Technicolor Birth Memories

I have just started reading Ina May's Guide to Childbirth. The first 1/3 of the book consists of birth stories, mostly from women associated with or at The Farm in Tennessee. The stories are varied, representing women from differing backgrounds but most are extremely positive and uplifting, beautiful.

Birth stories often have a play-by-play quality (first this happened, and then this, and then I said this and then...) as mothers recount every little detail. Other times, they are too short, only giving a general account of what happened. Despite this, I always love to read them.

As I read Ina May's Guide I was struck by some of the women's vivid memories of very small details of the day their children were born:

I looked at the clear blue November sky and the brown oak leaves and basked in the warmth of the sun.

~ James's Birth

I remember the way the wind blew up the stairwell as I walked down with my beautiful son. Then the thunder and lightning began, and it started to pour rain, making everything cool and comfortable.

~ Otis Francisco's Birth

It was quite comforting to curl up next to my man, listening to the sound of the woodstove crackling.

~ Mulci's Birth

These tiny details, usually just a sentence here or there are what brought the stories to life for me. Some of the women talk about how the world was more vivid and clear, crisper than it had ever been before. I had never thought about it in quite that way before but as I remember my children's births, I realise that this is exactly true. The world, or at least certain parts of it, were in sharp focus. I have very vivid memories of a few small moments, sensations that will be with me all my life.

The day my son was born I remember the look of the lake, still and calm, reflecting the Indian Summer sunrise with the promise of a little more warmth before winter.

The day my daughter was born - I remember the rattle and hum of yet another load of towels and sheets in the dryer mingling with the shouts of children floating in the open window. I remember the early evening midsummer light, sun still high at 8:00 pm. I remember baby potatoes with dill from the garden.

I wonder about your experiences. What tiny detail is etched in your consciousness? If everyone shared their one bright moment, what kind of variation will we see? Will there be a difference between home birthers and hospital birthers?

Join the discussion on Facebook or post your comments here.

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Review: The No-Cry Nap Solution

Usually I am wary of sleep books. My three year old son has resisted sleep since he was five months old. We tried everything. We read books. We struggled. Sometimes we just gave in and accepted that he wasn’t a sleeper. Somewhere in there I gave up on all advice about getting children to sleep. I quit reading the books and I followed my older sister’s tried and true parenting adage “Do What Works.” Since then we’ve added a family member (8 month old daughter) and we’ve seen that there are both similarities and differences in our children’s sleep personalities. We’ve attempted to do things a little differently with her and sometimes we’ve been successful and sometimes we haven’t.

Along came Elizabeth Pantley’s new offering, The No-Cry Nap Solution – Guaranteed Gentle Ways to Solve All Your Naptime Problems. Having read The No-Cry Sleep Solution when my son was a baby, I already respected Pantley’s approach and philosophies. She is well recommended by the docs (dad and sons) over at Dr. Sears and I respect her tireless efforts to spread the word about gentle ways to get your child to sleep. I too am fervently opposed to the Cry-It-Out approach so despite giving up on sleep advice, Pantley remained one of my favourite parenting authors.

The newest book in her No-Cry series did not disappoint in the least. Like previous offerings, this book is well-researched, sensitive and practical. She includes in-depth explanations about baby and child sleep patterns and about the science and benefits of naps. These sections were extremely helpful, provided several Aha! moments and paved the way for me to re-evaluate our daily schedule for both our pre-schooler and our baby. It gave me the background information I needed to discover why certain methods were working and others weren’t.

After some general discussion about sleep and naps, the rest of the book is organized around specific challenges and solutions. Each challenge is explained and followed by more than one way to solve it. The bonus here is that a busy mom doesn’t have to sit down and read the book cover to cover. After the first few chapters, it is easy to flip to the section that applies to you and come back whenever your situation changes to try something new. As long as you can get past the distracting references to other pages in every chapter, this small paperback will become a treasured reference book to come back to over and over.

Because the book is written for a general audience, it may feel daunting when the list of possible causes to catnaps includes so many possibilities that you don’t know where to begin. My daughter’s frequent wakings could be caused by teething, impending developmental leap (crawling) or separation anxiety. My son’s inability to settle for a nap could be caused by being over-tired or not tired enough. But Pantley is thorough; rest assured that she has guaranteed gentle suggestions for every possible scenario that you might face. Gentle solutions are not always easy solutions though and The No-Cry Nap Solution is certainly not a quick-fix manual. Some of Pantley’s suggestions have to be done over and over again before they work. It might take five times unlatching your nurse-to-sleep baby before you can sneak away. You might have to try several different methods before finding the one that works for you.

Sometimes a sleep-deprived parent will feel like it’s easier to just do what’s been working. Which brings me to my favourite thing about Elizabeth Pantley and The No-Cry Nap Solution: Pantley accepts that all families are different and she repeatedly asserts to do what works for you. She offers the log sheets and schedules to fill out and then says to go ahead and skip them if they don’t suit your personality. She describes sleep challenges like a baby that will only nap in arms and then explains that not all families will consider that a challenge. Her No-Cry Process for Peaceful Problem Solving was like a page torn from my parenting manifesto:

"Address only those problems that are true problems to you, and don’t create or imagine problems because someone else thinks you have them, no matter if that person is family, friend or expert."

As always, Pantley proves sensitive not only to differing parenting approaches and family situations but also to the child. Her suggestions are always gentle and never designed to cause the child distress and yet she recognizes that parents need practical ways to get their children to sleep so they can re-charge too. Her approaches are balanced and realistic in that the goal is rest for both parent and child.

The book is peppered with quotes and photos from real-life parents. The photos are sweet and sometimes funny. The quotes give a tired, frustrated parent hope, a glimmer of light at the end of a dark sleepless tunnel. Both give the book added credibility. The science and research are wonderful but it’s the fact that Pantley has tested these ideas on real families (209 in 18 different countries) that makes it feel like they might work in my own.

Amazingly, many of Pantley’s solutions did work for us, despite our track record. Some suggestions were new to us and have worked their magic in only a couple of short weeks. Others show promise but are not paying off just yet. Still others were old tricks that we found on our own through trial and error. Imagine my surprise when I read solutions in the book that I had learned to employ in our family while struggling with sleep for three years. It was like a message telling me that I do know what I’m doing. And thankfully for all of us, so does Elizabeth Pantley; this book is one more great reason why she is the trusted resource for all parents looking to help their children sleep better.

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Sweet Home Birth Boxes - the supplies you need no matter what your birth plan includes!

Sneak Peek at Pantley's New Book

Just wanted to share with you how excited I am that I have been selected to review an advance copy of Elizabeth Pantley's new book The No-Cry Nap Solution. I should be getting my copy in early December and I look forward to reading it and sharing my thoughts with you. It's especially timely for me as I have been struggling with a few nap issues with my children so I really can't wait to get my copy.

From the publisher:

The No-Cry Nap Solution: Guaranteed Gentle Ways to Solve All Your Naptime Problems

Bestselling parenting author brings her solutions to your naptime dilemmas

Will your child only nap in your arms, in a swing, or after elaborate rituals? Does your child take cat naps--or none at all? Let world-renowned, trusted parenting author Elizabeth Pantley help you. She'll guide you with the same sensitive expertise and gentle approach used in her other No-Cry bestsellers.

Research shows that naps improve health, mood, growth, and well-being. Yet children often resist the naps they need. The results are fussy, crying babies and cranky, grouchy kids who also have trouble sleeping at night!

In The No-Cry Nap Solution Pantley explains to parents of children ages newborn to kindergarten the importance of napping to both behavior during the day and sleeping during (and through!) the night. She then shares with you her gentle, loving techniques--tested on families of all sizes and circumstances--and shows you how you can customize her solutions for your own family. Pantley addresses issues such as children who resist naps, dealing with schedule changes, turning short naps into longer ones, helping a child go from needing motion to sleep to "stationery"� sleep, nursing at naptime, solving daycare napping problems, and more.

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Sweet Home Birth Boxes - the supplies you need no matter what your birth plan includes!

On The Shelf

Birth Stories
by Katrina O'Brien

From natural birth at home to unexpected birth in the outdoors to planned Caesareans, these touchingly personal and funny tales illustrate how the method of arrival is less important than the love the child finds when it finally arrives.





The Colors of Birth: Shared Stories
by Ellyn Stanek Hutton

After childbirth, a woman joins the largest sorority on our planet: women who are mothers. Each mother makes her choices: hospital birthing room or water birth at home, obstetrician or midwife, epidural or natural childbirth-often forsaking all plans when unforeseen variables threaten her or her child. But enduring such a trial to bring a new life into the world provides a life-changing experience for the new mother, as exemplified by the women who share their stories in Ellyn Stanek Hutton's new compilation. The Colors of Birth contains stories that represent a rainbow of experience through color imagery chosen by each contributor. Each woman was asked to tap her instinctual perception and choose a color that best represented her childbirth experience. The Colors of Birth creates community by reinforcing and refreshing the emotional bond that is motherhood. It will stimulate conversations with friends, family members, mothers, doctors, and midwives. A loving and thoughtful shower gift, it will help the pregnant woman sort through a full spectrum of birth stories as she identifies her own approach-and offer reassurance should her plans go awry.

Descriptions from the Publishers.

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Sweet Home Featured in Shared Vision

We are excited to share with you that Sweet Home has been featured in Vancouver's February issue of Shared Vision under the ENVISION section. Check it out!

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Sweet Home Birth Boxes - the supplies you need no matter what your birth plan includes!

Breastfeeding and Birth News This Week

Lots of controversy in the news this week so I’ve broken up the news report into several posts:

Check out Breastfeeding Campaign Watered Down in the United States and Midwifery Under Scrutiny in Quebec in separate posts.

Nunavut Midwifery Goes High-tech
This really got me excited: The Ajunnginiq Centre launched a trilingual midwifery website last week, which supporters say will help strengthen the ties among midwives throughout the Inuit regions. The website has information in English, French and Inuktitut. Translation was done with the help of elders who gave advice on traditional birthing terms.

"This will be a very good communication tool for the communities and interested parties," said Natsiq Kango, head of the Midwives Association of Nunavut. "There is a lot of interest, but there aren't a lot of outlets for it. The technology in place today, this is going to provide a real channel for this."

There is a new midwifery program in Iqaluit that took on six new students this year. Nunavut Arctic College also offers classes in maternity care. The site will also be used by midwives, nurses and nutritionists.

This is exciting because in remote northern communities women often have to travel hundreds of miles to give birth in the nearest hospital. This often means being separated from family and community for weeks at a time when it is important for women to be close to family and friends. Encouraging midwifery and traditional practices is a step in the right direction for the North. It’s wonderful to see programs in place that train the local people and that foster respect for the community’s traditional ways.


‘Pushed’ Cries Out for Childbirth options

Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care, a new book by Jennifer Block, former editor at Ms. Magazine, is looking at maternity care and childbirth options. One of Block’s goals was to support women who choose alternative birth options and to spell out the truth about maternity care in the United States, care which often involves a “pushed” birth. Block describes a “pushed” birth as “one that is induced, sped up and/or heavily medicated for no good reason, and all too often concludes with surgery, invasive instruments, an episiotomy or a bad vaginal tear -- outcomes you don't want."

For more info: check out the website, or this review.


BOLD initiative: Birth, the play

All through September, a play about birth is running in Washington State and around the world. Birth, the critically acclaimed play billed as the Vagina Monologues of childbirth, is part of Birth On Labor Day (BOLD), a global movement to make maternity care mother-friendly. The play is the story of eight women, the births they experienced and their right to choose where and how they birth. The play will run in 30 cities worldwide. Unfortunately, the play is only running in one Canadian city (in Ontario). Check out the play’s website for more info about Birth and about BOLD.


Survival Tips for New Moms

Healthy Mum, Happy Baby is part survival manual and part recipe book. The idea for the book, to write a breastfeeding manual, came to Annemarie Tempelman-Kluit in the middle of the night. She researched and compiled all of the info she found and is now running two websites to help new moms. Healthymumhappybaby.com updates the information in her book, and www.yoyomama.ca provides helpful, hip info, tips and guides to local events to smooth over the yo-yo bumps of early motherhood.

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Sweet Home Birth Boxes - the supplies you need no matter what your birth plan includes!

On The Shelf

The Birth That's Right For You
by Dr. Amen Ness, Lisa Gould Rubin & Jackie Frederick Berner

Publisher's Description:

Have the birth that’s right for you—not your mother, your sister or your best friend.

Dr. Amen Ness, doula Lisa Gould Rubin and mom Jackie Frederick-Berner believe that when it comes to the ideal birth method, there’s really only one best expert: YOU. The Birth That's Right for You helps you custom-tailor your birth experience by having you reflect on:

• The way you imagine giving birth
• How you cope with pain
• What you need to feel safe and secure

Based on your answers, you will be able to create an approach that will meet your needs whether you get the epidural, chant your way to delivery in a birthing pool, take a wait and see approach to medication, or any combination in between.

In The Birth That's Right for You, you will learn how to:

• Match yourself up to the coping strategies that best fit you
• Take a realistic look at your expectations and let go of everyone else's
• Assemble a labor and delivery team that supports what you want for yourself

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Sweet Home Birth Boxes - the supplies you need no matter what your birth plan includes!

On The Shelf

Birthing Fathers: The Transformation Of Men In American Rites Of Birth
by Richard K. Reed

Publisher's Description:

"Birthing Fathers is a groundbreaking anthropological and sociological analysis of American fatherhood and men’s role in birthing."

— Robbie Davis-Floyd, author of Birth as an American Rite of Passage

"Treating birth as ritual, Reed makes clever use of his anthropological expertise, qualitative data, and personal experience to bring to life the frustrations and joys men often encounter as they navigate the medical model of birthing."

— William Marsiglio, author Sex, Men, and Babies: Stories of Awareness and Responsibility

In the past two decades, men have gone from being excluded from the delivery room to being admitted, then invited, and, finally, expected to participate actively in the birth of their children. No longer mere observers, fathers attend baby showers, go to birthing classes, and share in the intimate, everyday details of their partners’ pregnancies.

In this unique study, Richard Reed draws on the feminist critique of professionalized medical birthing to argue that the clinical nature of medical intervention distances fathers from child delivery. He explores men’s roles in childbirth and the ways in which birth transforms a man’s identity and his relations with his partner, his new baby, and society. In other societies, birth is recognized as an important rite of passage for fathers. Yet, in American culture, despite the fact that fathers are admitted into delivery rooms, little attention is given to their transition to fatherhood.

The book concludes with an exploration of what men’s roles in childbirth tell us about gender and American society. Reed suggests that it is no coincidence that men’s participation in the birthing process developed in parallel to changing definitions of fatherhood more broadly. Over the past twenty years, it has become expected that fathers, in addition to being strong and dependable, will be empathetic and nurturing.

Well-researched, candidly written, and enriched with personal accounts of over fifty men from all parts of the world, this book is as much about the birth of fathers as it is about fathers in birth.











Birth as an American Rite of Passage
by Robbie Davis-Floyd

From Library Journal:

Davis-Floyd has written a brilliant feminist analysis of childbirth rites of passage in American culture. These rites, she argues, take away women's power over their bodies, naturally designed to bring life into the world, and for no physiological reason give it to the medical system. She believes that society, intimidated by women's ability to give birth, has designed obstetrical rituals that are far more complex than natural childbirth itself in order to deliver what is from nature into culture. "In this way," she writes, "society symbolically demonstrates ownership of its product." This beautiful book, full of insightful interviews with women on a range of birth experiences and with an extensive bibliography, is a wonderful addition to the growing literature on the anthropology of the body and the theoretical debates over mind/body and nature/culture dichotomies. Essential for all anthropology and women's studies collections and medical school libraries and highly recommended for public libraries.

- Patricia Sarles, Mt. Sinai Medical Ctr. Lib., New York

"[Davis-Floyd] is a respectful listener who has encouraged her subjects to speak honestly about a complex experience. Consequently, even skeptical readers of the fascinating stories she has gathered should be prompted to reflect on the meaning of their own or their partners' experience of birth. . . . I admire, without reservation, the generous, critical, passionate spirit that animates this book."

- Sara Ruddick, New York Times Book Review

Amazon.ca reviews:

Necessary reading
October 16, 2005
Reviewer: Doulawoman (Oklahoma City OK)

If you really want to know what to expect when you're expecting, read this book and Henci Goer's Thinking Woman's Guide to a Better Birth. If you'd really like to remove yourself from the technobirth machine, read Ina May Gaskin's Ina May's Guide to Childbirth and Spiritual Midwifery. If you've always thought you might want a natural birth, read Peggy O'Mara's Having a Baby, Naturally. And remember this one thing: If you really (really) want a natural, unmedicated birth, don't give birth in a hospital.

Wonderful and thoughtful reading experience!
October 10, 2000
Reviewer: Christina B Morrow "christinaburden" (Galveston, Texas United States)

If you are a woman looking for a thoughtful review of our modern birthing culture this is a wonderful book. I have read a lot about birth options, perspectives of the birth experience, and midwifery history and philosophy but went away wanting for more. My desire to really explore an informed text about our birthing culture was finally satiated by this book. I am not an anthropologist by training and yet found the book accessible, educational, and challenging. I really suggest this book be read by everyone interested in the birth experience, partners, attendants, birthing woman, or children of technocracy.

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Sweet Home Birth Boxes - the supplies you need no matter what your birth plan includes!

New Book Suggestions

Interested in yoga for pregnancy?

Attachment parenting?

An environmental look at breastfeeding?

You're sure to find something great to read in this list of books that have been recommended by our Sweet Home visitors.

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Sweet Home Birth Boxes - the supplies you need no matter what your birth plan includes!