[With the caveat that dads are fully capable of a complete range of emotions and have many complicated feelings upon becoming parents, including guilt, we’re going to focus on mom guilt today.] After going through some method of adding a child to your life (none of them easy), you find yourself home rocking a screaming … Continue reading When Guilt Hits Like a Sledgehammer
If you have a friend, family member or coworker expecting a new baby, going through a health crisis, or having their lives otherwise disrupted, they could probably use a bit of help getting food on the table. If someone hasn’t already set up a meal train for them, why not do it yourself? These days, … Continue reading How to be the Hero of a Meal Train
Kristen is a certified birth doula through DONA International. She is a veteran military spouse of fourteen years and counting. She has five children; ranging from twenty-two to one, a dog and two cats. She is a proud New England sports team fanatic and reps her teams by season. Kristen came into doula work after … Continue reading Kristen
Felicia Kelly is a 30 year old birth doula and mother of two biological children & two bonus children. Her motherhood journey began early at the age of 19 with a scary, highly intervened, long labor, and resulting emergency cesarean. Fast forward 10 years and her passion for birth work began during her second pregnancy … Continue reading Felicia
Do we need to feel guilty if we’re currently not cherishing cracked nipples, poop on our floor, or reading Chicka-Chicka-Boom-Boom AGAIN? No! Something you could say instead: “This is a really hard time. You’re doing a great job even if it doesn’t feel like it sometimes.”
If your due date is calculated based on the date of your last period, it will only be accurate if you have perfect 28-day cycles and ovulate on cue halfway through. An estimate based on an early ultrasound may be more accurate, but that doesn’t mean your baby will read his chart and obediently arrive at 40 weeks!
Julius Caesar was not the first c-section baby (nor did he invent the Caesar salad) — Pliny the Elder speculated that he was named for an ancestor born by that method. In Caesar’s time, c-sections were used to save babies’ lives when mothers died in childbirth. Luckily for all of us, the procedure has changed … Continue reading C is for…
For nine months, you nurtured a child with your body, providing her the nutrients she needs and a safe place to do the important business of growing fingernails, kidneys, neurons and so forth. In the meantime, that growing baby might only permit you to eat salted watermelon, or insist on chocolate glazed donuts and mac … Continue reading B is for….
But although it is common for babies (especially breastfed) to go a week or even two between stools at this age, you don’t need to dismiss it as “normal” for your child. Sometimes a few simple changes can get your baby stooling daily, which we have to assume is more comfortable!
A new baby arrives in your house — a tiny, fragile creature demanding attention at all hours, needing your help to figure out this complicated business of eating and sleeping and living. It’s enough to turn the most level-headed, composed, organized new mother into an anxious wreck. But when do normal postpartum nerves turn into the common but under-diagnosed illness of postpartum anxiety?
