Doing It At Home - The Home Birth Podcast

In this episode we’re talking about ways in which you can prepare the physical space (i.e. your home) for your home birth. For our home birth, Matthew and I were very intentional in wanting to create a peaceful, comfortable, relaxing space to welcome Maya into the world. We were also gifted with incredibly fabulous things like a home cleaning and a “homebirth space setting” ceremony, which really...

In today's episode we're talking to Anne Margolis - Certified and Licensed Home Birth Midwife, Licensed OB/GYN nurse practitioner, practicing prenatal yogi, home birth expert and creator of HomeSweetHomeBirth.com. Anne believes in a healthy woman’s innate ability to give birth normally, naturally and with pleasure despite the challenges. She is devoted to protecting undisturbed physiological labor...

In this episode we're giving you some powerful affirmations to help you prepare for your pregnancy and home birth. We have 2 affirmations for moms and 2 for dads. We’ve talked a lot about affirmations on the show at different points in time - a little bit in our story and then in the stories of other moms, so we thought we’d create some of our own for you beautiful listeners! I thought it would be...

In today's episode we're talking with Marissa Olivera, a mom of 2 from Utica, NY, with both a hospital birth story and home birth story. Marissa experienced intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR) with her first pregnancy. That, along with some early signs of labor made for a hospital birth that included a lot of intervention and fear. The way she sees it, baby Maxwell just wasn’t ready yet. She pl...

In today's episode we're giving you nine questions to ask yourself to decide whether home birth might be an option for you and your family. This podcast is all about providing resources, stories and empowering around the home birth conversation. We personally chose homebirth to welcome our daughter into the world, but we realize that home birth is not the best option for some families. There are s...

In today's episode we talk to mom Lindsay Bonnar about her home birth story. Lindsay planned a home birth for her first baby, but circumstances required a transfer to a birth center. Now pregnant with her second, Lindsay and her husband are planning a home birth again for the second round.  ---- This episode is an interview and home birth story of Lindsay Bonnar. Lindsay is another beautiful face...

In today’s episode I’m sharing my postpartum story. I get into the nitty gritty details of the very first postpartum stages after my home birth. I also talk about what I experienced with postnatal visits with my midwives, healing a perineal tear, breastfeeding, diastasis recti (aka ab separation), postpartum sex and more! --  Hey all, Sarah here. In this episode I’m solo and talking all about my h...

Today we're talking with Maria Mengel about her 2 birth stories. Maria's first daughter was born at a birthing center with a midwife, and her second was an unassisted home birth (also known as "freebirth"). In this episode Maria gets honest about her two birth experiences and shares some of the things she learned during the process. Maria reached out to us after listening to the show and felt insp...

In today's episode we talk about 6 comments and questions that you absolutely don't want to say to a homebirth mom or family! We heard these things as we prepared for our home birth and can say from experience that they are not helpful at all. Some things are better left unsaid, and that applies to commentary on someone’s decision to have a home birth. In this episode we share 6 big statement/topi...

Continuing our work to bring real and honest stories of home birth to you, we sat down with Debbie Schneider, CPM extraordinaire. Debbie is actually our midwife. She delivered Maya, and has become a very important part of our lives. We’ve known we wanted to interview Debbie since we started the podcast. She’s an amazing and wise source of information and support of all things home birth. Her story...

In this episode we're talking with mom of 4 Jenny DiPietro, who has had multiple home births, a homebirth turned hospital transfer, a water birth at home, and who performs placenta encapsulation for families. We get into a lot in this one!  Oh yeah, and we’re also entering a new phase of the podcast! In addition to our episodes that feature Matthew and me discussing some topic related to home birt...

In today’s episode we address the question, “Is home birth messy?” It's a great question that I know crossed my mind once or twice during pregnancy, because let's be honest, most images we have about birth is that it's a bloody, sticky, gross mess! But here’s the truth on mess during a homebirth: yes there are parts of it that can be messy (as I’m sure you can imagine fluids can go everywhere), bu...

Today’s episode was inspired by a listener email. Leonie, listening all the way in Australia, reached out to share her birth story. She had planned for a minimal intervention birth in a midwife led public hospital program (way to go Australis!) but things didn’t go exactly as anticipated. Her email was amazing - raw, honest and transparent - and at the end she had a few questions for me about home...

A lot goes into creating a badass and powerful team. You want a team that works together and has synergy. You want individual members who can hold their own yet contribute to the totality of the group. You want to be able to trust everyone’s competence and commitment to the overall goal. These teams win championships, seal the deals, and set the example for all other teams. Now when it comes to ch...

In this episode, I invite you into a precious and intimate moment. You see, during the early parts of birthing time (labor), we placed a recorder in the room - to capture the experience and be able to listen back to it later on. While I was moving through my birthing waves (contractions) in the bathtub, Matthew tended to me by bringing me water and snacks along with affirming me and contacting our...

I had always heard pregnancy can be a vulnerable time. You’re dealing with a lot of changes - physically and emotionally. Not to mention, the more pregnant you become, the more obvious your circumstance is to anyone who lays eyes on you. And for some reason, actually lots of reasons - there’s something about a big, beautiful belly that attracts a lot of attention. There comes a time when you can’t...

This is it, folks! The episode you’ve all been waiting for….our birth story! Matthew and I sit down (in bed, as always) with our first guest - less than a week old baby Maya. She lies quietly (for the most part, you might hear some coos and little grunts in the background at times) on Matthew’s chest while we recount the story of our home birth, while it’s still fresh in our minds. We take you fro...

“We are not a culture that waits for anything, nor are we believers in normal birth; waiting for a baby can feel like insanity.” This is a powerful quote from an article that had a profound impact on Matthew and me. The article is about the “in between” stage of the last days of pregnancy before moving into birth, a period that the author of the article calls zwischen (pulling from the German word...

We preface this episode with a little disclaimer and I feel it necessary to include it here as well - WE ARE NOT DOCTORS OR MEDICAL EXPERTS AND WE ARE NOT GIVING MEDICAL ADVICE. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get into some fun stuff. Today we’re talking about our top 10 list for prepping for our home birth. We found that these were the things that helped us throughout pregnancy - from the m...

Let’s talk about sex, BABY! Not just the kind that makes the babies, but the kind you continue doing while the bun is in the oven. There’s plenty of topics around pregnancy that receive just the surface level of attention paid to them in the blogs, books, and classes. Sex was the big thing for me that I experienced ambiguity around. Everything I saw depicted one of two extremes - you either want i...

When you’re expecting, it’s very common to hear the question, “Where are you delivering?” If not that specifically, people generally ask about your doctor or your doctor visits. Whether it’s close friends and family or total strangers, most will insert some sort of advice or personal experience to whatever birth plan it is you’ve chosen. It can be even more interesting when you share that your bir...

Remember the horrible films you’d watch in sex ed classes featuring a scary, screaming, bloody mess of a woman giving birth in total agony (probably because she had sex before marriage and was birthing the baby out of wedlock - I went to Catholic school so I’m convinced those videos were purely to warn off pre-marital sex rather than educate on the miracle of childbirth)? Well until becoming pregn...

Just about every pregnancy/birth resource out there focuses on the mother or the baby, which makes sense to an extent because they are the main actors on stage. But there’s typically another partner involved who is feeling all sorts of things, but isn’t always asked or encouraged to share and express the roller coaster of thoughts, fears, hopes, beliefs that they’re experiencing. I wanted to chang...

When we began our pregnancy adventure, home birth was pretty far from our mind. We kicked things off the traditional way: going to see an OBGYN at a great hospital that would usher our baby into the world the way that 98% of families in the US do it. But three months later we parted ways with our OBGYN, partnered up with a midwife group working out of their home, and began our home birth journey....

“We’re doing it at home!” That’s the response my husband and I gave when people asked us about our birth plans. 3 months into our pregnancy we decided to ditch the traditional hospital birth with an OBGYN, for a birth that aligned more with the experience we wanted to create for ourselves and our little one. Home birth suited us well, and we dove in. But not without fears, judgements, conversation...