Pregnancy, Readying, nourishing.
Midwifery care optimizes physical, emotional, intellectual, and soul wellbeing. Each appt is an hour long and includes a full evaluation of a woman and her growing baby: belly measurements, baby’s position and heart rate, blood pressure and pulse, labwork if indicated, screenings if desired, consultations if needed.
With the body’s wisdom and inclination to heal itself held in highest regard, discomforts and deviations from wellness are harmonized with food, supplements, herbs, homeopathics, body work, and somatic inquiry about energetic and emotional reveals.
Prenatal care appointments at the ROOT or in your home:
every 4 weeks until 28 weeks
every 2-3 weeks from 28- 36 weeks
weekly from 37 weeks until Birth
But mostly, prenatal care is a tapestry of: conversation, story telling, reading, writing, delving. Exploring: discomforts, fears, ancestral patterns, deepest desires, stillness. Accessing source. Speaking truth. Growing faith. Stripping away distractions. Excavating. Removing obstacles. Making space. Softening. Focusing priorities. Nourishing body and soul deeply. Honoring the sanctity, simplicity and potency of pregnancy. Sating intellectual curiosities with information without overriding the quiet whispers within. Readying for Birth. Cultivating intimacy, trust, and collaborative creation between midwife, woman and family.
All this with the intention of bringing a woman closer to herself, to what is most true for her, to her own innate knowings about how to grow, birth, and mother a baby.
Labor + Birth, Questing.
And then one day, labor begins, and the mystery begins to reveal.
Prenatal care prepares women and families to engage the labor journey with curiosity and confidence. They revel in the intimacy of being together, alone, at home, indulging those comforts and the excitements of meeting their baby. There is steady support, consultation and presence from the midwife. As labor becomes active most women are ready for their midwife, many even asking for her. The midwife’s presence supports her to confidently continue on her quest. The midwife does the work of monitoring the labor and woman and baby. She is witness. She holds and tends to the space. Sometimes there is a lot of guidance. Sometimes there is only quiet, devotional presence and simple reassurance that all is well and healthy. Birth looks all the ways, sometimes quiet and still, other times roaring, fast and wild. It is my deepest intention for it to be full of breath, steadiness, trust, held by midwifery in a deep container of furious love. The midwife remains for several hours after birth to clean, monitor, measure, nourish, and celebrate mother, baby and family.
Postpartum, Integration, healing.
Birth produces two people.
The first: a flailing soul struggling to take in a new world, a new way of being as it draws breath against the unknown.
The second: a baby.
Bunmi Laditan
The 4th trimester, 12 weeks postpartum is tender, sacred, time for a family that includes caring for two new beings, a baby and a mother. Midwifery care nourishes deeply, impressing rest, nourishment, connection, quiet, and temporality. Reminding women to go slow, restore, heal, to prompt her story telling and integration of birth into her sense of self and the world.
This is not a time to get right back to it.
What is postpartum care?
3 appointments week 1
follow-up appointments week 2, 4 and 6-8 in your home, to tend to mother and baby
For women: restoring her body, nourishing her soul, learning to caretake self and baby, support lactation and nursing, balancing hormones, normalizing simultaneous profound love and overwhelm, closing back down physically and psychically, honoring this time, and exploring changes in identity, relationships, body, sexuality, work, life, self.
Baby: weight, color, temperament, nursing, sleep, soothing, on going well baby care.
Extended pp care appointments are available for women or for entire families.
I sat with a 3d pp woman today. She talked about how exquisitely hard it was, the pieces of herself she was asked to confront, the profound healing and fierce power she accessed, and how she knows Birth changed her. It struck me just how vulnerable it is to be witnessed in this way and how much it matters that we tell each other, you are exquisite, thank you for inviting me, trusting me, telling me, and passing your babies ever so briefly through my hands.- Kelly Murphy, Midwife
Well Woman, Whole Woman.
Well Family, Whole Family.
One appointment or many, this is designed for all.
Honoring the traditional scope of the community midwife, these are consultations for any level of care for families including but not limited to: Fertility, Extended Postpartum Care, Well Baby Care for the first year, Mothering, Nutrition, Self Care, Spirit Care, Miscarriage, Abortion, Harmonizing Menstrual Cycles, Hormones, Creativity, Untangling the layers that manifest as Depression and Anxiety, Self Care through Food, Supplement Suggestions, Optimizing or Treating with Herbs or Homepathics, Family Planning, Birth Control, and any other places where she wants to delve in body, heart, voice, spirit, soul, and wellness.
Intrauterine Insemination (IUI)
IUI is a simple fertility procedure, using a speculum and small catheter to place sperm only in the uterus. Semen (from a known donor/partner) needs to be washed before it is placed in the uterus. This takes 30-60m. Generally, if purchasing from a spermbank, the samples are IUI ready. The IUI takes just a few minutes.
To request IUI services, include your tentative upcoming fertile window, how you track and time, if you desire 1 or 2 IUIs, and if you will be using fresh or frozen sample.
If you need support learning: to track cycles, optimize fertility, determining the most fertile days for timed IUI or intercourse, navigating fresh and frozen donor options, IUI and vaginal inseminations, known versus anonymous donors, shipping semen from known donors in other cities, or you are looking for support in the emotional and spirit exploration of fertility/conception, consider scheduling a Well Woman Whole Woman consultation.
*I look at labs and work with women to optimize fertility. However, the place I believe we work most importantly is in delving into some of the emotional/soul story layered in the fertility/conception journey, with what the call to Mother is asking and revealing for you. This is the part of you that the labs don't inform.
