobin was so low for even an adult, let alone a baby.  But blood transfusions for babies are really little.  You think “blood transfusion;” you think these huge – it’s like a little syringe amount of blood.  It’s super little because they were so little.

Alyssa:            So did they explain that to you?  Because I think if somebody told me, hey, your newborn baby needs a blood transfusion, I would just break down.  So they said this is literally what it looks like?  So they just pump new blood into their vein?

Tricia:             Yeah, they did it through her head because the head veins are so nice and with babies, they still move.  They’re little babies.  She might be three pounds, but they’re tough little things at three pounds.  And so they go through the head because it’s a really good opening; they don’t have to worry about trying to do it more than once.  And so it’s a really little amount; it’s a little syringe.  Thankfully, yeah, they did explain some of that.  By that time I was pumping.  I was able to thankfully talk to a NICU nurse prior to going into NICU, so I knew that without the girls, if I wanted my milk supply to go in, I needed to have a pump within three hours.  I had to kind of fight for my pump a little bit, but I was able to get a pump in those first three hours because I was determined to have that.  I was able to see the girls for the first time a little after midnight, and they were born at 6:52 and 6:53.  So it took about four hours for me to get down there.  I couldn’t hold them or anything like that.  They were little things.  But at that point, Keira had her blood transfusion and all of that.  They were, yes, very fragile little things.

Alyssa:            What goes through your mind?

Tricia:             At that point, I think I was just so happy to see them okay that I really – I don’t think that there was much else because I had experienced her coming out not breathing and her being whisked away and knowing that I almost didn’t go in that day.  They were going to send me home.  When I went into the hospital, I came in with contractions every eight minutes apart.  I was a centimeter and a half dilated.  They thought they’d give me some fluids and send me back home at 1:00.  I went to the hospital alone; drove a friend’s car; was in my nephew’s preschool class that morning.  Like, nobody had a clue that these girlies were coming, and then 3:30, doctor comes in and, “You’re dilated to a three.  We can’t send you home.  You’re an automatic C-section.  I can’t send you home.  Contractions haven’t stopped.  You probably should call your husband.”  Husband’s going, “Do I have time to go get my oil changed?”  I’m like, “No, honey, I don’t think you do.  They’re acting like we don’t have time for this.”

Alyssa:            Maybe that’s what he did for those two hours.  “I got a burger and my oil changed and cried.”

Tricia:             Right!  So the first few days, yeah, were really just – I overdid it a little bit because the anesthesia made me feel – it takes 24 hours for anesthesia from a spinal to fully leave your system, so I could walk, I could pee, I could do all that.  I felt invincible, but you’re not invincible.  It’s the pain meds talking to you that you’re invincible.  So the first three days I pretty much – we did not really have any visitors at the hospital when I was in there, which is way different than with my son.

Alyssa:            And was that by choice?  You didn’t want anybody to come?

Tricia:             Yeah, I really didn’t.  They can’t go into NICU, and I wanted to be down with the babies.  I was up in my room to get meds, to eat, and to sleep.  And everything else I did next to the girls.  Rosalind was in – she had bilirubin lights for a couple days.  They had bradys throughout the six weeks, which is when they periodically stop breathing.  It’s a really common preemie problem is the best way I know how to put it.  It’s just that in the uterus, if they don’t breathe a second, it’s fine.  They’ve got all the stuff, so it’s them learning how to breathe.  They still have to learn how to breathe.  Rosalind had a little bit more issues with her lungs, so they were given surfactant to coat their lungs to try to help them breathe at delivery and to help their lungs grow and mature.  Keira’s lungs took it; Rosalind’s did not.  It all still, 24 hours later, it was pretty much right on the surface of her lungs kind of a concept, so she had a lot more issues breathing.  She was off and on different various c-pap and nose canula and breathing.  They both had caffeine at some point, and I remember a NICU nurse telling me to drink more caffeine because it was better that they got it through my milk vs. the little –

Alyssa:            So what is the caffeine for?

Tricia:             It’s to help with them remembering that breathing on their own, to help them be a little bit more alert.  That was my understanding, anyway.  It’s a lot of trying to get them to remember to breathe on their own because if they sleep and they forget to breathe, there’s a lot of monitors.

Alyssa:            Interesting.  I would have never thought caffeine.

Tricia:             And once again, it’s a really tiny amount.

Alyssa:            Oh, of course.  “Let’s give them a cup of coffee in a syringe.”

Tricia:             Basically!  The medical aspect of – I never thought I would know all this medical stuff, and then you have twins who spend six weeks.  Food’s in milliliters, and everything’s ounces, and those ounces matter.  Like, you don’t think about it when you’ve got a full-term baby and they come home seven pounds and four ounces.  But then you have a 3.4 and a 3.7 and they go down to the three pounds, and it’s like, you gained an ounce today!  That ounce is huge!  I exclusively pumped.  We attempted latching, but they never really got the hang of it.  Even with bottles, they were still like – part of the reason we were in NICU so long is because it took them a while to understand that oh, I have to suck, swallow, breathe.  I have to eat.  After about two weeks in for the most part they were feeder/growers.  The first couple weeks were a little bit of one step forward, two steps back.  Because Keira was under 3.5, she had to do a routine eye exam, which is because there’s a disease that they can get in their eyes if they’re on oxygen for too long.  Their birth weight’s low because most of these babies who are that little are on oxygen for a while.  And they also have to do a head ultrasound because there’s risks of breathing.  And with her routine head ultrasound, they found a pseudocyst in the left ventricle of her brain, which looked more like a blood clot.  It didn’t seem to affect function; didn’t seem to be anything too different.  They ended up doing a head ultrasound of Rosalind because they’re identical, so they were curious if it was a thing.  Both of their left ventricles are bigger than normal, I guess.  I don’t really know what that means.  Everybody’s brains look funny.  The doctor made it out like, “They’re bigger than what the normal brain is, but if we were to do a head ultrasound on you, your brain would look funny too.”  Like, there’s a very vague, “this is how your brain is supposed to look” concept.  And so they both had bigger left ventricles, but sister did not have the pseudocyst.  So they think the pseudocyst was part of delivery.  Either that blood transfusion aspect where sister was getting her blood and she was giving it, or just with the placenta and delivery being a little bit more traumatic on her little body.

Alyssa:            So is that something that goes away?  You just watch it, or did you have to –

Tricia:             It did.  It did.  They weren’t 100% sure.  It’s not something that we studied much here.  The doctor had to get a study from Sweden because they have more availabilities to that.  If it did not go away, the doctor had said that it really wasn’t going to affect any function.  It doesn’t affect anything.  Hers did dissipate.  That might be the wrong word, but it did disappear about eight, nine months in.  She had an MRI.  She’s had a couple of them, and so we are officially – neuro is done.  She’s clear.  She had a little bit of – she had to do some PT for a little bit for her right side because of just making sure everything crossed, but otherwise you would not know that she had that at all.

Alyssa:            So you said after a couple of weeks, they became feeders/growers.  Is that like a common term for NICU parents?  Like, they’re feeding well and growing, and that’s their main goal is just to keep them feeding and growing?

Tricia:             It is.  In the NICU, you start in the back.  The littler you are, you start in the back.  That tends to be –

Alyssa:            So you kind of graduate towards the front?

Tricia:             You graduate towards the door.  So when we got there, we were in this little corner, and it was both girls’ beds, and you’re in the back.  And you can tell that you take a little bit more.  A little bit more nurses, a little bit more machines.  You’re back there.  Like I said, we were 32-weekers, so we were kind of surrounded.  There was some 26-weekers.  There were some 24-weekers.  So when you’re toward the back, it’s generally – in this NICU, you’re a little bit more of a – “We need to monitor you.  You’re not as stable.”

Alyssa:            A little higher risk.

Tricia:             You’re a little bit higher risk, yeah, which it’s not that you’re not stable.  It’s just that nurses need to be checking in a little bit more and a lot of times you’re in the kangaroo pods, which are the big isolettes, and you need the darker lights and you need to be a little bit more quiet.  So you get put back there so that you can really sleep and grow, and it’s more womb-like towards the back, as womb-like as you can be in a room filled with monitors.  They give these blankets.  Each baby gets to go home with this big, oversized blanket that they put over top of the isolettes so that it can stay dark.  My girls still sleep with them at night; they’re their little NICU blankies.  Then as they get a little bit bigger, because newer babies come in that are the younger and need the quiet and the more monitoring, you get moved to the front.  And so my girls had about two and a half, three weeks and then got moved to right next to a window and right across the nurse’s station.  So yeah, then they get put into little basinets because they start being able to control their body temperature, and they are starting to breathe better, and they don’t need the c-pap.  They just have the nose canula which is a huge – the nose canula looks really scary.  It’s actually a lot better than to be intubated, but it looks a lot scarier.  So it’s got all these bigger monitors and whereas with the nose canula it’s just these little things of oxygen and it can hide behind the bed.  So yes, as they get bigger, yes, they get closer to the door.

Alyssa:            Okay.  So for a good three, four weeks they were feeders/growers?

Tricia:             They were.

Alyssa:            When do they graduate?  At what point do they say, okay, they’re good to go?

Tricia:             They have to be breathing on their own.  They need to not have bradys within – I want to say it’s 48 or 72 hours.  It’s a decent amount of time.  It might be 72 because that’s part of the reason that Rosalind ended up staying longer than Keira did is that she had a couple episodes and they can’t send – they have to make sure that she can go home not breathing.  Now, there are babies that are sent home with breathing machines and with monitors and whatnot depending on where you are and what your baby needs.  Every morning, the doctors come and they give you updates on how they fed that day and what they’re thinking about food-wise; what they’re going to add; what they’re going to change; positives that baby did.  And then they also, if you’ve got questions, doctors will sit and answer your questions.  They go through rounds.  It’s the way that they can do the nurses from the morning to the night, keep everybody up to date per baby.  So they also have to pass a car seat test.  Mom and Dad have to sit and watch three different videos.  There’s a car seat safety test.  There’s a CPR class.  There’s another one.  I cannot remember off the top of my head.

Alyssa:            But they want to make sure you’re going home prepared?  As prepared as you can be.

Tricia:             Yep, yep.  They come home, and they’re really – the nurses are all trained.  They’re trained for feeding; they’re trained for various different – there was one that was a lactation consultant, so she sat and worked a lot on trying to get the girls to latch and have to figure out some of that.  They’re really knowledgeable.  They have also social workers upstairs that come down weekly and are like, “What can we do to help?”  My husband and I had a 45-minute drive.  Our NICU gave us gas cards weekly to help pay for driving there and back and there and back.  Because there is a house that’s like right next to it, but you have to be within an hour.  So we were just close enough that really – and we had a toddler at home, so we wouldn’t have been able to really use that much anyway, but it was nice that they were like, “What can we do to help your family make this less—”

Alyssa:            A little less stressful.

Tricia:             A little less stressful; a little less, yeah.  And then usually they do a room-in, so they send you upstairs, and you’re on your own with baby.  They’ll come in and do vitals every three hours.  It’s basically like you leaving the hospital –

Alyssa:            If you would have had a full-term baby?  So you get that night, maybe, day –

Tricia:             Yep, you get that night.

Alyssa:            It’s like, okay, I can do this alone before we go home.

Tricia:             Mm-hmm.  You go home; babies are off all the monitors.  It gets a little bit of normalcy to this.  They’ll wheel you down in the wheelchair, and the whole, like, this is what you do.  Like, I did not leave from the maternity floor when I was sent home because I could not leave from that floor empty-handed.  I was like, I’m leaving from the NICU floor.  You can put everything back down to the NICU floor, I’m just leaving the hospital and then coming back.  If I leave this floor, it’s –

Alyssa:            Something in your brain just won’t let you –

Tricia:             Something in my brain.  I was leaving my girls.  I was leaving my girls together.  It was that – I’m not leaving as a postpartum mom.  I’m leaving as a mom.  And I think that for whatever reason, that made a big difference.

Alyssa:            So last question I have is you finally get to take them home.  Well, one, and then the other, but you finally have both babies home.  How do you deal with the nerves of what if they stop breathing?  I mean, every parent has this fear of what if they stop breathing in the night.  There’s all these what-ifs, and you have like a hundred more.  How do you handle that?

Tricia:             I know some parents buy the little Owlet monitor thing.  There’s a bunch of different sleeping monitors.  My girls came home on a schedule, so we kind of kept their schedule.  I will be honest; I was over their crib just kind of watching them breathe for a while.  Because you don’t, and you can’t.  There’s really not – there was an oversized chair.  I pumped in their room a lot, so I could watch them breathe while I pumped.  You kind of just eventually get a little bit less – I don’t know if it ever really goes away.

Alyssa:            Does it ever go away?  I mean, I still check my almost-five-year-old daughter’s breathing at night before I go to bed, so that never really goes away, but you get to a point where you’re like, okay, these girls are healthy; they’re going to be able to sleep through the night, and now I can sleep through the night.

Tricia:             Yeah.  I mean, I had a post-partum doula that I talked to for a while because I did have a lot of anxiety.

Alyssa:            The same one that was with you in the hospital?

Tricia:             Yes.  Due to just – yeah, I had a lot of anxiety from NICU; a lot of fears.  So talking through a lot of it helped too.  I think being able to talk it out and being, you know, they’re okay.  They’re here now.  My big thing is they’re here; they’re healthy.  They’re happy.  They’re fierce little things.  But they’ve had a really long day.  They’ve had a long rough road.  Writing it out helped too.  They have a book they both will get that is their full NICU journey.

Alyssa:            So you would write every day?

Tricia:             Pretty close.  Regularly.  I wouldn’t say every day, but pretty close.  It has their updates; it has their weights.  It talks about when Keira came home.  Actually, that was probably the hardest day of NICU was taking just one of them home because it felt so foreign to me.  I needed – I was supposed to have two.  There’s two of you.  And they’d never been apart.  At least when I left, they were still together.  It was really weird to take just her home.  It was a very bittersweet day.  Our family’s all like, “But you get to get ready for one.”  I’m like, yeah, for two days, and now I get to take this infant in and out of the hospital.  It’s not as great as you think it is.”  I mean, it had to happen.  It was fine; it was great; it was four days, and they left her bed and they made it as comfortable as they could.  So their book talks about that a little bit.  And I was a little bit more open with them in their book than I was with, like, Facebook-updating my family.

Alyssa:            Oh, I’m sure.  It will be a beautiful thing for them to read when they get older, I’m sure.

Tricia:             Mm-hmm, for them to see how far they’ve come.

Alyssa:            Yeah, and for you to remember because I feel like, you know, even a year ago, you forget little stories, and I’m a huge proponent of writing things down especially during the newborn stage because you are in this fog, and if you don’t write it down, you probably will never remember.  And kids love to hear those stories about themselves, so I think that’s a beautiful way to track that.

Tricia:             Yes.

Alyssa:            Well, thank you so much.  I feel like we have a million different multiples topics we could talk about, like your pumping alone.  I think that could be – we will definitely talk about that again.

Tricia:             Yes, I could talk for days for that, and all the places I’ve pumped.

Alyssa:            We will talk about that for sure.  Well, thanks.  If you have any questions for Tricia, contact us at info@goldcoastdoulas.com.  And you can find us on our website, goldcoastdoulas.com.  Thanks for listening in today.  We will talk to you soon.

Podcast Episode #9: How to Handle a Six-Week NICU Stay Read More »

Postpartum Doula

Podcast Episode #8: Kristin’s Experience with the NICU

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In this episode of Ask the Doulas, Kristin shares her experiences with the NICU when her daughter was born.  You can listen to this complete interview on iTunes.

Alyssa:            Hi, welcome back to another episode of Ask the Doulas with Gold Coast Doulas.  I am Alyssa, and we are talking to my partner Kristin today.

Kristin:           Hello, I’m Kristen, and I’m a birth and postpartum doula at Gold Coast.

Alyssa:            When we talked to Kristin earlier, we found out about your birth story, and during that time, you had said your daughter Abby when she was born spent four days in the NICU.  So can you expand on what it felt like as a parent to have a baby – you know, after a kind of traumatic birth experience, and then you don’t get to bring that baby home right away.  How does that feel?

Kristin:           Yeah, and again, those of you that heard my birth story, it was traumatic in some ways, and then I had preeclampsia, but very redemptive in that I was able to have an unmedicated birth with very few interventions with the preeclampsia, which is pretty rare.  And after I had Abby, it was very standard.  I was able to do skin-to-skin and breastfeed, but they did some testing and found that she had glucose issues, and so then it led to her getting transferred to the NICU, and we were fortunate in that the DeVos Children’s Hospital had literally just opened.  And they had the really-preemie babies in there, and they had the regular ICU that we started out in, which was overcrowded and there were parents standing everywhere, and I was trying to nurse and hold my baby.  And they somehow ended up transferring us to the Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital where we had our own private room and more individualized nurse attention, and I had a rocker and I could hold Abby and nurse her there.  So we got to experience those amenities which now as a doula has served me very well.  And so that was really fabulous, but because of her glucose issues, our pediatrician had recommended that she start with an IV and then it led to, once she got off of that, she was on enhanced formula.  And I was pumping the entire time, so we would spend time with her, and then I would go back to my room to pump, and my husband would stay with her.  And I was pumping without a baby in my room, which obviously you never imagine that you have your child and then they aren’t actually in the room with you.  So that was overwhelming because I kept getting all of these people coming in to help me, like say, okay, you’ve got photographers that want to take your picture with your baby.  Well, my baby’s not there when I’m in there pumping.  The lactation consultants come in, and my baby’s not there, so they’re helping me with pumping, and that’s about it.  So I’m going back and forth, and even though again I had what’s considered a natural birth, I was in a wheelchair because it was one end of the hospital to the other.  So I was getting dizzy trying to walk all of that way myself, so I was overwhelmed by a lot of things.  And the pumping was overwhelming.  So again the heel pricks constantly were hard on me as a mom to see her get poked so many times and cry, and all of the cords and everything that’s involved in a NICU stay is overwhelming.  Everything beeps all of the time.  You can’t really fully hold your child.  And everything was timed when I was eventually able to attempt nursing with her.  So once she got off the formula, I was able to spend about ten minutes, because everything was very timed out in the NICU, trying to nurse.  So if I couldn’t get her to latch or if I couldn’t get my milk to come in – it was coming in at the time that she was in the NICU, so some of that was frustrating because she wasn’t getting a full feed, and then they had to supplement after.

Alyssa:            They’d take her away from you?

Kristin:           Yes, so I had my ten minutes to get that done, and that was really overwhelming.  So I wasn’t sleeping.  And my husband had experienced, with his daughter from a previous marriage, five weeks in the NICU, so he was very familiar with the NICU.  So for me, that made everything easier, so all of the protocols and the beeps and the wires, he was able to help me with, but for me, even four days was a lot, but for him, this was nothing in comparison to his daughter.  So we were able to navigate that, and again, I mean, there was a rocking chair there, and it was very comfortable.  My step-daughter could come in and visit, but it can be overwhelming.  So I have a heart for NICU and high-risk moms because of my own experience, and many of them experience longer stays and just so much more intensity as far as conditions with their babies.  Glucose is very minor in comparison, but it certainly made breastfeeding challenging because, again, with nipple confusion – and in the NICU my daughter had to have a pacifier, which all of my natural birth plans were like no pacifier; never going to introduce a bottle, at least until the first month or six weeks, according to what I learned in Lamaze class and everything.  So that really – a lot of my plans just went out the window, and I had to adapt.  And so I wasn’t sleeping well, and we ended up getting released a day before Abby, so luckily, the hospital allowed us to stay an extra day, but we went home without our daughter, so you can imagine the car seat behind you, and not having a baby, and all of these family members and friends – it’s my first baby, and wanting to come visit us in the hospital, and I was turning people away and saying “No, there’s no baby.  You can’t go to the NICU; there’s no visiting.”  And then to go home and spend the night in your home without your baby there is really tough.  So again, I have a heart for moms that experience that for so much longer than what I did.  But then the next morning, we got up very early and went to the hospital, and she got her glucose tested and she was fine to go, so we were able to go home.  But then when I got home with her, I didn’t know what to do.  I wanted to breastfeed, but she didn’t really want to breastfeed.  She wanted a bottle.  It’s so much less work; it’s quicker.  So, you know, I was pumping, so she had my pumped milk that she could use, and we stopped supplementing by that point, but I had to get a lot of help from lactation, so I went back to Spectrum Health multiple times and met with the lactation consultants, and that wasn’t really working.  So then I ended up having lactation consultants come into my home and help, and I finally got the latch that would really work for me comfort-wise, and I was able to make it work.  And then my daughter didn’t to wean.  She wanted to nurse forever.

Alyssa:            She never gave up.  So was there any fear that day you brought her home, like, she just spent four days in the NICU because there’s something wrong, and they said it’s manageable now, but now she’s home.  Did you have this fear of what if something happens while she’s home?

Kristin:           Yeah, I mean, I certainly wanted to go to the pediatrician’s office as much as I could for reassurance that everything was okay.  And I didn’t know that I could care for her as a new parent and having other people have their hands on her and telling me what to do, and so I was overwhelmed.  And my husband went back to work, and I was used to working, so I had my leave time, and that was a little challenging, especially having spent three weeks on bed rest right before having her.  So that isolation was a bit much, and I didn’t know what postpartum doulas were back then, but I did have the help from a local nonprofit called Moms Bloom, and a volunteer came into my home who was retired.  So she was a grandmother, essentially, and she would hold Abby so I could take a shower or do some things around the house, and that was nice.  And it gave me someone to talk to because again, I was overwhelmed and lonely.  And it reassured me that I was doing everything that I needed to, and that there were no concerns, that she was normal and healthy.  So yeah, there is some of that anxiety as a new parent coming back from the hospital and that’s something that I wouldn’t be able to catch, could be wrong again with her.  But we got through it, and again, she nursed into toddlerhood, so it all worked out.

Alyssa:            Go, Abby!

Kristin:           It’s all about, yeah, just getting resources and having a support system around you after getting home from the NICU because it can be overwhelming.

Alyssa:            It’s so easy to give up.  I think that’s key it just have enough support and don’t be afraid to ask for help.

Kristin:           Yes, exactly.  Yeah, and so you’re not alone, NICU moms!  I understand, in a very small way, what you go through, but there are so many wonderful nurses and support groups within the hospital, and the breastfeeding support groups, so just know that you have resources and reach out to the community.  Postpartum and overnight doulas are here to help, so again, that’s something that I would have used had I know that that was an option, and for NICU moms especially, we can lighten your load a lot and give you reassurance and support with your new baby or babies.

Alyssa:            Well, thanks for sharing, and if you want to find out more our daytime and overnight postpartum doulas, you can check out our website, goldcoastdoulas.com, and then if you want to email either of us, Kristin or I, info@goldcoastdoulas.com.  We would love to hear from you.  Thanks, Kristin.

Kristin:           Thanks.

Podcast Episode #8: Kristin’s Experience with the NICU Read More »

sleep training

Sleep Training is a Four Letter Word

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Sleep Training. Those two words can stir up some pretty aggressive emotions for some parents. I guess it’s because there are so many methodologies, many of which are controversial, and there are so many different thoughts on parenting and what is right and wrong.

My answer is there’s no one way to do this! If there was, it would be simple.

Whether a family wants to co-sleep or have baby in his own crib, it’s not my job to judge their decisions. My job is to figure out a solution that works well for them.

Sleep training shouldn’t be a controversial topic. Everyone needs and wants a full night’s rest. I don’t know many (actually any) people who would argue with that, but how you get there is where it becomes tricky. We don’t want to let our child cry for hours or make them feel neglected, which many methodologies tend to do.

Sleep training, at it’s most basic level, is a plan to help the mental, physical, and emotional well-being of both parents and baby. Without sleep, parents are exhausted, mentally drained, and overly-emotional. A sleep-deprived baby can find it hard to nap during the day, be too exhausted to nurse, cry all the time, or just zone out because daily activities are too stimulating.

A good sleep consultant will take all factors into account. They will listen to your story, your history, your values, and your end goal. They will come up with a solution that works for everyone, not a method that works for “most”.

As parents, I think we need to give up on this idea that there is only one certain way to do things. It’s great to have a plan, but they must always be flexible. I see parents beat themselves up over plans that aren’t working, especially feeding and sleeping patterns. They see their friend’s baby sleeping through the night or their niece on a perfect feeding and nap schedule. They’re given all sorts of advice that doesn’t work for them, they read all the books and each one gives them conflicting ideas, so they end up more confused.

I had one client tell me this, “I read all the books but none of them ever told me what to do in the night when my baby wouldn’t stop crying. We did the consistent night time routine, we did the ‘shuffle’ slowly out of the room, we tried to soothe him back to sleep, but nothing ever worked. We felt defeated.”

Books and articles on sleep can only help to a certain extent. You need a physical presence that can ask questions, assess your individual situation, and come up with an individualized plan. Most of the time there are other factors at play that the books aren’t going to mention.

As a Certified Infant and Child Sleep Consultant, Certified Postpartum Doula, and Newborn Care Specialist, I love helping families set goals and figure out realistic ways to reach them. There’s nothing more satisfying than happy parents and a happy baby.

Contact me to talk about a customized sleep plan for your family.

 

Sleep Training is a Four Letter Word Read More »

Cindy's Suds

Podcast Episode #5: Why Choose Natural Products for Your Baby’s Body?

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In this episode of Ask the Doulas, Cindy and Alyssa talk about the benefits of choosing natural care products for your baby and your household.  You can listen to the complete podcast on iTunes.

Alyssa:            Hi, welcome to Ask the Doulas with Gold Coast Doulas.  Today we are talking to Cindy, creator and owner of Cindy’s Suds.  Can you give me your elevator speech of what is Cindy’s Suds?

Cindy:            Sure, sure.  So Cindy’s Suds is a 100% natural company that provides natural bath and body products and products for home, primarily to parents of younger families who are seeking to make the change from more conventional-type products to more natural-based products once they start realizing how much better that is for their bodies and for their families and homes and everything.

Alyssa:            I love it.  I recently got some of your stuff, and I’m obsessed with the body butter.  I love it.

Cindy:             Oh, good.  Which scent did I send you?

Alyssa:            I don’t even know.  Do you have an unscented?

Cindy:             I do, yeah.

Alyssa:            So tell me how you started Cindy’s Suds and why.

Cindy:            Okay.  So I have three kids.  Our middle child was born with very, very dry skin and severe eczema, and his skin is so much thinner than my other kids, if that even makes sense.  My other two kids, when they were born, they had darker skin and they just loved them, “Oh, they look like they have a tan.  They look darker.”  When he was born, I was like, “Whoa!”  Almost transparent, his skin was so thin.  So he had always had very sensitive skin, just really paper-thin, almost, and after he was probably maybe six to nine months, I really started noticing his skin was super, super dry.  He started developing eczema patches on his legs, on his butt cheeks, on his arms.  And he would scratch them at night or when he would take a nap, and he would wake up from his naps with bloody legs and bloody fingernails, and it was just heartbreaking as a mom to go in there.  He was trying to give me this little smile, and he’s got blood on his sheets and blood on his legs.  So that broke my heart, and in my mind, because I’m a physician assistant by trade, in my mind I thought, oh, well, it’s eczema.  You treat eczema with steroids.  But in my mom’s heart, I’m like, are you kidding me?  There’s no way.  This kid, his skin is way too thin.

Alyssa:            Yeah, what does cortisone cream do?

Cindy:            It thins out skin, yeah, so cortisone cream further thins out skin as it’s decreasing inflammation on the skin, so I’m like, there’s no way.  This kid already has super thin skin.  There’s no way I’m going to do that to him.  So that kind of got my mind rolling with, well, what else is out there?  What else could I do?  And this was almost – well, this was 16 years ago because he’ll be 16 this month.  So there were natural products out there, but there weren’t to the degree that there are now, and so I started going to the library and getting out books because this was also almost to the point where the internet was kind of still in the early phases, and just because I’m more old-school, you just didn’t think to go to the internet for things because it wasn’t really a resource that normal moms tapped into yet.  So I went to the library and got a bunch of different books, and there were not a lot.  There were a handful of books on making natural products for your skin and for your body and things, so I just started combing through those and writing down.  This sounds good, and this sounds good.  Kind of compiling little mini-recipes that I would try, and I did try the recipes, and it worked, and I ended up with so much of it that I started giving it away for gifts and for friends who had babies, and then here we are, ten-plus years later.  Well, I didn’t start the company until after I’d been doing it for several years.

Alyssa:            So you’ve been making this for 16 years?

Cindy:             I’ve been making it for 16 years, yeah.

Alyssa:            And the company?

Cindy:             And then we’ve had that for ten years.

Alyssa:            So for six year you made it but didn’t sell it.  What finally made you – was it a friend going, “You really need to sell this stuff”?

Cindy:            It was that.  It was friends; it was family; it was the fact that I had so much of it at home from making it for my own family that I got to the point where I’m like, okay, either this is just – it’s got to go to more people, gift-wise or birthday-wise or whatever, or I should start selling it.  And then I had a couple – the reason why I started, funny enough, was we had a garage sale, and I was getting rid of my baby stuff.  And so I had some of this, of my product, out for sale, and one of the ladies who ran a craft bizarre at a local church said, “Oh, you should be in our craft show,” and I was like, oh!  Perfect idea!

Alyssa:            So is that how you started, craft shows?

Cindy:             That’s how I started was craft shows, yeah.

Alyssa:            Okay.  And so 16 years later, what happened with your son’s skin?  Did it progressively get better?  Did you find out what caused it?

Cindy:             You know, in hindsight, I’m sure so much of it was diet-related.

Alyssa:            That’s what I was wondering.

Cindy:            Yeah.  And that’s kind of where we’re all going.  Looking at the skin as a whole, the skin is kind of a mirror or window into what’s going on inside your body.  And so when you see skin issues on the outside that you’re like, oh, something’s not quite right, you’ve got to look inside.  What’s not right on the inside?  And oftentimes more than not, it’s a dietary condition, but back up 16 years ago, we didn’t really think that way right off the bat.  It was more like, oh, there’s a skin condition.  You treat the skin condition.  And I think still there are maybe some people that still think that way.  It’s a skin condition; treat the skin.  But more often than not, if it’s a skin condition, let’s see what else is going on and let’s figure out if it’s dietary or if it’s autoimmune, which can also have a little bit of a factor, too, with eczema, psoriasis, things like that.  But typically there is some kind of a dietary component.  So in hindsight, yes, he probably had sensitivities, even back then, to dairy products and probably to gluten, as well.  For sure dairy because now he’s on a dairy free diet and much better.

Alyssa:            So you have figured out some dietary things now as a 16-year-old?

Cindy:             For sure, yeah.

Alyssa:            Yeah, because my daughter, who’s four and a half, we found out – it’s been about two years ago that we found out her eczema was due to several food allergies.  And it’s funny because the older generation, like you said, 16, 20, 30 years ago, they’re the ones who say, “Oh, this is just a bunch of bunk.  All these gluten free; that’s just ridiculous.  My kids had eczema for years.”  Well…

Cindy:             Hmm.  Exactly!

Alyssa:            “Yeah, you just put cortisone cream on it; you deal with it.”  And we have noticed a significant difference.  She still does get eczema and we have to put stuff on it occasionally, but it’s definitely internal.

Cindy:            Yes.  For sure, for sure.  And when I went to PA school, I graduated in 1996.  There was nothing in our schooling on anything holistic, anything alternative.  It was strictly western medicine because that’s what was taught.  And so it’s relatively a new concept still for those of us old-school people that went to school in the 80s or 90s.  It just wasn’t something that was even – something that you thought of or studied or were aware of.  So a lot of this stuff is self-taught, and then just learning from there, and then seeking out providers now that are natural-minded or alternative-minded.  Not to say that I’ve turned my back on western medicine, but you need to embrace both, I feel like, because there’s a huge component where both are useful.

Alyssa:            Right.  So what would you recommend?  Let’s say we have a new client; they have a baby.  I think thin skin or not, all babies have just such super-sensitive skin, and you have some really good baby products.

Cindy:            We do, yeah.  So whether you use my product or somebody else’s product or you make your own product, my overall encouragement for a new mom, especially, is seek out something that is as natural as possible.  The fewer ingredients the better, obviously.  Most things that you’re going to buy over the counter, store-bought brands, they contain chemicals.  Even if they say, “Oh, it’s the natural version of Johnson’s & Johnson’s,” or natural version of whatever –

Alyssa:            Many of them still have alcohol.

Cindy:             Tons of them do.

Alyssa:            As one of the first ingredients!

Cindy:            Right.  It’s like water and then alcohol.  So you’ve really, really got to turn into a label-reader.  That’s huge.  I know a lot of moms are like, oh, I’m going to make it myself.  Which I’m like, excellent.  That is so great.  Do it.  Dabble in it.  Learn about it.  But a lot of moms just don’t have the time to do that because parenting is so overwhelming at first, especially with your first.  There’s just so much to learn, so much to do, that if you don’t want to make it yourself, seek out a company or two that you trust, that you believe in, that has the same philosophy as you do with using minimalistic ingredients, and just be a label-reader.  You’ve just go to flip everything over that you’re buying and see what’s in it.  The fewer ingredients, the better.  And then everything just sparingly.  For a little baby, you don’t need to douse a baby.  Sparingly.  Another thing that I always tell new moms: new moms nowadays, they want to give their baby a bath every night.  And babies don’t need baths every night.  They just don’t.

Alyssa:            It really dries out their skin.

Cindy:            Once a week.  Oh, man, it does.  So once a week; twice a week, at the most, but this nightly bathing routine just strips the body of natural oils.

Alyssa:            I try to get my clients, post-partum clients or sleep clients, away from a bath being part of the bedtime routine for that reason.  And plus with some babies it actually kind of wakes them up and it’s a fun activity.

Cindy:             It stimulates them, yeah.

Alyssa:            So I tell them unless this is putting your baby to sleep, this does not need to happen at night.  So let’s pick a day, Sunday afternoon, you know, let’s give them a bath once a week.  And the nighttime routine is more like, let’s read a book, sing a song.  Let’s get that bath out of there because when my daughter had eczema or had it really bad, and I was bathing her sometimes every day, every other day, because you think you need to – it was making it worse.

Cindy:            Exactly, yeah.  And that’s what I think is so great about the fact that there are doulas now, and I so wish that I had one with my kids.  But you don’t know what you don’t know, and if you’re walking through parenthood for the first time, and your mom, most likely, was old school, and you give them a bath every night, and then you put on Johnson’s & Johnson’s baby lotion, and they smell like a baby.  You don’t have somebody who’s going to kind of walk with you and tell you what may or may not be beneficial, and so that’s what is so great about having a doula walk beside you when you are pregnant or delivering or after delivery, as just someone to kind of give you feedback and what does this look like, raising this little tiny baby?  There’s not an instruction manual.  So it’s great when you can come and share with a new mom and dad what you’ve learned.

Alyssa:            Yeah, we can be a trusted resource.  And it’s hard.  Every family is different, so, like you mentioned, like the moms or the grandma.  They know one way of raising children because that’s how she raised hers, so she has these ideas in her head of how this works, but a doula has worked with so many different types of families and all walks of life, and we can walk into that space and say okay, I see where you are at right now.  This is what’s going to work best for you, and then here’s trusted – again, be a trusted resource for this is how this looks.

Cindy:             Right, exactly.

Alyssa:            Well, thank you for sharing today.

Cindy:            Absolutely.

Alyssa:            We are going to have you on again later in the month, and we look forward to talking to you.

Cindy:             Sounds good.  Looking forward to it, too.

Alyssa:            If people have questions about your products, do you have an email, phone number, or website?

Cindy:            Absolutely.  You can go to www.cindyssuds.com.  That’s our website, and on our website, you can check out our products.  There’s a little product description next to each product.  If you have specific questions, there’s a Contact page on our website that you can put your question in and it sends it right to me.  You can also email me directly at cindy@cindyssuds.com.  Those are the two best ways to get ahold of me, and if you have specific questions, definitely shoot me an email.  I love the education part of talking to moms and dads, just helping them kind of navigate the waters of what it looks like to be a new parent or to add a second child or a third child, or what does it look like to go from conventional products to natural products.

Alyssa:            Because sometimes you have do that slowly.

Cindy:            You do, yeah.  You can’t sometimes just jump in.  You’ve got to make a slower transition.

Alyssa:            Baby steps.

Cindy:            For sure.  So yeah, I welcome any questions.  Any way that I can help, shoot me an email.

Alyssa:            Excellent.  Thank you.  And if you have questions about this podcast or Gold Coast, you can email us at info@goldcoastdoulas.com.

Podcast Episode #5: Why Choose Natural Products for Your Baby’s Body? Read More »

Postpartum Doula

Podcast Episode #2: Having Kids Later in Life – Kristin’s Birth Journey

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In this episode of Ask the Doulas, Kristin shares about her birth experiences and how she started the journey to become a birth doula.  You can listen to this complete podcast on iTunes.

 

Alyssa:            Welcome to another episode of Ask the Doulas with Gold Coast Doulas.  I am Alyssa, co-owner and postpartum doula, and today we’re talking to Kristin, the co-owner and birth doula.

Kristin:           Yeah, birth and postpartum.

Alyssa:            She interviewed me last episode about my journey throughout pregnancy and what made me want to become a doula, and today we’re going to talk about her journey and what made her want to become a birth and postpartum doula.

Kristin:           Yeah, so I had kids later in life, so I got myself into that high-risk category by age.  I was 36 with my first pregnancy and had my daughter at 37.  And I had a really great pregnancy, despite a high-stress job in political fundraising, and my nurse midwife kept saying throughout the pregnancy that I was having the perfect pregnancy and there were no worries.  My health was great.  My diet was great.  And I planned myself the perfect, natural birth.  I took Lamaze classes; my husband and I practiced; I watched all the documentaries; read all the books.  I like to plan my way through life in general, and I thought that everything would just be the way I wanted it to be.  And at 37 weeks, I got diagnosed with preeclampsia.  My blood pressure was rising; that was the first of the signs.  And so I got put on modified bedrest, which was super stressful for someone who felt like I had to do a million things before baby arrived: getting all of the things ready, the car seat installed, and running all the errands and finishing up work and all of that.  And so I had to really take it easy, and every midwife appointment was beyond stressful because you get the blood pressure check.  And so I was nervous about that.

Alyssa:            Which made your blood pressure go up.

Kristin:           It made it worse.  So they kept watching me, and every week, there were more and more signs.  So I got put on full bedrest, which was really frustrating.  I was lucky enough to live above – for those of you that live in Grand Rapids, we had just moved back from Lansing, and I was living above The Electric Cheetah, and we had this place that was very modern, very open, the first tenants.  And all of a sudden, we get married and pregnant, and there wasn’t a whole lot of room for a baby and not the ideal place to be pregnant.  But the staff at The Electric Cheetah became like neighbors since we didn’t really have neighbors on Wealthy Street, and so they would bring up food to me when my husband was at work.  They’d serve it to me on their fine china.  He would call in different meals for me, and they would bring it up to my place.

Alyssa:            So nice!

Kristin:           Yeah, it was amazing.  So that’s how I handled bedrest.  I certainly could have used an antepartum doula for bedrest.  I didn’t know what one was back then.  My daughter’s almost seven, and so that wasn’t something that people really knew of.

Alyssa:            Yeah, most of our postpartum doulas do bedrest, too.

Kristin:           Yes, and our birth doulas do some of that as well with birth planning and some of the different aspects related to getting ready for birth.  So yeah, I didn’t have a bedrest doula or anything like that.

Alyssa:            I’m wondering, for those who don’t know much about preeclampsia, besides high blood pressure, why do you have be on bedrest?  And for someone who may be worried about it or someone who may have it?

Kristin:           Yeah, essentially, they don’t want you to be too active so the blood pressure keeps rising.

Alyssa:            And what causes it?

Kristin:           I’m not going to get into all of the different medical things, and women have it for different reasons, but of course, if they’re worried about a stroke, the providers are watching to make sure that mom doesn’t have a stroke.  They’re worried about baby as well as the mother.  Some women develop headaches.  I did not.  Some women develop swelling in their ankles.  I didn’t really develop that, but by the time I was on full bedrest, I had protein in my urine, which they worry about kidneys and different organs going.  So I was starting to have trouble with my kidneys, and I got an induction.  So I ended my bedrest with an induction in a hospital.  I remember being overwhelmed.  I didn’t have doulas; again, I didn’t really know what a doula was with my first.  So I called my Lamaze instructor; like, how do we do this?  I still don’t want any interventions.  Still working with the midwives.  And it was very scary because I felt like I was alone in my room with my husband, and inductions can be long and boring, and you don’t really feel a whole lot.  I had my membranes swept the day before and went in and had Cervidil, which can be taken out if there are any reactions with the baby.  So mine was inserted, and my daughter didn’t react that well, so I didn’t have it in as long as they’d intended.  And things ended up going quickly, but I had a lot of back labor, and again, I was alone.  I didn’t want my husband to touch me because he couldn’t provide enough pressure.  I felt like I wanted him to just, like, punch my back.  Nothing was firm enough.  And he didn’t know what to do; he was just in over his head, completely overwhelmed, kept referencing manuals.  We had to make all these decisions as far as interventions and what’s the best thing to do, because my daughter had decelerations in her heart beat, and they were worried about her, and there was the threat of a cesarean.  But I was very fortunate in my journey, other than back labor, which is an experience in itself.  I didn’t have any major interventions; I never had Pitocin.  I wasn’t on magnesium for my preeclampsia.  I did not have an epidural.  I was able to move around the room, and a nurse came in, who certainly had some doula qualities about her, and helped me move my baby, and we did hands and knees on a birthing ball on the bed, and all of a sudden, she turned, and I was able to push her out.  I could feel her turn, and all of a sudden, it was like, I feel like I’m pooping.  And Patrick’s like, you’re really not.

Alyssa:            That’s exactly how I knew.

Kristin:           And I said, “Can you just check, because I think I’m pooping!”  And my daughter was born four pushes later, and it was a crazy experience, an overwhelming experience, and I remember – we’ll get into some of my journey with my daughter after she was born in another episode, but I remember going into my midwife at the six-week checkup, and she was talking to me about family planning and what to do, and because I was 37 and had preeclampsia.  There were big decisions that needed to be made if we wanted to expand our family with another baby.  We had my stepdaughter and then my daughter, and we wanted to have a third child.  And so my midwife recommended that we give it some time for me to heal, but that I should probably start trying when she was about a year.  And so I got pregnant pretty easily and quickly, just like the first time.  I was very fortunate in that, but I was worried about getting preeclampsia the second time.  There was a lot of chance that I would have that recurrence, so I was watched throughout the entire pregnancy.  And so I hired doulas before I even told anyone else.  They were the first call I made, and I wanted that support through pregnancy even more so than at the birth.  I felt like if I could go through what I did without any sort of interventions the first time with preeclampsia and back labor, then I could rack out the birth, but the pregnancy scared me.  Preeclampsia, getting that again, scared me.  And so they supported me through the pregnancy; gave me a lot of resources.  I listened to my midwives, did a lot of swimming, kept the stress down.  I wasn’t working in politics like I was before.  I was doing consulting.  And I talked to lactation consultants because I was nursing my daughter through my pregnancy, and so –

Alyssa:            So that’s not a failsafe planning method.

Kristin:           No, it’s not.

Alyssa:            There are a lot of people who think it is.

Kristin:           No, it’s not failsafe.  So yeah, there were a lot of things that I felt like having doula support really helped me with during that pregnancy, and I had an amazing intervention-free birth, and my son was huge, but he had no issues.  He wasn’t in the NICU like my daughter.  I never had any elevated blood pressure; no headaches, no signs of anything.  But I was on that high watch, especially because I was getting closer to 40 by that time.  I had my son at 39, so I was definitely in that advanced maternal age category by then, so it was a journey.  So I started becoming more and more curious about doula support, but I don’t like blood.  And I don’t really like hospitals.  I didn’t; I do now.  I didn’t like hospitals.  I remember any time my dad had a procedure in a hospital, I was always just overwhelmed by it.  I didn’t like to visit friends in the hospital who had babies.  I didn’t want to be a patient myself.  I had never had anything, no surgeries, nothing done in the hospital.  And so for me to be a doula, where most doulas do the majority of their work in the hospital, didn’t really make sense, but I was still fascinated by birth and everything to do with it.  So after having my daughter I got really active in breastfeeding groups and brought a national nonprofit to Grand Rapids.  We had a big rally and speakers, and that was phenomenal.  And that started me getting to know other birth workers, and I kept in touch with my doulas, and I started teaching Sacred Pregnancy classes after my son was born because that book really helped me, again, to avoid preeclampsia with the mental and spiritual aspect of birth and really also to be intentional about my pregnancy, because with your first pregnancy, you can connect with that baby, and there’s so many special moments between you and your husband or partner.  But when you had a toddler running around or other children, it’s hard to connect to your baby.  So Sacred Pregnancy gave me that outlet in journaling and meditation and affirmations.  It did so much for me that I decided to become one of the first instructors in the US and went to a training with my whole family when my son was four months.  So I had signed up for everything during my pregnancy, and I started – I had promoted my classes, because I’m an overachiever like you, before I even went to the training, and so I had a class set up two weeks after I got back, and ran the first class for my training class, and I had this amazing experience in Virginia with Anni Daulter, who’s one of my dear friends and the author and creator of the Sacred Pregnancy book and the Sacred Living movement, and that started my journey.  I started teaching classes, and my students wanted me to be their doula.  I’m like, “No, I can’t be your doula.”  They’re like, “Yeah, you can.  Just be at my birth.  You know, we’ve spent all this time; you’ve been great.”  And so I started teaching my classes under a doula collectives umbrella and decided that I was getting enough inquiries that I might try it out.  Sacred Pregnancy started a doula training program, so again, I took my whole family to Florida this time so I could nurse my babies and go through this training program.  It was four days, very intense, and a lot of journeying for me in some of my fears that I had surrounding being a doula, especially with blood.  Like, it was pretty wild.  We wrote our fears on each other’s body parts, the other doulas, and mine was blood.  Everybody’s joking because they’re like, “There’s no way you can be a doula.  That’s all you see is bodily fluids.  There’s going to be fluid everywhere.”

Alyssa:            So how did you do it?  How did you get past that?

Kristin:           I feel like I just set the intention that I could do it.

Alyssa:            That there’s a purpose behind this.

Kristin:           And it’s not a big deal, and there was so much more to being a birth worker.  So my first birth, I feel like it was a sign, but my client had a lot of blood loss and hemorrhaging and so on, and I didn’t pass out.  So I was like, I can do this!

Alyssa:            Test completed.

Kristin:           This is a big test, and I rocked it.  And I have so many husbands or partners that have that fear, and I’m like, “I’ve been there, and I’m actually a doula.”  I never really liked to be around blood.  I would cut myself and freak out.  But it’s different because, yeah, it’s not a cut.  It’s not an injury.  It’s a natural, normal process.  So I became a birth doula and started doing some postpartum ceremonies through Sacred Pregnancy.  I had gone to another four-day training, this time in Georgia, and it was all about mother roasting and doing closing ceremonies and belly binding and herbal teas and herbalism, which I didn’t get into all that much, but I really loved the ceremonial aspects of the postpartum traditions and studying Malaysian culture.  But I kept focusing more on my love of birth and helping mothers through pregnancy and their transitions, especially specializing in high-risk moms because that was my background, as well as moms who were seeking a natural birth.  It was a year-plus into my birth journey before I supported a client with an epidural, and the first epidural client I had, I was like, this is amazing.  We had fun, music was going, like, wow.  This is totally different than anything else I had experienced because I was supporting very high-risk clients who were maybe even on bedrest their entire pregnancy; had medical conditions; they were getting cesareans that were scheduled and they wanted me to support them through that.  Or clients who were either having a homebirth or seeking an unmedicated birth.  And some had Pitocin and didn’t choose an epidural.  There were all of these factors, but I didn’t have an epidural for a year, and I was taking a couple clients a month, so that was a wild experience.  Now I have everything, but when I started out, it was kind of one or the other.  High-risk, or someone seeking an unmedicated birth, and a lot of my clients were my students in class, which I was able to have this amazing bond with them for eight weeks with women connecting with each other.  So yeah, I just fell in love with it, but I feel like the postpartum end of things is so needed, as well.  It’s not just the pregnancy; it’s after, and women feeling like they don’t have a village and that they’re alone.  And I, certainly, with two-under-two was overwhelmed and needed support, and it was hard to go places with two.  The store was a challenge and going to the pediatrician’s office if my husband couldn’t help in the winter, because I had babies during – well, a Halloween baby, and a mid-January.  So that’s not always that easy.  So I could have had a doula come along with me to the store or the pediatrician or whatever, bundling two young kids.  So I just love supporting everything to do with the journey to be a parent and to expanding the family and I feel like – you know, women in traditional cultures, they have this village to rely on; they have a sisterhood, and here, especially with people being so transient, we don’t necessarily have our families.  People oftentimes isolate you if you once you have a kid, it’s like, okay, I’m going to give you some time to just deal with your baby.  But really, we need help, and doulas do things that are different than what friends do or what parents do or other family members.  We’ll do whatever we can, but we’re not just focused on the baby; we’re focused on the mother and her emotional needs as well as the father and his needs, which can be very different in the processing of becoming a parent for the first time, or the second or third time.  So we focus on the family unit as a whole which is so unique and so needed, in my opinion.

Alyssa:            You can email us at info@goldcoastdoulas.com.  Check us out at our website, goldcoastdoulas.com, and find us on Instagram and Facebook.  We hope to hear from you.

Podcast Episode #2: Having Kids Later in Life – Kristin’s Birth Journey Read More »

Postpartum Doula

Podcast Episode #1: One and Done! Alyssa’s Doula Journey

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In this episode of Ask the Doulas, Alyssa shares about her birth experience and her decision to have only child, as well as her journey to becoming a postpartum doula.  You can listen to the complete podcast on iTunes.

 

Kristin:           Welcome to another episode of Ask the Doulas with Gold Coast Doulas.  I’m Kristin.

Alyssa:            And I’m Alyssa.

Kristin:           And our topic today is all about why we decided to become doulas, so we’ll begin with Alyssa’s journey.

Alyssa:            Yeah, so I used to work in a male-dominated field.  I worked in the construction industry, and then I got pregnant, had a baby, and I think as with most women, they would say it just completely rocked their world.  The way I saw things changed, and I wasn’t unhappy at my job, but I knew I needed to do something different.  So I started to wonder, who’s helping all these women who are having hard pregnancies and they don’t have any support once they come home?  And the term “doula” is something that I knew, but I didn’t know what a postpartum doula was, and I remember, Kristin, meeting you, and you were the first one who actually said the term “postpartum doula” to me, and I was like, “Oh, my gosh, that exists?”  And I started researching it, and I’m like, that’s it.  That’s exactly what I’ve been looking for.  So I started looking into certification organizations, found one, and it fit well.  I took the course, and they give you 18 months to complete it, but I am a total bookwork and nerd, and I think it took me about six months.  I got all my bookwork, all my essays and reading and all the clients that I needed and everything that is supposed to take 18 months.  And then I just did it, and I just have always felt compelled to help women and children, and it was even stronger after having a baby.

Kristin:           We were in the same training together, which is pretty awesome.

Alyssa:            Yeah, so I’ve known you since the beginning of my journey.

Kristin:           Yeah, it’s so cool.  So it was during pregnancy that you sort of started feeling different about the woman’s journey and experience through motherhood.  What were your family planning options as far as future kids and how you handle your journey as a mother?

Alyssa:            It’s funny.  Family planning turned into a whole new concept because you spend so many years trying not to get pregnant, and then all of a sudden, you are trying to, and it’s more difficult than you expect.   And we ended up – I think I was 33 when I got pregnant and 34 when I had her, and that is by no means old, but something in me said that I don’t want to have kids past 35.  So I decided when we had her, when we had our daughter, we were going to give it a year, and then make that decision then.  But I kind of knew right away that we only wanted one, and it’s really strange because my husband and I both grew up with siblings.  And so as far as family planning, we didn’t really think about that during pregnancy, but knowing that we were kind of going into this being “one and done,” we had – yeah, that’s the first thing my midwife asked me at my six-week checkup is, “What’s your family planning?  How are you planning for your future family?”  And I don’t know yet.  I don’t know.  So yeah, we’re just good with one, and it’s been taken care of.

Kristin:           And do people, especially in West Michigan that’s so family-centered, ask you and your husband a lot of questions about whether you’re going to have another baby or have a sister or brother for your child?

Alyssa:            Of course they do.  You know, the second you get married, it’s – well, first you’re dating, and it’s, “When are you getting married?  When are you getting married?”  And it’s pry, pry, pry.  And then you get married, and it’s, “When are you having a baby?  When are you having a baby?”  And it’s all these prying questions with the best of intentions, and they just want to see you have a baby, but knowing what I know now and all the struggles people go through, it’s a really tough question to ask and an even tougher one to answer.  And I feel like when you have baby number one, trying for baby number two, it’s still the same.  Just because you had baby number one doesn’t mean it’s easy to have baby number two.  I have friends who are struggling and have struggled for years to have baby number two.  And it’s just not a question that should be asked, but I do.  I get it all the time.

Kristin:           It’s a very personal question.

Alyssa:            Yeah, when I say that I only want one, I get the, like, smack-across-the-face guilt.  “How can you only have one?  You’re doing your daughter a disservice.  She needs a sibling.”  You know, they know better than I do, apparently.  But we love our little family of three, and really, it just boils down to: it’s nobody else’s business.  It’s my family, not theirs.

Kristin:           Right, and you travel a lot, so it makes it so much easier with one child to have a very active life.

Alyssa:            Yeah, we love to travel, and she’s been on an airplane since she was nine weeks old, and she’s so easy and so good.  She’s our little world traveler.  Not that we couldn’t do it with two, but it would be a heck of a lot harder, especially when you’re paying for an extra plane ticket and then you need extra rooms when they get older.  So, I mean, part of it’s selfish reasons, right?  It’s easy for us; she’s great; she’s easy; we can travel.  We’re a little bit older.  Not too old; I mean, I have friends who are having babies right now that are 38, 40, 41.  It’s what’s too old for you?  How do you feel?  And for me, for some reason, it was 35.  Maybe because my mom was 35.  My dad was nine years older, so I saw that growing up, too, having parents who were older than the rest of my friends’ parents, and my father almost being their grandparents’ age.

Kristin:           Yeah, I’m one of the oldest moms on the playground, that’s for sure.

Alyssa:            I don’t mind it.  We’re older and wiser.

Kristin:           Yeah, for sure.  So do you love holding babies, since you’re not having any more babies of your own?

Alyssa:            I do.  I get my baby fix all the time.  I love it.  I absolutely love it.  And you know, honestly, I wouldn’t be able to do what I do if I had another kid.  It’s a lot of work.  One’s hard.  My clients who have toddlers and then a newborn are sometimes – they can’t even comprehend how much extra work that is.  And I wouldn’t be able to be helping and supporting clients the way I do now if I had more children.

Kristin:           You’d be supporting your own family.

Alyssa:            Right.  So there’s always a give and take.  I know my daughter would be an amazing big sister.  I know she would.  But there’s a give and take.  She gets 100% of my attention and all my love and gets to come everywhere with us, and she’s my little buddy.

Kristin:           And she has cousins, lots of cousins.

Alyssa:            Yeah, lots of cousins, lots of friends.  My husband and I going into this said we’re going to make a point to just socialize her.  She will go places with us; we will bring friends; we’ll be the family that says, “Pick a friend.  They’ll come to Disney with us.”  It’s still cheaper than having another kid to bring a friend places occasionally.  But there’s always a give and take, and ultimately, it’s each family’s personal decision, and it just kind of stinks that other people have to make you feel bad for what feels good for you.  We love our little family of three.

Kristin:           So what’s your best advice to a family or client who plans to only have one child and doesn’t know how to break the news to their family and circle of friends?

Alyssa:            It’s hard.  Based on personalities, I’ve heard people say flat-out, “It’s none of your business,” and I don’t go that route.  I don’t think there’s a need to be rude or brash with people, but you can say, “That’s a nice thought,” or “Maybe that works for your family, but this works for ours.”

Kristin:           Perfect.  I love it.  Well, thanks for listening, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts on this episode.  Remember, these moments are golden.

Alyssa:            And I will be interviewing Kristin next episode to talk about her journey and her story.  So stay tuned.

Podcast Episode #1: One and Done! Alyssa’s Doula Journey Read More »

Spectrum Health Natural Birthing Suite

Make Your Hospital Room Feel Like Home

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Today’s blog comes from one of our past birth doulas, Courtney Garvelink. Her experience with birth clients, as well as being a licensed massage therapist and previous HypnoBirthing instructor, makes her an expert on comfort measures in the delivery room. See what she has to say about making your hospital birth feel more like home.

If you are preparing for a birth, you are getting your body and your mind ready for what may be the most important and wonderful experience of your life to this point. There are so many options and decisions to make leading up to the birth itself, one of which is where you will deliver; home, birth center, or hospital? Maybe, for you, it’s not a choice. Your finances or insurance may limit you to one option, usually a hospital. And some families just feel more at ease in a hospital. If you are among the many who will be welcoming your new babe in a hospital setting, there are still ways create a warm and comfortable atmosphere that reminds you of home during your stay.

I believe the environment you are birthing in can greatly impact your laboring time. Before we look at what you can do to make your hospital stay feel homier, let’s understand why that would matter. Your surroundings and birth environment can have a real impact on how you cope and progress during labor.  The way we feel and our perception of comfort during labor directly effects our hormones during birth. We are not much different than animals, in that when they give birth they find a dark, secluded space where they feel safe. This allows the hormones needed for birth to kick in and flow well, shutting down the fight or flight response that happens when we feel unsafe or uncomfortable. During labor, we want our body to produce all the oxytocin it can, keeping adrenaline at bay. Hospital rooms are often bright and cold, with visible equipment you may or may not need. They can lack the welcoming feeling you get when you arrive home, ready to relax. Here are several ways you can make your hospital labor room feel more home-like.

Dim the Lights
Giving birth is about as primal as you can get, so take a note from our animal friends. Hospital room lighting is adjustable, and it’s your room, so adjust away. You can ask the nurses to keep the lights dimmed down, they usually have no issue with it. If they need to brighten the room so they can see what they are doing, they will usually turn them back down for you when they leave.

Room Temp
There will almost always be a thermostat in each room. When you get there, adjust the temperature to what you would normally have it set to at home or maybe just a touch cooler. It’s normal for women to run a little warmer during labor. You are probably working harder than you ever will during your birthing time.

Turn on Some Candles
LED candles are great for setting up a relaxing atmosphere. Please don’t bring wax candles to burn, this is a fire hazard. If you like to burn candles at home for the aroma, my next tip can help with that.

Essential Oils
There are several essential oils that are safe during pregnancy and labor that can be beneficial for boosting your energy, easing discomfort and muscle fatigue, and creating a calm aroma in the room. You can mix some water with your favorite essential oil and mist the room or linens you’ll be using. Check before using a diffuser in the room, as some staff may have sensitivity to certain aromas or the hospital may not allow them. You can also dilute the oil and apply to the skin directly. Be sure to get good quality oils or find an aromatherapist who can help you decide which oils are best.

Bring Your Own Pillow/Favorite Throw Blanket
When you are ready for relaxation or sleep at home and you lay your head on your pillow, you are conditioned to relax and sleep. This will be comforting at the hospital when you’re laboring. Use your pillow as a cue to relax as you move through different positions.

Play Some Tunes
Create a playlist of your favorite music, whether it’s calm or upbeat. Music can help reduce stress and the perception of pain during labor. Start working on that playlist while you are in birth preparations by finding what genres or artists are soothing/relaxing to you. Listen to those tracks or stations throughout your pregnancy; it’ll be familiar during labor and help promote relaxation.

Bring Your Own Gown
Lets be real, no one likes wearing the standard hospital gown. They are dull and unflattering. They remind you every time you look down that you are in a hospital. Bring your own button-down gown or an oversized button-down shirt. The buttons will help give easier access for breastfeeding and skin-to-skin. You can also find cute birthing gowns online.

Pictures From Home
Do you have a favorite picture from home that makes you happy or brings with it a feeling of calm? Bring it to the hospital! Maybe not your large canvas print, but something you can pack in your hospital bag. Having a piece of home can be comforting and calming during your stay in the hospital room.

The Best of Both Worlds
Did you know Spectrum Health now has two natural birthing suites at Butterworth (pictured above)? If you are low-risk, it’s a wonderful option. The rooms have a queen sized bed, lamps for softer lighting, birthing balls, and a Jacuzzi tub. And they didn’t forget about Dad; the rooms also have a recliner, flat-screen television, free Wi-Fi, and a pullout sofa. You cannot bring oil diffusers or wax candles, but overall they feel much more home-like than most hospital rooms.

Hire a Doula
Okay this sounds great, but how will you remember all this when the time actually comes? A birth doula can be your best resource. Let them meet you at the hospital and get the room ready for you. Let your birth doula take care of creating a home-like environment as well as pain management techniques and encouragement along the way.

To learn more about Courtney and ask her questions about birth doula support, you can fill out a contact form on our website or join her at an upcoming “What is a Doula?” event at EcoBuns in Holland. 

 

Make Your Hospital Room Feel Like Home Read More »

Baby Shower Gifts

[un]common sense: Buy them what they asked for

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[un]common sense is a blog about navigating through everyday life, using some common sense tips to make it just a bit easier, and sometimes a little more fun. Alyssa is a wife, mother, and postpartum doula who has some tricks up her sleeve and wants to share them with the world. Well now, don’t you feel lucky?

I recently attended a friend’s baby shower; the first I’ve been to in years. I was surprised to see that not much had changed since I had my own (over five years ago). The mother was showered with gifts alright, most of which she did not register for.

There’s nothing more annoying than opening boxes and gift bags filled with presents that your Aunt thinks “Is just the most adorable outfit ever” or your Grandmother says,”I just couldn’t pass up when I saw it!”

They have the best of intentions, but when it comes to having a baby, or babies, you don’t need extra stuff just because it’s adorable. You need practical, useful items that will make your life easier, not just make the baby or nursery look cute.

I remember after my baby showers having a pile of baby blankets, toys, and stuffed animals. What the heck was I going to do with all of it? I didn’t register for any of them, most of them were hideous, newborns don’t play with toys, and most importantly you can’t put any of that stuff in a crib, so why in the world would anyone think a baby needed all this stuff?

I returned what I could (blankets, onesies with silly phrases, gigantic toys, fancy pacifiers, stuffed animals) and donated whatever came without receipts and the stores wouldn’t take. I wonder how many hundreds of dollars were spent on those gifts, wasted. Wasted because it was not what I asked for! People took it upon themselves to decide what I needed for my baby instead of buying what I requested. It made all the time I spent researching what I needed, then registering for it, seem pointless.

So, I watched in agony as my friend opened up gift after gift that she did not register for. I watched as the mound of “Oh my god, it’s sooo soft!” blankets grew, the pile of “So stinkin’ cute!” stuffed animals overflowed, and the boxes of expensive newborn outfits began to stack up.

I wonder when people will get it? Baby showers are about the Mom and baby, not about them.

In-home support from a postpartum doula is the most wonderful gift you could give to new parents. If I could have taken the hundreds of dollars wasted on fuzzy leopard print blankets and extra large stuffed animals and put it toward a doula, you better believe I would have! My friend ended up getting a very generous amount gifted toward postpartum help because she requested it in her baby shower invites along with her registry.

If you are pregnant and planning to have baby showers, contact Gold Coast Doulas about a customized invitation stuffer. It’s an easy way to ask your friends and family for postpartum support.

The most common question I get asked as a Postpartum Doula is “What do you do for families?” It’s hard to answer because I consider my work to be fluid. It will change from family to family, and even day to day with the same family. One day a mother might need a nap, so I make sure the baby is cared for while she lies down, and maybe pick up the house a little or do some meal prep while she sleeps. The next day the same mother (because she got a nap) may be full of energy so we take our first outing together, be it to the grocery store or a walk around the block. If the mother has older children, she may feel like they’ve been neglected and want to spend some quality time with them; so again I will care for the newborn so she can focus on the older siblings.

Our services allow a mother to a nap or shower, drink a cup of tea, or finish her thank-you cards. We offer local resource suggestions for health care providers, chiropractors, mother’s groups, kid-friendly restaurants, or maybe the best place to buy a bottle of wine. We are also there for emotional support. We let her talk, cry, whatever she needs to do. And we make sure she is heard. A Postpartum Doula is an expert voice of reason that will not offer opinions or judgment.

Oftentimes new parents just need someone to guide them through the first few weeks or months with a newborn. Breastfeeding is often harder than expected. Parents finally understand what sleep deprivation means. They may be scared to give the first bath or clip baby’s nails the first time. A Postpartum Doula’s role is so very important. We are your village. We are here to support you and your family, judgment-free with no hidden agendas.

Contact Gold Coast if you have interest in any of the services we offer.

Bedrest Doulas, Birth Doulas, Daytime and Overnight Postpartum Doulas, Customized Baby Shower Stuffers, Lactation Consultations, or any of our classes including HypnoBirthing, Newborn Survival, Breastfeeding, Preparing for Multiples.

 

[un]common sense: Buy them what they asked for Read More »

Breastfeeding

Can My Body Make Enough Milk?

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Fact: Most breastfeeding mothers, at one time or another, worry about their milk supply. They wonder whether their body will make enough milk for their baby; if their supply will last.

Not surprising, since most of us have heard stories about moms who, despite wanting to breastfeed, reported not being able to; their milk dried up, baby refused the breast, they were told their milk wasn’t good, etc. Many mothers head into breastfeeding with an expectation that milk production will be a struggle, due in part to these stories that are shared widely by well-meaning strangers, friends, family members, and even healthcare providers. But the reality is that most mom’s bodies can make plenty of milk. The fear of low supply is much more common than the reality!

Before I go on, let me be clear that not all women who want to breastfeed can make enough milk to sustain a baby. There are many physical conditions that potentially impact milk production including birth complications, thyroid conditions, PCOS (Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome) and other hormone conditions, anemia, retained placenta, breast or chest injuries/surgeries, various illnesses, medications or hormonal birth control, or Insufficient Glandular Tissue (IGT – the technical term describing when breasts contain less milk-making tissue).  It’s important to recognize that low milk supply is a very real scenario that many struggle with, and it’s a serious topic that deserves a lot of attention of its own. But here we will focus on milk production in mothers with no prior physiological limitations; specifically on how low milk supply is less common than people think, and that it is much less common than “perceived low milk supply”.

Perceived low milk supply, or Perceived Insufficient Milk, is when moms are making enough milk but think that they are not. This may not sound like a big deal, but it is. Why? Because, despite having no physiological basis, perceived low supply is one of the most frequently-reported reasons for early weaning! And it’s a very stressful thing to worry about.

The good news: Perceived low supply does not equal actual low supply.

The bad news: Perceived low supply is very common, and, in addition to the fact that worrying is no fun, perceived low supply can cause low supply!

How can perceived low milk supply cause actual low supply?

When moms believe their supply is low, the way they feed changes, and how we feed has a strong influence on milk production. For example, moms might introduce supplemental formula if they perceive baby to be dissatisfied or hungry after nursing, or if baby is nursing more often than they expected or is waking frequently at night. It’s easy to assume that low supply is the cause of these things if we aren’t familiar with normal breastfeeding behaviors (especially when formula-feeding culture perpetuates unrealistic expectations for breastfed babies). Feeding on a rigid schedule, sleep training a young baby, or otherwise altering baby’s feeding routine can impact milk supply very easily, so understanding the nuts and bolts of milk production, baby behavior, and growth patterns is important. All of the conflicting advice we receive from family, pediatricians, and friends is confusing! Knowing how to tell when things are going well gives parents confidence to keep going through the ups and downs. Since perceived low supply is not a physical issue, it is totally avoidable, as long as parents have support and access to good information.

How does milk production work?

Milk production begins as a hormonally-driven process, initiated by hormone changes at birth. Over time, it becomes a supply and demand process (meaning that, ideally, the body will adjust to make exactly what baby needs – no more, no less). The baby communicates how much it needs by eating exactly what it needs! If it needs more, it will suckle more, sending hormonal signals to mom’s brain, which in turn tell her body to make more milk. This is one reason babies might seem to nurse around the clock during growth spurts. Not only are they trying to eat more, they are also instinctively “putting in the order”, so to speak, for more milk to be made to accommodate their increased needs. Simply put, the more milk is removed, the more milk the body will make. Milk can be removed in a number of ways: directly feeding baby at breast, or expressing with a pump or by hand. If milk isn’t removed regularly, milk production will be altered. This is how extra pumping can increase supply, or how skipping feeds or going long stretches between pumping at work can decrease supply. This also explains why babies who struggle to transfer milk can result in decreased supply over time, even if they are at the breast a lot! (There are many reasons why a baby might struggle to transfer milk effectively. Their feedings might take a very long time, or they may fatigue easily at the breast. If you suspect this, it’s a good time to call a lactation consultant). But, compared to pumps, babies are usually more efficient at removing milk, due to the additional stimulation, warmth and eye contact inducing more milk-making hormones. Expressing milk, however, is very effective for some, and is a necessity for breastfeeding moms who work out of the home or are separated from their babies.

For more about milk production, look for a future post all about how to maintain a good milk supply!

If you need support in the meantime, an IBCLC, Board Certified Lactation Consultant, can help answer your questions about supply, foods and herbs to support lactation, help you determine if baby is getting enough, or troubleshoot concerns even before your baby arrives!

Author: Shira Johnson, IBCLC

 

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postpartum depression and anxiety

Postpartum Depression & Anxiety Resource List

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After our recent event at the Wealthy Street Theatre where we screened ‘When the Bough Breaks – A Documentary about Postpartum Depression’ we realized that there are many great resources available to our community, but people may not know how to find them.

We at Gold Coast, with the help of Cristina Stauffer, have compiled a comprehensive list of resources for Postpartum Depression, Anxiety, and Psychosis.

These were some of the experts on our panel that you may contact directly:
Kerrie Vanweelden with Pine Rest
Allison Kunde, LMSW with Family Outreach Center
Cristina Stauffer, Private Practice Therapist cstaufferlmsw@gmail.com
Dr. Nicole Cain, ND, MA with Health for Life Grand Rapids
Micah McLaughlin with Continuum Healing
Here are some additional resources:
Local Support Groups:
(Please call for meeting schedule, location and/or registration) – These typically have no cost to attend.

Grand Rapids
Spectrum Health Healthier Communities
Nancy Roberts, Kathy Buchanan, and Sue Bailey
616-391-1771

Caledonia
Thrive Chiropractic Center
Ginger Hollemans
616-554-5070

Zeeland
Pine Rest
Melissa VanOrman
616-741-3790

Grand Haven / Spring Lake
North Ottawa Community Health System
Lauran Bronold
616-874-5154

Pine Rest

Muskegon
Hackley Community Care
Nancy Weller
231-773-6624

Lansing
Kirsten Kimmerly
517-712-7687

Online at www.postpartum.net

Gold Coast Doulas LLC is available for daytime and overnight postpartum support. Some other local friends and resources for postpartum care include MomsBloom, Inc., GR Doulas, LLC and The Village Doula GR, LLC.

 

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Nestlings Diaper Bank

Gold Coast Gives Back

Leave a Comment / Diaper Drive / /

In case you haven’t heard, Gold Coast Doulas is holding our annual Diaper Drive the entire month of September!

Why do we care so much about diapers?

Diapers are a basic health necessity for babies and are not provided by government assistance programs, but are one of the top un-met needs of low-income families. The inability of many families to meet this basic hygiene need for the smallest of their family members can create a sense of failure, guilt, and anxiety.

Parents, imagine not having the luxury of changing your baby’s diaper every time it was soiled (which we all know happens multiple times per day). How would you feel knowing you had to leave your baby in a dirty diaper all day because you only had one left and couldn’t afford to buy more? And imagine how that baby feels, wearing the same wet diaper all day and night.

The diaper drive coincides with National Diaper Awareness Needs week, September 25 – October 1.  Diaper Need Awareness Week is an initiative of the National Diaper Bank Network (NDBN), created to make a difference in the lives of the nearly 5.2 million babies in the United States aged three or younger who live in poor or low-income families.

Our drive specifically benefits Nestlings Diaper Bank and First Steps of Kent County. Holland-based Nestlings has distributed over 1/2 million diapers and helped over 15,000 families since 2011. Nestlings Diaper Bank also works with 30 partner agencies to distribute the diapers to the families in need. First Steps is an independent, influential, and neutral entity that leads the community’s efforts to strengthen and coordinate early childhood services in Kent County.

Our goal is to collect 30,000 diapers to support families in need in Kent and Ottawa counties. Diaper donations will be from September 1 to October 1 at the following drop-off locations:

In Zeeland:
Smedley Dental 133 1/3 E Main Ave
Howard Miller Library 14 S. Church Street

In Holland:
Untangled Salon 650 Riley Street
Brann’s 12234 James Street
Harbor Health and Massage 444 Washington Ave.
EcoBuns Baby + Co 12330 James Street
The Insurance Group 593 Heritage Court.

In Hudsonville:
Hudsonville Congregational United Church of Christ 4950 32nd Avenue
Love Inc. 3300 Van Buren Street

In Grand Rapids:
Manic Muse 5 Lyon street NW (They are also an ArtPrize venue!)
Balanced Health Chiropractic Center 1787 Grand Ridge Ct. NE
The Wellness Collective GR 1324 Lake Drive SE
Health for Life Grand Rapids 781 Kenmoor Ave. SE
Mindful Counseling 741 Kenmoor Ave. SE
Hopscotch Children’s Store 909 Cherry Street SE
Simply Born Midwifery Services 802 Merritt Street SE
Pioneer Construction 550 Kirtland Street SW

Look through those drawers, closets, and old diaper bags. You’d be surprised at how many random diapers and packages of wipes you may find lying around! And if not, please add a box or two to your grocery list and grab some on your next venture out to Target or Costco (bulk is good)!

Diaper sizes 4, 5 and 6 are the most needed sizes. Nestlings also accepts baby wipes, used and new cloth diapers and open packages of diapers in addition to new boxes and bags of disposable diapers.

 

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Grandparent

The Modern Grandparent

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Understanding the Modern Parent

First of all congratulations on becoming a Grandparent! Whether this is your 1st or 5th, it is a very excited time for the whole family.

Gold Coast Doulas offers in-home private classes for The Modern Grandparent. We are not currently offering group classes.

This 2 ½ hour class will break down the generation gap, giving soon-to-be grandparents the most up-to-date information while dispelling myths in a non-threatening, engaging way. Health and safety recommendations are always evolving and many things have changed since most grandparents had their own children.

Topics include:

  • Caring for the family after baby arrives
  • Handwashing, bathing baby, diapering, etc.
  • Car seat safety
  • Baby technology and gadgets
  • SIDS
  • Formula feeding and breastmilk
  • Babyproofing
  • AND MORE!

A particularly interesting topic that we cover in the class is, Understanding the Modern Parent. Here’s a brief snippet of what we talk about for this portion of the class.

Understanding your adult children and their choices can be a challenge at times, even during the best of times. One of the keys to understanding the choices your adult children make is understanding the differences between the generations and how they view the world. In 2002 Landcaster and Stillman published “When Generations Collide”. This paper took a look at inter-generational differences in the workplace.

Many of the grandparents who take this class will be the parents of those who are considered late Generation X or Millennials. These generations tend to have differing views than previous generations when it comes to Communication, Money and Authority. Being aware of the attitudes and approaches of the differing generations will help you to understand the choices your adult children may make and where they are coming from.

Sometimes it’s as simple as understanding these differences that avoid many family conflicts as families grow. Grandparents have to realize that their children deserve the respect and have the right to raise a family (their grandchildren) however they choose.

Today’s parents face different challenges than their parents faced, and even more different ones than their grandparents faced. The balance of work and family life can be very stressful. Thankfully there are grandparents like you willing to help relieve some of these stresses by simply not judging them. Your compassionate support allows your children to raise your grandchildren properly and also maintain a healthy relationship with their spouse.

Many parents today appreciate the help from their parents and welcome the non-judgemental support. While you are visiting ask, “What can I do to help you today?” There might not be anything needed other than holding the baby while mom showers or playing with a sibling while mom is breastfeeding; but by just asking, you are showing you are supportive and that will go a long way with your children. Asking what they need instead of offering what you think they need is critical.

Interested in becoming a Modern Grandparent? Contact Gold Coast Doulas about a private in-home class today!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Down Syndrome

How my son with Down syndrome has changed my life.

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We recently had the opportunity to interview our guest blogger, Alisha, about her experience as a mother of a child with Down syndrome. Read on to find out about her amazing journey.

On October 27th, 2016, Alisha found out her son Mason was born with Down syndrome.

What went through your mind?

A lot of things crossed my mind while I was pregnant but having a child born with a disability was not one of them. It made me put a lot of things into perspective and quickly. I was devastated initially. I had an older son who was perfect, and at 23 & 24 years old, my fiancée and I were really confused as to how this had happened. We had tons of ultrasounds done when I was pregnant, even a 3D one and no one ever saw anything. They always talked about how great the baby looked.

Our devastation didn’t last long. We knew that he was our son; we loved him and were prepared to support him no matter what. Things were definitely scary at first. I was always so anxious, always thinking of what Mason’s future would be like. Because that’s pretty much how it goes with Down syndrome, you don’t really know much until they start to grow and develop. So I’ve learned just to live in the moment.

What’s the one thing you would you tell other parents who find out they’re having a child with Ds?

It’s going to be okay. It doesn’t seem like it at first; you have so many questions, and there will be so many people contacting you. Just make sure you write everything down and take notes at the doctor’s appointments. There will be lots of them, so I suggest you get some sort of file folder to organize all of the paperwork.

What has been the biggest challenge?

The biggest challenge has been figuring out all the different processes we have to go through to receive the resources available to Mason. Since he has Down syndrome, he is automatically eligible for SSI benefits but it takes three to five months to get approved. We have to submit so much information!

Having his medical records transferred from one doctor to another has also been a pain. I am constantly making phone calls to confirm everyone has what they need. Nonetheless, it has made me a more organized person. I’ve started using my planner more and I also have a folder for Mason’s and the rest of my little family’s important documents. I get to lug both of those around with me to each and every one of his doctor’s appointments.

What has been the most rewarding?

The whole experience has been rewarding to me. I’ve learned so much, and it’s encouraged me to make some changes health wise.

Mason has blessed my life in ways he’ll never understand. I wouldn’t have started my business had it not been for him, and my desire to be with him for every step of his journey. Pursuing my Virtual Assistant business has opened so many doors for me and changed my life in so many ways. I wake up everyday more grateful.

What is your biggest fear for your son?

My biggest fear is that Mason will be labeled by society. There are so many people that say and do things to people who are defenseless. Mason didn’t ask to be different, but honestly, he isn’t that much different than you and me. He’s only 5 months old but he’s so smart already, and he’s very aware of the things going on around him. Nonetheless, Mason and everyone else with a disability deserves the same respect as everyone else.

Do you think the way society sees people with disabilities has changed since we were kids? How?

Yes. I definitely think there is more education about all the different disabilities. I also think there’s also a lot more being done in society to make these people feel good and welcomed. My older son, Christian, goes to an inclusion school here in Atlanta. He’s in the 2nd grade and he has a little boy with Down syndrome in his class. I love that because it shows Christian that his brother won’t be any different than the rest of us.

What will you do to make sure he has all the opportunities he deserves?

Since the moment I found out Mason had Down syndrome, I said that I would do whatever I could to make sure he would be the best he could be in life. I quit my job to stay home with him and to make sure that he gets to all of his appointments. I plan to get involved with the Down Syndrome Association of Atlanta, make some connections, and find more resources that could benefit Mason.

Mason is doing awesome. He’s gotten nothing but great reports from all of the doctors we’ve visited. We recently went to the Down Syndrome Clinic at Emory here in Atlanta and we met with some genetic counselors. Dr. Talboy (who was awesome!) presented us with the chance to participate in a research study with Colorado State, and he’s starting physical therapy this week!

I will forever be grateful for my son with Down syndrome; he’s changed my life forever.

Alisha Wilson is Owner of M&C Virtual Assistants
www.mandcvirtualassistants.com

 

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