Fabulous crocheted goddess from my mom as a blessingway gift 🙂
Birth Quotes of the Week!
Archive | 2011
Mother Blessing Ceremony
Lots of good friend energy!
I keep wanting to post about my mother blessing/blessingway ceremony last week and I can’t quite manage to find the right words. So, I decided to share some pictures mainly and wait to see if more words will come…My mom hosted it at my home and 19 women attended (so, with me, a nice even 20). I don’t think there have ever been so many people in my living room! Early in this pregnancy I said I wanted to have the “biggest blessingway ever!” and it was a big one. A lot of my friends tend towards “small and intimate” for their mother blessings and while I definitely see the value to that too, it was really important to me to see and feel and know how many people in my life care about me and my baby and who have hoped with me and waited with me while I cautiously made my way to this time and this place. My mom said something about there being a lot of people here and I said, “yep, and I like them all!” My life has been touched/enriched by every woman in the room and it was very moving to look around the room and see them all here together. It was a very crying blessingway—they each stated their name and said, “I am here for you, Molly” and I was a wreck! I really felt like it was one of the best days of my life and was just what I needed. I felt so well-cared for and loved and full of emotion. I thank each one of them for being here for me and for loving my baby with me.
Birth altar table with many lovely new additions!
Birth doll adorned with small items from all the guests.
After the ceremony, I set up a different table close to my "birth nest" spot.
I hung these three lovely birth art pieces on the wall right around the corner from my little table. The Willendorf wallhanging is from my friend Trisha, the super cool photo from my friend Karen, and the firey pregnant woman painting from my lovely future sister-in-law, Jenny.
My whole birth art wall/gallery.
I wish I would have taken a picture of all the lovely and tasty food that was there for our feast as well! It was a beautiful, special day and felt like an amazing launching point on my upcoming birthing journey 🙂
Adventures in Birth Art…
Celebrating pregnancy mandala
This has been my most art-full pregnancy and that has been so much fun! I’ve made polymer clay birth goddess sculptures galore, some womby finger labyrinths, drawn a number of black and white mandalas (see example to right!), made a specially decorated birth altar, and also made a belly cast. Each one of these projects has been meaningful to me in a special way. At my blessingway/mother blessing ceremony this past weekend, I was touched to be gifted with many birth art projects made for me by my friends. Really wonderful (more on this later, I promise!).
A little while ago, I wanted to incorporate the labyrinth metaphor into one of my sculptures, but was unable to make a tiny enough labyrinth to stick on her belly the way I envisioned, so she ended up with a double-spiral instead:
Spiral belly figure sitting on spiral birth symbol aromatherapy pillow gifted to me by my friend at my blessingway ceremony.
My current “issue” that I decided to work on through art is with pushing the baby out. I have never found pushing an enjoyable part of labor and the feeling of the baby’s head crowning to me is intense and scary and has—in the past—resulted in injury to my body that takes a long and challenging time to recover from. This is not a part of my birthing time that I am looking forward to. During my birth with Noah, since he was so small (15 weeks) there was no physical harm resulting from pushing him out, but there was the new association formed with having to “let go” of my baby this time in a very emotionally painful way.
So, I’ve been doing some mental work with myself about pushing, as well has having listened to my Hypnobabies CD about pushing the baby out. This baby is doing a very extreme cervical pressure thing every night and when I experience that, I consciously relax and release rather than hold tension in my pelvic floor. I’ve also been doing a birth visualization in which I envision the baby gently gliding out 🙂 So, I decided it was time for some Crowning Mother birth art. I made two sculptures, intending one as a doula gift and one for myself. I loved them while they were uncooked, but alas, I tried a new method—I mixed the polymer clay pigment with glaze and then I boiled them. Now, boiling has worked well previously, but I’d never done it with glaze before. They came out looking like they had peeling skin and were all mottled and discolored looking and very ruined to my eyes. I ended up deciding the one with gold pigment was still okay as she was (she has a peeling place on her back, etc. and you can see in the picture how her pigmentation is messed up/uneven):
First attempt at a Crowning Mama...
The second one was so discolored and bad looking, that I used acrylic paint to paint her pink:
Pink mama
She looks all right, but I still remember how she was supposed to look! (hmm. Do I sense a message here about how I might feel about my own unrepaired past tears? I remember how I’m supposed to look…)
I know they look like they’re sitting on their babies’ heads, but that was the best way I could do it to make them be able to be stable and freestanding.
I also made a three generations sculpture that was supposed to be a gift for my mom, but again had with the bad glaze/pigment issue. I ended up painting it green and don’t know if I will end up giving it to her or not (she saw it by mistake, because I had it sitting on the counter still when she came over):
Triple figure
Here all of them all together with my belly cast as backdrop 🙂
While I was at the painting, I also painted a mother-baby figure that my friend Summer made for me as a blessingway gift (don’t I have nice friends?! This was one of her first attempts at creating birth art and I was touched that she gave it to me! She left it white, saying that I could paint it if I wanted to. So, I painted it sparkly purple :))
I decided to redeem myself artistically by making a new Crowning Mama figure the following day. This one I applied pigment to in my usual way and decided to bake. Interestingly, I accidentally set the oven for 350 degrees, rather than the normal setting for polymer clay! Yikes! When I got her out, the tips of her hands were smoking! (I’m reaching now, but perhaps some kind of subtle “ring of fire” issue being manifested here…;))And, the pigment turned from purple to blue in some places, which actually isn’t a bad effect, but is also not normal! And, I am critical of the shape of her arms—too fat, long, and no graceful taper like some of my others.
Now, I have to decide whether I’m going for round three or not! (Perhaps there is a lesson to be found here in that birth isn’t supposed to be perfect and neither is birth art.) I feel like accomplished my original goal, which was to make a positive crowning/pushing image for myself—I thought all kinds of helpful, “open” thoughts while creating this last one especially and imagined welcoming the feeling of the baby’s head, rather than feeling fearful of it! So, she reminds me of that feeling. And, maybe she—and thus, myself–are actually good enough after all.
Belly Cast
I feel like I have about 15,000 blog posts that I want to write before my new baby is born! I’m also trying to add content from articles that I’ve had published over the years—some of my best stuff is in those articles and I feel like sharing the pre-print versions on my own website at last! Those things can obviously wait, but the posts that I have swirling around that have to do with pregnancy, I want to post NOW, while I’m still pregnant and while the feelings are fresh, not as retrospective posts later. It has been a different experience to blog while pregnant and it has definitely shifted the direction and tone of a lot of the posts I make to this blog—much more personal and less educational. I’ve also found that family and friends have begun reading my blog during my pregnancy, when they didn’t before, so I also like sharing things with them in this way.
Since I only have about 20 minutes right now, I’ll go with the shortest subject first, not the one I most want to write about (which is my blessingway last week—however, I think I feel a little too filled with emotion over it to really write about it the way I’d like to do, but I do have plenty of pictures I want to share).
On Sunday afternoon (38w1d), we made my belly cast! I seriously underestimated what a chilly experience it would be to make a
Trying to look enthusiastic despite the trickling...
belly cast in January! Yikes! My only other casting experience was in May (2006)—very different. For this one, we decided to make it with me standing up (for fullest shape) and so I stood in front of the furnace vent, but it didn’t help much. Even though the water was warm, it quickly chilled down as soon as the plaster was applied and ran in slow torturous trickles into my underwear and then
down my legs and into my socks. My heels also started to feel stone bruised from standing on the hard floor without moving (I did stand on a towel, but it didn’t help much!). If I shifted
them, Mark would complain that it was messing up his sculpting!
I’m really glad we did it and I’m glad to have an accommodating husband who doesn’t think something like this is silly or weird. I do not plan to actually paint the cast until after she is born. I am thinking of doing a black and white design on it similar to the mandalas I’ve been drawing during this pregnancy.
Finished (still unpainted) cast
Aside from “buying car seat” (which is winging its way here right now via site-to-store shipping), making the belly cast was my very last pre-baby “to-do.” Of course, I’ve now added, “finish blessingway and birth art blog posts…and a couple more…and maybe a couple more” to said list!
Birth Lessons from a Chicken
Birth Lessons from a Chicken
by Molly Remer, MSW, ICCE, CCCE
Originally published in Midwifery Today, 2009 Spring;(89):49
“Should we just let her sit on them?” my husband asked. He had been struggling to keep a broody hen off her nest for almost two weeks.
“I always vote in favor of the mother,” I told him. So, we stopped trying to oust her. My husband gathered up six random eggs from the coop and put them under her and we let her sit.
We consulted our book on raising chickens. The chicken book had very little encouraging advice about “natural incubation.” After reading it, we learned that she was likely to let the eggs get too cold causing them to die, or perhaps just chill a part of them causing the chicks to have deformed feet. If she did manage to hatch them, they will probably get bacteria in them from the “unsanitary” nest site and get “mushy chick disease.” This is, of course, if the eggs happen to be viable at all, which is improbable. It is recommended not to let her sit and if she persists to either cull her (kill her), or to just let her sit there until she dies of starvation trying to hatch infertile eggs (and therefore culls herself). The book also informed us that if she has feathery feet (she does), she will probably knock the eggs out of the nest by accident and break them. Also, she should definitely be sitting in the spring and not the dead of winter. After studying the book, we are left with a clear sense that incubating eggs artificially is the preferred way to go and that “natural incubation” is fraught with difficulty and dangers.
However, there our chicken sat in the unheated, but well built and insulated chicken coop as the January temperatures outdoors reached -2F. We concluded that she probably had a 5% chance of actually hatching anything and I felt sad for her.
Then, one morning when my husband went to feed the chickens, he heard a funny noise. He looked at the broody hen and from beneath her, a fuzzy head appeared. Then two. Eventually, four. In this cold, cold weather at the wrong time of year with the wrong
The mama hen and two of her chicks
kind of feet and the wrong kind of eggs, she did it! We didn’t trust her, or believe in her. Our book and the experts didn’t either. However, her inherent mothering wisdom won out—it trumped us. At the risk of excessive personification, it truly seemed that she had believed in herself and trusted her instincts (or perhaps, that Nature believed in itself).
Perhaps we could have had the same result with an artificial incubator—a tray that rotates the eggs, instead of “clumsy” feathered feet; a properly temperature controlled unit instead of the heat of her own breast; a sterilized box instead of a wooden coop with an unscientific amount of possibly “germy” feathers plucked from her own body.
My husband ran to get the rest of the family and as we watched that first small fuzzy baby with its eyes bright with life, I was awash with the parallels—the book tells her that her pelvis will be too small, labor will be too painful, her skin won’t stretch, she might have GD, there might be any manner of complications, maybe she should elect to have the baby surgically. Why all the fuss about doing it “naturally” anyway?
Then, as we continued to stare in amazement, the mama hen clucked to her baby softly and fluffed her wings around it until it disappeared beneath her with the others. Isn’t this the birthright of every new baby of any species? To be snuggled immediately after birth into the warm embrace and near the breast of the female body that has given it life? The body that has cared for and nurtured it so lovingly so that its head may finally peek out into the world?
If our chicken were to write a book about hatching babies—or about giving birth—perhaps her section about natural incubation would read:
Maybe she knows what she’s doing.
Maybe you should trust her.
Maybe she can do a better job with her own body and her own babies than you can.
Maybe she can do this all by herself.
—
Molly Remer, MSW, ICCE, CCCE is a certified birth educator and activist. She is editor of the Friends of Missouri Midwives newsletter, a breastfeeding counselor, and the mother of two young sons and a baby girl on the way. She loves to write and blogs about birth at https://talkbirth.wordpress.com, midwifery at http://cfmidwifery.blogspot.com, and miscarriage at http://tinyfootprintsonmyheart.wordpress.com.
—
This is a preprint of Birth Lessons from a Chicken, an article published in Midwifery Today, 2009 Spring;(89):49. Copyright © 2009 Midwifery Today. Midwifery Today’s website is located at: http://www.midwiferytoday.com
Book Review: Gentle Birth Companions
Book Review: Gentle Birth Companions: doulas serving humanity
By Adela Stockton
McCubbington Press, 2010
ISBN 978-1-907931-00-0
104 pages, paperback, £13.00 (worldwide)
http://www.adelastockton.co.uk
Reviewed by Molly Remer, MSW, ICCE, CCCE
https://talkbirth.wordpress.com
Gentle Birth Companions is the first book “written about the doula movement beyond the US” and as such it was a fascinating read. I hadn’t realized how ethnocentric my own perceptions were about the role and history of doulas and I previously assumed that the “doula movement” was essentially synonymous with the “doula profession in the US.” Not so! Indeed, Stockton discusses the way in which in the US, doula professional organizations strive mainly to be acceptable to the medical community, whereas in the UK the doula operates outside of (or parallel to) the medical system. And, she provides an interesting analysis as to whether doulas should be referred to as “professionals” in the first place (this is also due to a difference in what the word means in the UK compared to the US). She expresses several criticisms of certification or even of specialized training programs, feeling that professionalization builds additional, unnecessary layers of bureaucracy into the maternity care system and that the role of a doula should be the role of a lay woman. She also posits that the role of doula actually represents a return to the role of traditional midwifery—what midwifery was supposed to be and has now become removed from politically, socially, and culturally.
Gentle Birth Companions is divided into three sections. In the first, Grassroots, it explores the origins of the doula, the 21st century doula (including doula preparation and training), the UK “brand” of doula, and the wider doula community (thoughts about a global movement and also about doulas in the developing world as well as the industrialized world). The second section, Guardians of Gentle Birth?, explores the doula’s role both antenatally and postpartum and the return to “traditional midwifery” represented by the role. In the third section, Doula Tales, some UK doulas share birth stories , experiences, and thoughts in their own words.
Gentle Birth Companions is an excellent look at the “politics” of the doula movement and the professionalization and motivations of such, as well as at the role and purpose of the doula in women’s lives.
—
Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book for review purposes.
Birth Quotes of the Week
“In the midst of a world
…marked by tragedy and beauty
there must be those
who bear witness
against unnecessary destruction
and who, with faith,
stand and lead
in freedom,
with grace and power.
There must be those who
speak honestly
and do not avoid seeing
what must be seen
of sorrow and outrage,
or tenderness,
and wonder.”
–via Unitarian Universalist Association
“One of the most important things I have learned about birthing babies is that the process is more of an unfolding marvel than a routine progression of events.” –Tori Kropp
”We are part of generations of women, one to the next. Teaching, mentoring, supporting, assisting, befriending, and so much more. Let us not lose those connections in our lives, in our births…” —Preparing For Birth
”There is no other organ quite like the uterus. If men had such an organ they would brag about it. So should we” ~Ina May Gaskin
(this quote got the most “likes” of almost all the quotes I’ve ever posted on the CfM FB page!)
“A woman’s confidence and ability to give birth and to care for her baby are enhanced or diminished by every person who gives her care, and by the environment in which she gives birth…Every women should have the opportunity to give birth as she wishes in an environment in which she feels nurtured and secure, and her emotional well-being, privacy, and personal preferences are respected.” —Coalition for Improving Maternity Services (CIMS)
“Birth wisdom…comes most completely not from the outside but from deep within the woman’s physiology.” –Robbie Davis-Floyd (in intro to Gentle Birth Choices)
“Hospital-based childbirth classes usually do not teach women about the wonder and mystery and sweaty, intense power of birth, but rather prepare them for each and every hospital procedure by educating their intellects instead of honoring their bodies.” –Robbie Davis-Floyd (in intro to Gentle Birth Choices book)
(Let it be known before anyone gets their feelings hurt that I do understand that there are very good, complete, helpful, awesome hospital birth classes and hospital birth educators out there! This quote is a generality, but one that seems quite true in a number of cases [but not all, of course]).
“…I have noticed that the subgroup of women who tend to choose [homebirth] often exhibit certain characteristics, such as comfort within their own bodies, a desire to have a birth experience that is more poetic than clinical, as well as a desire to return what we all feel is some seriously missing humanity to the experience of having a baby…” –Cara Muhlhahn
“We can no longer sit back and debate whether maternity care is evidence-based. We have seen that over and over again, in most cases, it is not…” –Connie Livingstone
Finishing Up!
I have had a crabby and annoying day for much of the day, which is not the frame of mind I envisioned being in when writing this post! I originally set out to write about what a nice time I’ve been having the last couple of days, sooooo….going to just write and perhaps I’ll recapture some of the peace and sense of harmony that was prompting me to write in the first place!
On Sunday, I had a very delightful time spontaneously working on the birth altar I planned to make. When I say spontaneous, it doesn’t mean that I didn’t know I was going to do it—I knew I was, someday—just that I suddenly started working on it and basically didn’t quit until I was finished and it came together in a perfect way for me. 
I felt so good and content after making it. Inspired by that experience, I then wrote down a list of my fears about the birth (this was also on my to-do-before-actual-birthing-day list) and then did a Hypnobabies “fear release” session after that. And, then I burned them all up in the kitchen sink. More good feelings!
Also on Sunday, while the kids were at my parents’ house, I worked in the bedroom getting all of the baby’s clothes sorted and into the right boxes as well as assembling my special tub of birth supplies so that everything is easily available in one place and no one has to ask me for anything—I even put a box of raspberry leaf tea in, which could also easily just stay in the cupboard where it usually lives, but it is right there with everything else now. While I was doing this, Mark worked on sorting out his own clothes and decluttering the closet. We also decluttered some of the “hot spots” on our kitchen counters that attract random piles of nothing important. So, more good feelings about that!
The next morning, I woke up before the kids and did the Hypnobabies “visualize your perfect birth” exercise (not a CD, my imagination). It suggested spending about 5 minutes and I spent almost 20 minutes—since I am having some strange “death” fears about this birth, I went ahead and carried the visualization through to my being 89 and then to the baby being 89 ;-D Maybe this was excessive, but I felt good about it—ending the visualization with just the initial “hi, baby!” moment didn’t feel like enough to me! So, then I felt really positive and complete about that 🙂 I also finished my birth altar that morning—I put a glaze over the images, took pictures, etc. I also listened to the pregnancy and birth affirmations from Hypnobabies while I did some of my other work. Later, we went on a nature exploration walk in the woods to enjoy the nice weather and when we came back, I read some of my kids’ homebirth books to them—Welcome with Love, Runa’s Birth, and We’re Having a Homebirth. They are excited and want to be there when the baby is born, but I’m strongly leaning toward only having them present if they happen to wake up. I don’t know that I want them woken up if they’re not ready (I realized this for sure after Z mentioned how he is going to be “screaming” when the baby is born. Um. No, thanks on that).
Then, on Tuesday, I had some more belly pictures taken. It is fun to be “special” and get my pictures taken 🙂 I love all of the ones I’ve seen so far from this shoot, but these two are really good!
Today, I had my first prenatal appointment with my midwife at our own house. I’ve spent the entire pregnancy not being able to picture her in our home and so, now, I can—because she’s actually been here. I hadn’t really realized before that she hasn’t really ever met Mark or my mom, other than very short introductions about 6 years ago! She seems to think I will have the baby early—baby’s head is very low (which I can feel, for sure!) and she said my amniotic fluid has decreased. She also thinks baby is on the small side, but I think I will fool people once again. I only measure 33 weeks, which is kind of funny, because I wonder what I would look like measuring 40 weeks—I guess pretty extreme! I have been having a lot of pre-birthing waves (trying out my Hypnobabies words!). I always do, but they’ve definitely increased in frequency to about every 15-20 minutes throughout the day. I also reminded her that I don’t expect to call her until near the end, because what I want from her is immediate postpartum help—I like being almost alone during my birthing time (more Hypnobabies words. I like this one especially—it isn’t “labor” it is my “birthing time.” :))
After the midwife left, my mom stayed and we went through my box of birth supplies so she knows what is where. I also made sure she knows how to use my camera because she is on picture-duty. I also showed Mark and my mom the things I learned about neonatal resuscitation at the training I attended last month and we practiced with my resuscitation bag so that we all know how to do “positive pressure ventilation” and chest compressions on a newborn now. I know this might seem kind of over the top, but I find it very empowering to know how to do these things now—they always seemed “mysterious” and specialized before—and it doesn’t make me feel like I’m planning for a “worst case,” but that I’ve completely resolved any fear I had about things I wouldn’t know how to do for my own baby if I was giving birth alone! We’ve been talking about needing to do this since the end of Dec., so it felt very good to get everything all squared away in this manner.
Really the only things left I’d like to get done now before she is born are the belly cast and my blessingway and to crochet one more hat for her! (Of course, I have non-birth/non-baby things in abundance that I’d also like to get done—double checking the exam questions for my online class, finalizing the FoMM newsletter, submitting two articles, finalizing some the blog posts in my drafts folder, etc., etc., etc. , <sob>), but right now my mind is on the specifically getting-ready-for-baby to-dos and I’ve done ’em! Go, me!
Birth Altar
Inspired by the birth altars by artist Amy Swagman of The Mandala Journey, I decided I wanted to make a special birth altar for this upcoming birth. My mom bought me a small, unfinished curio cabinet/shadow box from Hobby Lobby to use for this purpose (thanks, Mom!). The first thing I did was to paint it “placenta red” using a blend of red and purple paints to get the shade I wanted. This is my favorite “power” color:
Door open (door is glass, but it doesn't show up in the pictures and looks like an empty frame).
I had a variety of postcards, tags, and inspirational words saved and some of them posted on the wall by my computer. I decided it was time to do something with all these accumulated goodies. I made a reversible, removable card to insert into the front door of the box. For the front panel, I used a card that I bought from Birthing from Within with the “kiva woman” painting that I really love and connect with. I didn’t like cutting it up, but it was worth it! Around the edges I picked words from the tag that came with a shirt I purchased from WYSH (though the quotes are intended to be about the parenting journey, they are amazingly apropos for birth—which, of course, is part of the parenting journey too). I also used some of the tear off pages from a little “happy thoughts” sort of page-a-day calendar that I had a couple of years ago from the $1 Shop (again, totally appropriate for birth, even though it wasn’t the original purpose). Finally, my paper-hoarding tendencies have come in handy, because these little words of wisdom were perfect! Part of me felt like I “shouldn’t” have so many words as part of my birth altar—birth brain doesn’t really “speak” in words, but words are my thing and my “medium,” so to speak, so I followed my intuition and I loved how it turned out. It is perfect 🙂
First side of reversible card
I am less happy with the second side—I was going for less wordy on it and maybe I should have worded it up too! The upper left hand corner is a linoleum block print carved by my husband 🙂
Second side of reversible card
Front of the altar with card inside:
Inside of door with card inside:
For the back, I had a small collection of items that are round and so I thought they seemed to go together. In the center, I attached the womb labyrinth I made a couple of weeks ago. In the upper right hand corner is one of the black and white drawings that I’ve been doing that my mom modified and cut into a linoleum block print as well. The lower left hand corner is a postcard version of a womb labyrinth that I drew in 2007.
Then, I filled it up with some things that hold meaning to me that usually are around my house in various places including two of my polymer clay birth goddess sculptures. I included two little LED tea lights, which look really cool in there in real life, but are less cool in the pictures. I also put in a little plastic baby, which might be kind of weird—I can’t decide…
Remember the reversible card? Now the front is also the inside panel! 🙂
With card removed and door closed.
Opened all the way with front and back both visible.
This was officially the most fun and rewarding birth project I’ve worked on 🙂
Birth & Mystery
“Birth is a great mystery. Yet, we live in a rational, scientific world that doesn’t allow for mystery. ‘In this day and age, there must be a better way to have a baby,’ implies that if you are informed enough, strong enough, you can control it. Any woman who has given birth, who can be honest, will tell you otherwise. There are no guarantees. It is an uncontrollable experience. Taking care of yourself and being informed and empowered are crucial, but so is surrender. Forget about trying to birth perfectly. Forget about trying to please anyone, least of all your doctor or midwife…” –Jennifer Louden (The Pregnant Woman’s Comfort Book)
At Montana De Oro in 2009 (waves remind me of both mystery and surrender)
I couldn’t fit this whole quote into my Facebook status today, so I’m sharing it here. I think it is a good reminder for all of us and especially for me as I get ready to do this again sometime this very month!
Here is a previous post I wrote about surrender, birth, and control and here is one about distraction, concentration, and surrender (which is a concept I love).
Every day I feel more ready to embark on my own new mystery!
Edited to add, in response to a comment about whether it might be possible to have a perfect birth:
I do think it is probably possible to have the “perfect birth” for you, but I have yet to read/see/experience a birth where the mother didn’t think of something that would have been nice to have different. Even with the very blissful stories, there’s usually some kind of “hiccup” or “wish I would have done…” (even if it as simple as, “wish I would have had the placenta encapsulated). I feel like with each of my own births I “improve” upon whatever it was that was less than perfect last time, but then there is usually a new surprise for me with the new birth—because each birth is its own journey and has its own lessons to impart! But, I feel like I spend a lot of energy prior to subsequent births thinking of ways to “fix” whatever the hiccup was with the preceding birth (with my current pregnancy the needed “fixes” for me are LIVE baby and minimizing postpartum bleeding. I expect there will probably be some kind of new “surprise” for me that will lead to me thinking that IF I had done something different maybe THAT element could have been perfect too!). What sounds perfect to me this time around is a very, very undisturbed (possibly unassisted) birth, but with IMMEDIATE postpartum assistance and bloody-towel washing! ;-D
Talk Birth 