Last night our customized birth kit FINALLY arrived after much anxiety over UPS delivery and someone being around to sign for it. I went through the box a little bit this morning. Looks like everything is in order, including the "Born at Home" birth certificate and cotton onesie that I ordered. Now we just have to purchase the rest of the stuff on the list that our midwife gave us. It just a lot of odds and ends, like towels, washcloths, olive oil, etc...
My mind has been wandering all over the place. I bought "Spiritual Midwifery" the other day and now I am dreaming about what I have been reading. All these "groovy", "far out" birth stories from the 1960s and 1970s from the community known as "The Farm" in Summertown, Tennessee. It's cool to read about these hippy women and their husbands getting "high" off the rushes (contractions). I want my birth to be a transcendental experience too! I want to get high, tune out and meet God during this holy experience. I think so much of the sacrament of birth has been lost in the techno-medical model of maternity care; it's really a shame. When I tell some people about how I want my birth to be a spiritual, holistic and emotional experience, they kind of just look at me like I have 3 heads. Some people get it though. I wonder why it's so hard for people to understand that hospitals are businesses therefore they do not always have the patient's best interest in mind, i.e. mother and baby. The world is run by economics. People want to get paid. People will not get paid if more and more women stay home to have their babies. Case closed. But people are ignorant; their minds are not capable of opening up to different possibilities of realities. Once your mind is opened, it will just keep opening and receiving truths that may sometimes be hard to fathom. I feel blessed that the knowledge of traditional, non-medicated birth as an option was passed to me. It's not what the mainstream media portrays so I was unaware of my choices in childbirth. The expectation is that you go into labor, you go to the hospital to have your baby. So of course now I am fighting tooth and nail with my insurance company to get them to cover my homebirth midwife at the in-network rate. WHY? Because they do not have any midwives who perform homebirths in-network so effectively I have no choice but to go out-of-network if I want a homebirth. Anyway, enough about that. I have already contacted my employer's benefits department. I hope something will come of that.
In the meantime, I am already plotting and planning my journey to becoming a yummy mummy. I want to do a 5k in February so I plan on starting the Couch to 5k running program 2 weeks postpartum. I plan on doing gentle walking as soon as I feel up to it after the delivery, maybe after a few days. I also have the Winsor Pilates DVDs and I remember when I was doing them consistently, I was getting great results. Six weeks PP, I want to resume weight training and resistance workouts. yeah...I am focused. I think the running/walking combined with the weight training well help get things back together. Hopefully... I don't have any new stretch marks from the pregnancy. I do have some old ones from like junior highschool when I was growing "out" a little bit too fast...LOL!
1 comment:
Oh, goodness! I remember when my birth kit arrived. I was so excited!!
It was so interesting and sad. My insurance company willingly paid $12K for me to have my first son in the hospital but refused to cover my homebirth. After arguing and haggling, they agreed to cover 1/3rd of the cost and the rest I had to come up with out of pocket, even though the cost of the homebirth was only $6K. Unbelievable.
Anyway, I loved Spiritual Midwifery and I know firsthand that it's possible to have a wonderful, holy, heavenly birth. I've got the pictures to prove it! ;) I do find myself shying away from telling folks that I had a homebirth and how lovely it was because I don't want the strange looks. But homebirth is something I wish more women knew about and did because it's just so empowering and so life-changing.
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