UC thread #9...Sept. '04 - Page 2

[3_opihi]

Hi everybody!

Congrats oshunmama!!!! I love the name, btw. Enjoy your time with your beautiful blessing

As for the FHT, I'm not going to listen, because I would have no idea what to listen for and I don't think I would be able to concentrate anyhow.

I have another question - and I know there have been lots of threads on this- I just never read them.

If you could recommend one book, and only one mind you, on UC what would it be? I already have lots of labor and birth books. But I would kind of like to read something about UC specifically. I also don't like reading a lot of technical stuff. I feel like I start analyzing everything and it takes away from my intuition. So, anybody want to recommend one non technical, UC specific book?

Aloha, and I hope this month brings everybody much happiness.

[StacyL]

"Unassisted Homebirth: An Act Of Love" by Lynn Griesemer.

[ComaWhite]

We were able to listen to the heartbeat with a regular 'ol stethescope past the 23'rd week.
I was a really neat thing for us (especially dh) to do, we would listen before we went to bed and do a belly massage with oils too.
It was really neat as the hb would be different when she was awake and much slower when she was sleeping, quiet when she was posterior and loud when she was anteroir.... it would speed up just for a few seconds when she spun herself around, there was a few times where she would just constantly move away, so I would respect her space/privacy and not try again until the next night.
It never once made me feel concerened or worried, just really connected, as Lula's Mom said...
During labour, it was the last thing on my mind, I would have never had the patience to stop what I was doing just to listen to the hb.
I dunno, Im a little obsessive about details... I

[rainbowmoon]

i actually did rent a doppler during my last pg which we used about 5 times..finding the heartbeat ourselves was really neat.. anyway next time we will likely go for the fetascope. where did you all buy yours? cascade?

I wanted to ask does anyone know where to find unassisted birth videos? (we are already getting the one from the Empowered Childbirth list btw)

[cottonwood]

Is that the same one as from the CBirth list? There's also A Clear Road to Birth, and on Laura Shanley's site I think there are some other videos that are not specifically about UC but have UC births on them.

[lovemygirl]

Originally Posted by mamamaya

If you could recommend one book, and only one mind you, on UC what would it be? I already have lots of labor and birth books. But I would kind of like to read something about UC specifically. I also don't like reading a lot of technical stuff. I feel like I start analyzing everything and it takes away from my intuition. So, anybody want to recommend one non technical, UC specific book?

hands down (at least for me) Unassisted Childbirth by Laura Shanley is the best IMHO. I have also read the Unassisted Homebirth by Lynn M. Griesemer, but I didn't like it ...
For me, Laura's book is really, truly what UC is all about.

[indigolilybear]

I don't have a favorite book perse, and liked Shanley's allright, didn't really like Griesmer (sp?)
But my favorite thing to read was anything by Jeannine Parvati Baker. mostly her articles. here: www.freestone.org or www.birthkeeper.com

HTH!

[laurata]

My mother...

Can I just vent?

I am finding it incredibly annoying that my mother keeps "subtly" asking, "So have you seen a doctor lately?"

Seriously mom, shut up and stop asking. It's none of your business.

I've been extremely neutral and haven't discussed any of my plans with her. Just left it at "I'll do what seems best when the time comes." (my tactic about the doctor appointments so far has been *mumble mumble* "Nova! Stop that! Quit it. -- Mom, I need to go take care of my kids, they're getting into stuff.")

{sigh} Whatever. We certainly do talk a lot less on the phone these days, and I am glad we live 2500 miles or so apart.

[JesseMomme]

(((((( ))))))))))) laurata I can so relate!! I'll have to try that over the phone thing hehehe.

I love my mother and I'm glad she lives nearby, but we just butt heads over everything I do as a parent (not vaxxing, etc) and even though I have already had one UC it still just boggles her mind ( as she has so clearly stated) It "really helps" that she has been a nurse for 25 years or so This time around she spent a few months urging me to reschedule an appt with the women's clinic until she finally gave up, I've let her take my BP a couple of times (once at the office she works at I was seeing the dr for being on zoloft, once at home) not so much b/c I want to know but just to show her I really am fine. The last one was 120/70-something? And that was after I had spent fifteen minutes feverishly vaccuuming :LOL

She just totally doesn't understand why I don't want anyone around. We were both present for my first son's birth and trauma, but we see two different versions of what happened and still disagree to this day. Ah well, just commiserating. Hang in there, and I will too

[Aura_Kitten]

hi all.

about the FHT during labor and delivery ~ my little sprite was kicking on her way out, so i didn't worry too much about it. :LOL

while i was pregnant, i had my partner put his ear to my belly and listen to her heartbeat that way.

eta ~ the 1 book i would recommend is Prenatal Yoga & Natural Birth, by Jeannine Parvati Baker. it is so... spiritual / blissful and has such an awesome pro-UC view of the birth process.

[indigolilybear]

Jessemomme--my mom's a RN too, fun eh?? :LOL She was sooo worried!

[nikirj]

Weird, my mom is an RN too...

We aren't telling her we're UCing, she'd call CPS. Or at the very least, stop talking to me and DH and go crying to every relative we have until nobody else would either. She's really good at that whole getting-people-on-her-side thing (tells whatever story it is that they'd need to hear to get them to think she's totally right and whoever else is totally wrong). It would be a mess.

[Lula's Mom]

My sister is up here visiting, fleeing from Hurricane Frances for the weekend. I hadn't discussed our birth plans with her at all- she's very medically inclined, and I thought she'd have a cow. She saw my Unassisted Homebirth book on the bedside table though, and asked ever-so-casually, "So is that what you're doing? Having it by yourselves?" I said yes, and she just said "Oh." A while later I told her she was taking it a lot more calmly than I thought she would, and she just said "It's not like I'm surprised, that's totally something you would do" :LOL I guess I underestimated her! Either that, or I didn't realize just how well the Xanax is working for her.

I'm worried about my mom, though. She has been supportive and plans to be present at the birth, if possible, to help with Lula. But I just found out that she is drinking again. She had quit 13 years ago, and I thought she was done for good. I just found out that she started again at some point, I don't know when. Her health is very bad recently, and the drinking is the cause, according to her doctor. She doesn't know that I know. I'm worried about her killing herself, and I'm worried about whether she will be physically and/or mentally able to be here with me.

[Aura_Kitten]

"It's not like I'm surprised, that's totally something you would do"

:LOL


i'm sorry to hear about your mom. my dad is an alcoholic and it's so hard... s

[majazama]

I'm looking forward to hearing your birth stories! some of you are soon, right?

[Dandylion]

Feeling weird, emotionally and unsure

Hi. I haven't posted since I introduced myself a couple of months back. To quickly update, I'm almost twenty weeks, I haven't had any prenatal care but my own so far, and this will be my first UC (my other two were hospital births).

I've been doing fairly well so far, but the past couple of weeks I've been feeling increasingly... I don't know exactly how to put it. Nervous, unsure, just weird. Emotionally, not physically. All of the sudden I feel like I'm flying without a net or something. At this point in my previous pregnancies I would have already had four appointments with my ob, I would have had all the tests that I don't even want this time around, I would have had an ultrasound that would have told me the sex of this baby. I believe very strongly in UC. Why am I suddenly feeling so anxious? Is it just because this time it's so different? Because this time I have only myself to rely on to know whether everything is going well or not?

Here's a little bit of background, a few things that been happening recently that may be the cause of what I'm feeling right now. I've been feeling the baby kick for quite a long time (since ten weeks!), but it's intermittent. What I mean by that is, one night I felt these huge rolling over movements in my abdomen, bigger than anything I've felt that early, three times in a row and then never since. I mean there's plenty of movement, but it's mostly small and just when I get used to the baby being active and I think, "Okay, now I'll not have any big gaps between movement," and then I'll feel nothing for the rest of the day and night and then I start feeling antsy, which I know is ridiculous because it's still pretty early and the baby is still pretty small and I'm not going to feel big rolling over movements like I felt before regularly for a little while yet. But I still think about it and worry.

Also, I haven't really told my family about my plans, except for my mom and I told her that I was still considering seeing a midwife once or twice during the pregnancy to kind of mollify her (and it's true--I am considering it). The other day my aunt asked me in an email if I had a midwife yet and I still haven't gotten around to answering her email and another aunt today IM'ed me to ask me if I wanted to come down and have her do an ultrasound (she is a NICU nurse and she did this for me for my last pregnancy). I told her that I wasn't planning on doing any ultrasounds this time, but that I would let her know if I changed my mind and she asked me if I was seeing a doctor. I said the same thing that I had said to my mother (considering later), but that everything was going fine so far. She just said that was good and she would talk to me later and let her know about the U/S. That's not a bad reaction, right? So why did I start worrying about what she may have been thinking but not saying? Why did I start thinking about my whole extended family (which is quite large) sitting around talking about how crazy I am and how they can't believe I'm not seeing a doctor? Why do I even care, especially if no one is saying anything negative to my face or (and this is much more likely) they don't even really know what's going on anyway?

Sometimes I feel so strange and like it's very stressful to do the non-mainstream thing. There are times that I consider just putting my older daughter in school instead of unschooling her. Wouldn't it be easier if I just went with the flow? I don't consider it seriously, but god, sometimes I wish I was in the majority. With this, sometimes I just feel like running to the nearest OB and doing it like everybody else, doing the same way I did it with my daughters. But I know it wouldn't be easier because even though I would no longer be going agains the flow, I would be going against myself. And that's much worse, I think.

I don't really know what's going on with me, I'm worried about whether or not I even have any intuition, I'm worried about what other people think, I'm worried about not having a window into my uterus to see that everything is copacetic. I do feel a little bit better at having written all of this down and maybe some of you can offer me some suggestions on how to calm my nervous-Nellie self down a bit. I'm going to go now and order a fetoscope. I was debating whether or not to even get one, but I think now that it will really make me feel better, even if I have to wait a few more weeks to hear the heartbeat. I know I've read somewhere when it's possible to hear it, but I forget, can you hear it at 20 weeks? Maybe 21 or 22, which is probably when it will get here.

Okay, thanks for reading. Even though I never post, I always read this thread and I am very grateful to have it here. It's been extremely helpful. Also, I apologize for any unreadability. I'm a little bit emotional right now and it's affecting my writing.

[JesseMomme]

Sighhh was just about to post and Kieran woke up Liam.

I've been spending more time afk, but it worked I got the swelling all the way down. I literally didnt' do a thing all weekend, just let the kids go nuts, kept my feet up, and sewed some mama pads.

Ok Liam is happy and ran off to play.

Dandylion - I don't know how many other people have felt the way you do, but I know I wasn't alone when I felt similarly, like I was sailing off a cliff that I didn't see the edge of and the bottom wasn't in sight. It's truly uncharted territory, especially emotional territory. Who do we know, IRL, who has walked the same path, held even similar beliefs about birth in general...we're overcoming all of that subconcious junk that filled our heads about birth since our brains were little growing sponges, we are now living that paradigm shift we went through. Walking the walk, birthing THE birth that is in our hearts.

And to stand up for yourself while doing it can be stressful so that never helps. I was a regular lilly liver until I started my first UP. As time wore on, I got a lot better.

I worried I didnt' have intuition, or that it would fail me somehow too. I'd calm myself down telling myself I was perfectly capable to birth (two hosp vag births, as screwed up as they were, helped) on my own, that I'd be listening to my body the same way I had before only there would be NO distractions and needles and orders...It's like knowing your going come down with a cold, or you'll be getting AF in a day or so, you just will, know. I hope that made sense lol.

This has been my most 'mellow' baby so far (my fourth), I swear I go all day a not feel a thing, then sit down to pay attention and well he/she must be sleeping or something go figure! Even the kicks and jabs felt muffled somehow, nothing like I remembered for the first three. I never felt the somersaults the other three would do. It finally dawned on me that perhaps this time my placenta is front and center so it's plausible thats why a lot feels mellow and muffled. Something to consider.

Yeah it would be easier to go with the flow, but like you said, you'd be miserable. How worth is it is that. For me when ignorance was gone and there was nothing blissful left and I still went to the appts to make everyone leave me alone, that was one of the most agonizing, stressful time I had ever experienced.

Mamajazza, any day or week now is my favorite phrase :LOL Oh yeah, I've seen it on cbirth before, it is odd how SO MANY people who choose to learn about UC or will UC or have UC'ed have family members who have medical backgrounds, and some themselves have worked somewhere in the medical field. I myself have a mother who is a nurse, my paternal grandmother was a nurse (she was born at home, but tried talking me out of homebirthing lol), and I did a year long stint as a home health aide (which I felt comfortable with because these people were chronically ill or whathave you but they were in the comfort of their home. ); I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting about a few family members...

[nikirj]

Hey Stephanie! You sound totally lucid to me, don't worry

I think that what you're feeling is normal. I'm getting some of that, too, having been the good little right-on-schedule patient for my first two pregnancies. I'm 23 weeks now, BTW...and haven't seen anyone or anything. I didn't feel movement until 20 weeks so I don't think you're in trouble at all not feeling things regularly. Even now I can only really count on feeling movement once a day or so; I can also get movement by playing guitar with the guitar body resting on my belly (baby will kick while I play).

I've noticed that as far as birthing goes, people don't seem to have much in the way of inhibitions when it comes to opening their mouths and letting their brains flow right on out. So if you have opened yourself up to hearing the negative (said things in a way that allows dissent in any shape or form) and haven't heard anything negative, then it is quite likely that they aren't thinking anything too negative.

My mom called today and asked me point-blank about several things, and I had to lie. It sucked. We talked a lot after that, though, and the rest of the conversation was really cool. It seems she has a bit of a hero-worship thing going on with the doctor that delivered my sibling and me, but it isn't too horribly misplaced (we were homebirths, very low-intervention, and this dr. apparently went out to The Farm every summer to exchange information, talk about techniques, etc. with the midwives there - he told her all kinds of stories apparently, and he was involved with Ina May et al from very near the beginnings of her story). I told her I was considering using embroidery floss or similar instead of cord clamps, and she asked if there was the possibility that doing so would cut into the cord or get too loose and cause blood loss- anyone know about that? I would think it would be OK as long as I don't tie it until it stops pulsing, then it wouldn't even matter much, right? She did say she thought it would be nicer on baby (those clamps scratch sometimes, and she told me that the other day she had to re-clamp a cord because some retard had clamped some belly skin in with it - the strange thing is, this was several hours after the birth and NOBODY NOTICED and nobody could figure out why the baby was so fussy!).

OK, anyhow...Stephanie, you sound totally normal to me. I've had many similar thoughts - I think it stems from being so used to the medical way of doing all these things, and this being so far from the norm, and also from having little support IRL. I mean, for me, the only people (besides the ladies on this board) who know about my plans are myself and my DH. It leaves me, well, disconnected, and feeling like my experience is so far from everyone else's that maybe I shouldn't say anything at all. I'm guessing I'll feel just as alone until I run into another UCer at the corner store

[StacyL]

Stephanie,

I can relate to the feeling like you are without a net. I saw my OB twice. Once at 13 weeks to confirm pg and heard heartbeat on Doppler, then I went the lab at 17 weeks for blood draw (didn't see doc) for the AFP screen, then I saw the OB at 24 weeks when he did an u/s. And I've never been back since! I felt a little funny for about a month after the u/s like, "Oooh, am I doing the right thing?" But after that it went away and I just trusted my body. Maybe it is a little easier for me to let go since I haven't experienced having a baby at all, much less the medical/hospital way.

Now, I have to say though, that I lie to everyone except my Mom! She's the only one I can trust to tell the truth that I don't see a doc for prenatal care and that we are doing this birth alone. Everyone else gets lied to! Example: (from family members) "So, how was your last doctor visit?" Me: "Oh, fine. Everything is going great! My weight gain was X, my BP was Y, and my fundal height is Z, just a little ahead of my dates." I get the actual numbers from weighing, measuring and BPing myself. Another example: (usually from a stranger or acquaintence) "So, you're having a homebirth? Wow, do you have a midwife?" Me: "Yes, I have a midwife." These answers usually end the conversation in both cases. People don't really want details, they just want to seem interested and know if you're ok, KWIM?

I wouldn't worry about movement at all. It's so variable. Now, if something ever felt seriously, fundamentally WRONG I would seek medical attention, of course.

Good luck!

[Aura_Kitten]

first, a quote from our Wise Woman JPB ~ Birth offers us the remembrance that each of us is the One Mother. And who is She? She was Creatrix, Source, Weaver of Life. From Her breasts streamed the Milky Way. Now she is anesthetized patient, surrounded by paid paranoids who, rather than witness the Mystery whence all life comes, MANage the medical event.


about the fear in UP / UC ~ i faced that as well. that fear kept me going back to my OB... until i did enough research to feel comfortable assessing myself, and enough meditation to realize that birth intuition really is inside all of us, as long as we listen. if you're really concerned, my first (+ foremost) suggestion would be to make a list of what is really frightening you, and then figure out how to confront those fears.

going against the grain can be, especially in our culture, a terrifying experience. it can also be a very powerfully transformative + empowering one. you can either choose to let the fear rule you... or grow past it.