Met with doula

Our doula meeting yesterday went great. As Mr. I told her, she would have had to say something really weird for us to not want to hire her, but of course it is important to feel comfortable with someone who's going to be with us at such an important time as the birth of our child. Anyway, she was perfectly likeable, friendly, nice, cheerful and encouraging. She is young, probably a little younger than me or no older, but she is a licensed massage therapist and certified doula and also happens to be a Reiki master.

She said that she has attended (I'm not sure if that's the right word) nine births. One of the women knew she wanted an epidural beforehand and had one, but out of the eight who wanted to go natural, all eight of them did. I was impressed by that! She said one of those eight did have pitocin to speed labor along a bit, but did not wind up with an epidural, which I found very encouraging. I always assume that if you get pitocin you always get the epi, even though my mom actually had pitocin and no pain meds when she had me.

We talked about how and when we would use her services... basically we could call her at any point during labor - as soon as we felt like we could use a third person there. We told her we would like to labor at home as long as we could and probably go to the hospital once I felt like moving around was going to get a little difficult. She said that she will be as hands-on or -off as we want her to be, and do some massage and give us suggestions about changing positions, trying a bath, walking around, and so on.

I was really excited when she described how great our chosen hospital is for natural birth! She said that they only do intermittent fetal monitoring, they will let you walk around and move as long as you like, they won't rush you into pitocin but will allow you to try other things first to speed up labor, they let you eat and bring your own snacks (she even said they let you bring in alcohol to celebrate afterward!), they have great jacuzzi tubs, and the staff is very supportive of natural birth and breastfeeding. That is SO awesome to hear. I didn't know how much we were going to have to fend off nurses pushing us to be strapped into a bed sucking ice chips, but it sounds like our hospital is not that way at all. Yay!

She said she will send me a list of questions to ask my OB to see how she feels about natural birth, and also some info on the local La Leche League meetings since I expressed an interest in that. She told us to think about it and talk about whether we would like to use her services, but we both fully agree that we do. If we give her $100 now and $125 each time I get another good job between now and January, it won't feel like much of hit at all.

When she left I was so excited I felt like, okay I'm ready to have this baby now! But no, little man needs to keep cooking a little longer....