Free craniosacral for infants

The amazing Carol Grey has slots open for pre-crawling babies to receive free craniosacral treatment from her students. Contact her at carol@carolgray.com for more info!

Supporting home birth

Read about the struggle for birth choices in this wonderful blog, Wild Pappoose. She says: "women are still waiting on a necessary shift in favor of their inherent right to choices." I believe this is often the case for all pregnancy choices, and most all healthcare choices. Women and families are the best and only people capable of deciding what happens to their bodies and their children. I really believe this! I have no investment in what the decisions are, so long as they are truly informed and made freely. So why are we "waiting on a necessary shift"? Lets make this shift happen by educating ourselves, making and standing by truly informed health care decisions, and speaking about the power of making these choices! Thanks for your great post, Wild Papoose.

West African Peanut Stew

I've had several requests for the recipe for the stew I made for my fundraising dinner, so here it is!

To make 1 large pot (feeds... an army?)
2T vege oil
1lb stew meat
1 small fresh tomato
1 can tomato paste
6 heaping tablespoons of creamy peanut butter
3 cloves garlic
1 habenaro pepper
1 small onion, diced
1-2 cubes bullion
salt and pepper
several potatoes and sweet potatoes, cubed (maybe 2-3 lbs? less if you're adding other veggies)
Vinegar (white, white wine, apple cider...)
Other veggies to consider adding in addition to or in place of the meat:
green cabbage
green beans
okra
carrots

In a large pot, fry the stew meat in oil.
When it is browned lower the heat to medium, and add the fresh tomato and tomato paste, and peanutbutter. Stir completely, and add 3 cups of water and a small handfull of salt.
In your handy mortar and pestle (or food processor, or dice and mix by hand) blend the garlic, onion and 1 bullion cube. Add to stew, and add whole habenaro pepper. Cover and let thicken over med-low heat.
When the meat is fully cooked add the potatoes and sweet potatoes. Add the other veggies when potatoes are 1/2 cooked. Let simmer uncovered until desired thickness.
When the potatoes are fully cooked add 3T vinegar, and bullion/salt/pepper to taste.



Serve over rice! Yum!

Fundraising Dinner a HUGE Success!!!

Wow. Just wow! I can't begin to tell you how heart warmed I was last Saturday at my African Birth Collective fundraising dinner. So many people from my community came out to support moms and babies, and midwives in Senegal!!! Together we raised a grand total of $657!!! This more than doubled my goal. In addition to the 30 some folks who came out to the dinner, many many people have donated on the African Birth Collective's website via Paypal. I don't have an exact total for the online donations, but my rough estimate is over $300 more have been donated this way!


The cash from the dinner will be used to buy 200 doses of anti-hemorrhage medications, and 100-200 doses of anitbiotic eye ointment that will prevent blindness in babies. It will buy an abundance of gloves and gauze, which are not readily available in Senegal. The remaining $200 I will bring directly to the birth center for the midwives there to use for whatever the birth center urgently needs (perhaps a new coat of paint, rebuilding, or supplies). The money donated on Paypal will go towards the $2,000 still needed to complete construction of the clinic in Kabar.

Thank you thank you thank you! I would like to give specific shout-outs to the following donors:
John and Maggie Felling
Kate Carter
Nichole Redding
Sally Felling
Gail Myers
Kelli McIntosh
Melissa Gordon-Magnus
Margaret Mallat, Brian Cook and Riley Cook
Judith Arcana
Starr Amrit-Troll
Sarah Stoll
Kriya Sadhana
Angela Beach
Courtney Piper
Pamela Echeverio
Tom Daly
Catherine Bailey
Stephanie Grant
Lena Wood
Elizabeth Schroeder
Maria McDowell
Aaron Schroeder
Zachary Schroeder
Rose Eckhart
Holly, Nick and Ethan Forrette
Tui, Ian and Charlie Wilson
Risa Cromer
Shelly and Tom Dodson
Verena and Jason Wutz
Leonie and Karim Alaeddine
Genevieve Plagens
Janet Tylinski
Tahnee Groat

And many more! Thank you for your generosity and commitment to safe birth!

African Birth Collective Fundraising Dinner

I am soon leaving the cold grey of Portland for the sunny warmth of West Africa! I am going with the African Birth Collective, to spend a month working at a birth center in the town of Kafountine alongside Senegalese midwives, American midwives, and international midwifery students. This is an amazing opportunity for my professional development, and I am really excited to see the dear friends I made in Senegal when I was there in 2006-2007.

It is also a great time for you to become involved in international midwifery. Many women in Senegal receive little to no prenatal care, which is alarming considering the profound impact of preventable and treatable conditions that are common during pregnancy in Senegal, such as anemia and malaria. Maternal mortality is estimated at 410 per 100,000 births, and infant mortality rate is 51 per 1,000 births, according to UNICEF’s 2009 statistics. Midwives are part of the solution: low tech, low interventive direct care throughout pregnancy and birth does reduce maternal and infant mortality. The 2011 State of the World’s Midwifery Report estimates 350,000 more trained midwives are needed to meet the needs of women, babies and families throughout the world. The African Birth Collective is stepping up to that challenge.

The African Birth Collective partners with maternity clinics in Senegal, West Africa, to provide needed medical supplies, vitamins and medications, educational resources to midwives and International exchange opportunities.  The African Birth Collective has purchased two ambulances for emergency transport to hospitals and a solar water pump for running water in a rural clinic in the southern Casamance region. They are currently working on pamphlets on neonatal resuscitation, suturing technique and alternative birth positions to be translated into Wolof and Mandinka, indigenous languages in the region. The biggest project they are working on right now is construction of a maternity clinic in the village of Kabar. Watch a video about the project here.

I will be volunteering at the birth center in Kafountine catching babies, and providing prenatal care and gynecologic care. We will also be helping to build and stock a new birth center in Kabar. I hope to bring with me the support of my community. None of these efforts would be possible without the generous donations from everyday people who want safe birth options for mothers and babies.  

I will be hosting a fundraising dinner on Feb 25^th at 6pm at my home. I will be making Mafé, Senegalese peanut stew (meat and vegan/GF options) with rice, salad and hibiscus juice. There will be photos from my previous trip, and from the clinics in Kafountine and Kabar, and I’ll give a short pitch for the African Birth Collective. Mostly we’ll eat and connect!  I am asking for a $10+ donation, which will go to purchasing supplies to bring to the clinic, or towards the $2,000 still needed to complete the Kabar clinic. Please feel free to bring any of the following supplies you might happen to have laying around as well J

Needed supplies include:

• Sterile and non-sterile gloves (size medium and large) and gauze (2x2 and 4x4)
• Syringes for medication injection
• Vitamin K and Erythromycin eye ointment
• Pitocin, methergine and cytotec
• Antibiotics
• Instruments: forceps, scissors, needle clamps

 If you are unable to attend the dinner, you will be sadly missed. But there are other great ways to still be involved! If you live in Portland and have supplies donations, please call me at 608-322-8214 and I can come pick them up. Monetary donations are also eagerly accepted. The money will go to buying medications to stock the clinics, and construction materials for the new clinic being constructed. Donations can be made via Paypal on the African Birth Collective’s website. The African Birth Collective is a non-profit and all donations are tax deductible. Thank you so much for your support and commitment to this important cause!

~Megan

Ryan Gosling on Homebirth

No matter what you think of the man, the actor, or the meme, these are laugh-out-loud funny! See the whole line up here.

The pain of chidbirth

Pain. Oh, pain.

It is a piece of childbirth that is on nearly everyone's mind. We take classes to prepare for it, we learn about medications that can take it away, we fear and loathe it.

I- not being someone about to give birth- am fascinated by it :) What is pain all about? Why does this near-perfect system come with inscrutable pain? Why do some women yell "Epidural" at the mere mention of birth pain, and others give birth au natural? And why in the world would anyone give birth more than once, knowing the pain of childbirth?

I have lots of thoughts about pain- where it comes from, what it's function is, how to manage it... (if you've taken my childbirth ed class, you've heard all these wacky theories!). But it was brought to my attention again by an acupuncturist friend's blog post: My 5 Favorite Things About Pain. The things she says about chronic pain really resonated with me and my experiences of supporting women through childbirth pain. I wanted to share both of our insights here.

1. Awareness: Leela talks about how living with chronic pain brings an awareness to us of all the small things in life. When getting in and out of a chair is not an automatic reflex, but a feat of endurance you begin to notice these small movements and actions. It brings us into the present, and into a responsibility for ourselves. In birth, the pain initially is a warning: get to a safe place. Use the heightened awareness that comes from early labor pains to get your immediate needs met and reduce distractions. Only when you feel safe, supported, secure- and thus your need to be aware of your surroundings is lessened- can labor progress smoothly.

2. Creativity: anyone who lives with arthritis can tell you about this one! How do you open a jar when it hurts your hands? I tell my clients labor is a free pass- you will use whatever tools are available to you (vocalizing, swearing, swatting hands away when they're touching you wrong...) to help manage the pain. These are not the most delicate tools, or those you might have chosen in another setting, but you have to get creative when pain confronts you with fewer options.

3. Hearing our own voices: pain helps us differentiate our true needs from all the input we recieve. As a midwife and doula, part of my job is to offer suggestions (position changes, pain coping techniques, etc), but a woman dealing with the pain of childbirth is enough in her own power to determine and say what is working and what isn't. Support people can make suggestions, but no one can know for certain what feels right except you.

4. Commitment to life: when we work within our own limitations (as opposed to avoiding or ignoring those limitations) we are making a true commitment to living fully. The pain of birth can bring a woman to the edge of her own limitations. Trust, support and a deep commitment to living fully can see you to that edge and back!

5. Less resistance to life: what do we learn from a time of pain? How to relax into it? How to use different modalities, like meditation or acupuncture (shout out!)? How to cope with future challenges? How many women have told me, "If I can birth naturally, I can do anything!" Then are confronted with a colicky baby at 2 am after weeks of limited sleep? And guess what? They're right! They can do anything! Drawing on all the tools they developed to deal with labor (support, deep relaxation, trust), they get through it. 

Parenting is not for the weak, and the greatest preparation may well indeed be the pain of childbirth. So maybe this near-perfect system is more perfect than I realized...