*THANK YOU* to my cheering squad ;-) for your encouragement and support in my tandem nursing efforts! I read a vignette from a mother in "Adventures in Tandem Nursing" who wrote that she made a point of nursing both her toddler and infant simultaneously in public to make a statement about tandem nursing -- basically, that it is possible! I don't know yet if I'll find myself doing the same thing, but I have found myself making a point of telling people that I am still nursing Kapono as a means of raising awareness about continued breastfeeding during pregnancy. Previously, I frequently censored that piece of information, but lately I've been forcing myself not to edit that part out anymore, so, good for me :-)
I've been reading "Silent Knife", a book about Cesarean prevention and vaginal birth after Cesarean (VBAC), and the experience of reading this book has really motivated me to have a home birth for our second child. The *only* thing is that we don't know where home will be in late September (around my due date) since we're moving all of our stuff to Arizona at the end of May and then staying in China for the summer. We're planning to return to Arizona in late Aug/early Sep about a month or so before my due date, but we're not sure yet if we'll be in Tucson or Phoenix.
The more I reflect on my own birth experience in a hospital and the more I reflect on what I really and truly believe in my heart to be true about childbirth (that it is/should be a SAFE, NON-MEDICAL experience for the vast majority of women and children in the world), the more I want to have a home birth. The most recent section that I read in "Silent Knife" talked about the disempowering process of childbirth in the United States -- how we have adopted and perpetuated this general attitude that doctors deliver babies (vs. women give birth). What a contrast! And so true!!! At my first pre-natal check-up this year, my ob mentioned that he was exhausted from having delivered babies all night and I was thinking, you just caught those babies, the women delivered them!!! I just got in touch with a free-standing birth clinic in Tucson which I'm hoping might be a good alternative to a home birth experience, but their first email reply to me was very impersonal and I told Emiliano that if I wanted impersonal, I could just go to a hospital again :P
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4 comments:
Good luck! I hope you get your homebirth. I haven't read Silent Knife but it sounds great. There are so many great natural childbirth books that every woman SHOULD read before giving birth. They are very eye opening. :)
Good luck with traveling a month before you're due! That could induce labor (which I'm sure you know that), so it might be hard to establish a relationship with a practitioner. I will be praying for you!! Love, Kimbie
Thank you, Sheryl! I just visited "A Much Better Blog" and loved it :-) Here's to gentle parenting!
Hi Kimbie, Thank you for the prayers -- they are so appreciated. It's funny -- I'm not too worried about the travel part, I'm mostly worried about the squatting toilets part! I managed it just fine when I lived in S.Korea, but that was ten years and two pregnancies ago :P Wish me luck!
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