8.15.2011

Frederick’s Birth Story: Preamble



Before I get into Frederick’s birth story I wanted to give a little background and explain some of my thoughts about the decisions we made. When Marc and I decided to allow God to have control of our family planning (read: no contraceptives) I was both nervous and excited. One month later I was very surprised to have a positive pregnancy test. It is a total blessing that we were able to have children and so quickly. I really thought it would take at least six months to get pregnant. And technically we were not even trying! Like I said, it’s a total blessing from God and we were so thankful. 

I knew I wanted to have a home birth. The first thing I did was look up midwives in my area and educate myself on what to look for in a midwife. I interviewed a few midwives and looked at a numerous websites. We choose Marvelys Lopez, CPM for many reasons. The way she treats her clients is great, each person gets about an hour every prenatal visit and she takes her time explaining and talking about everything from what is going on with development at each stage to nutrition. She is also a doctor who became a midwife, not to mention she is a mother as well.  We absolutely adore her!  Her website is: www.sweetmidwiferycare.com  

One of the reasons why I knew I wanted to have a home birth is: I really hate hospitals. I have too much baggage with them and physicians, who in my experience, never take the time to step out of protocol and treat each patient as a person and not just another number. I also think that the way birth is handled here in the US is mismanaged and antiquated. Not to mention run by men who have never and will never have personal experience in giving birth. If you want to learn more about how birth is handled here in our country, a good resource is the documentary by Ricky Lake and Abby Epstein “The Business of Being Born” and their follow up book Your Best Birth. Granted the documentary is biased on the side of natural child birth, but they do a good job in their book of just explaining how things are run and giving you choices. Especially after seeing the documentary and reading the book both Marc and I were set on the path to have a natural home birth with a midwife. 

Overall, I had a great pregnancy (with great care), hardly any sickness, (just about 5 days when brushing my teeth made me throw up) and before I knew it it was July and my due date was rapidly approaching. 

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