And We Have a Midwife!
The meeting with the midwife went very well yesterday. She seems to be a really cool lady. The kids were super excited about her visit. Then we found out she does an annual Haunted House every year, and Eden had to bust out her haunted house blue prints and bond over it. It was so cute.
Our midwife (how awesome does that sound?) is very comfortable with homebirths and hospital births. She's a certified nurse midwife, so she's able to prescribe if necessary, do labs, have hospital privileges. We did find out that, to her knowledge, the nearest hospital to us is Salem, which is probably an hour or more away. We'll have to ask around and make sure there's not one closer, just in case transport would be necessary. Hopefully it wouldn't though, since that's a rather long way. I have a feeling I would be birthing too fast to make it anyway. Missouri hospitals, or at least the ones around here, are apparently strongly anti-waterbirth, and they don't even want to "allow" women to labor out of the beds. Say what? I'm definitely not interested in a hospital birth around here. That doesn't surprise me, really, but it is disappointing for future doulaing possibilities.
She's even comfortable doing homebirths with twins, which I had to make sure of since Josh's family has several sets of twins. She said there should be no issues as long as the first baby is head down. She always brings a labor assistant, and then I'll have Josh, and hopefully maybe a doula or two. I want the kids to be involved, but I also want Josh to not have to deal with them the whole time. We might have to find someone who could be in charge of childcare here at the house.
The cost, I feel, is very reasonable. She said including prenatal exams, any labs that we want done (although she doesn't push them or find them necessary), the actual birth, postpartum, and baby well-checks to 28 weeks are all included in the cost of $3600. Now, I don't know how much my (hospital) births in Asheville cost, since I was lucky enough to have medicaid then, but I can guarantee you that it was well over 5k, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was upwards of 10k. I'm really excited, because I expected it to be a lot more! Especially since she's over an hour away from us, and she'll do all the driving. This is so different from our previous experiences. All of my prenatals, everything, will be right here at my house! How awesome is that? The only thing we'd have to leave for is if for some reason we find an ultrasound necessary (which would be an additional cost, but she knows the guy who runs the clinic so it's like $35 or something). Since we never find out the sex of the baby beforehand, I have no plans to do a routine ultrasound this time around unless there IS some legitimate reason to check things out.
She also said that there's a discount if you pay by 36 weeks, and that she's all about payment plans and bartering! She was interested in reiki, which she'd never heard of (but saw in my email sig line), and she said that she wanted to do some research on it, but we could potentially do a trade there to knock off some of the price. Since I've been trying to get my butt in gear with restarting my reiki school, that's very encouraging! And Josh had even just found my reiki class worksheets while we were cleaning.
We also have a plan! Apparently she's waiting on a shipment of lab stuff, but as soon as she gets all her necessaries, she'll give me a call and we'll schedule a well-woman visit (here at my house!). I want to go ahead and do a pap and everything before we start trying, since I'm long overdue. So we'll do that, and then when my next period starts up after that, she'll come out (to my house!) and do the IUD removal. She said that will probably change my long, crazy cycles immediately, so yay for that! And it will also probably return my fertility immediately. She was like, "So make sure you're well and truly ready", and I said, "Well, we've been discussing it for months. We're well and truly ready, right baby?" More to assure myself that he's good to go quite so fast, and Josh just grinned and nodded. So sweet! I can't wait!
Someone suggested I read up on the "boy diet" to help increase my chances of conceiving a boy. I've been doing that, and I've already went and bought some potassium supplements to start taking. I'm going to start eating boy-friendly foods, so hopefully it'll all take effect by the time we get that IUD out. Gotta start eating breakfast cereal in the morning, probably with bananas. I'm so bad with eating breakfast (maybe why I have two girls? ha), so that will be a big challenge for me. I may invest in some of those ovulation predictor things to make sure we try right around ovulation. Since I've been tracking my cycles for years with MyMonthlyCycles.com, I checked the ovulation predictor for October. It'll probably depend on my next period and whether it's as late as this one was, but we're tentatively scheduling boy attempt #1 for the full new* moon next month. WOOT! Now that it's all coming together, it's coming together fast!
I'm so happy. I just hope it all works out.
*edited because I realized that website uses the opposite symbol from my calendar.
Our midwife (how awesome does that sound?) is very comfortable with homebirths and hospital births. She's a certified nurse midwife, so she's able to prescribe if necessary, do labs, have hospital privileges. We did find out that, to her knowledge, the nearest hospital to us is Salem, which is probably an hour or more away. We'll have to ask around and make sure there's not one closer, just in case transport would be necessary. Hopefully it wouldn't though, since that's a rather long way. I have a feeling I would be birthing too fast to make it anyway. Missouri hospitals, or at least the ones around here, are apparently strongly anti-waterbirth, and they don't even want to "allow" women to labor out of the beds. Say what? I'm definitely not interested in a hospital birth around here. That doesn't surprise me, really, but it is disappointing for future doulaing possibilities.
She's even comfortable doing homebirths with twins, which I had to make sure of since Josh's family has several sets of twins. She said there should be no issues as long as the first baby is head down. She always brings a labor assistant, and then I'll have Josh, and hopefully maybe a doula or two. I want the kids to be involved, but I also want Josh to not have to deal with them the whole time. We might have to find someone who could be in charge of childcare here at the house.
The cost, I feel, is very reasonable. She said including prenatal exams, any labs that we want done (although she doesn't push them or find them necessary), the actual birth, postpartum, and baby well-checks to 28 weeks are all included in the cost of $3600. Now, I don't know how much my (hospital) births in Asheville cost, since I was lucky enough to have medicaid then, but I can guarantee you that it was well over 5k, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was upwards of 10k. I'm really excited, because I expected it to be a lot more! Especially since she's over an hour away from us, and she'll do all the driving. This is so different from our previous experiences. All of my prenatals, everything, will be right here at my house! How awesome is that? The only thing we'd have to leave for is if for some reason we find an ultrasound necessary (which would be an additional cost, but she knows the guy who runs the clinic so it's like $35 or something). Since we never find out the sex of the baby beforehand, I have no plans to do a routine ultrasound this time around unless there IS some legitimate reason to check things out.
She also said that there's a discount if you pay by 36 weeks, and that she's all about payment plans and bartering! She was interested in reiki, which she'd never heard of (but saw in my email sig line), and she said that she wanted to do some research on it, but we could potentially do a trade there to knock off some of the price. Since I've been trying to get my butt in gear with restarting my reiki school, that's very encouraging! And Josh had even just found my reiki class worksheets while we were cleaning.
We also have a plan! Apparently she's waiting on a shipment of lab stuff, but as soon as she gets all her necessaries, she'll give me a call and we'll schedule a well-woman visit (here at my house!). I want to go ahead and do a pap and everything before we start trying, since I'm long overdue. So we'll do that, and then when my next period starts up after that, she'll come out (to my house!) and do the IUD removal. She said that will probably change my long, crazy cycles immediately, so yay for that! And it will also probably return my fertility immediately. She was like, "So make sure you're well and truly ready", and I said, "Well, we've been discussing it for months. We're well and truly ready, right baby?" More to assure myself that he's good to go quite so fast, and Josh just grinned and nodded. So sweet! I can't wait!
Someone suggested I read up on the "boy diet" to help increase my chances of conceiving a boy. I've been doing that, and I've already went and bought some potassium supplements to start taking. I'm going to start eating boy-friendly foods, so hopefully it'll all take effect by the time we get that IUD out. Gotta start eating breakfast cereal in the morning, probably with bananas. I'm so bad with eating breakfast (maybe why I have two girls? ha), so that will be a big challenge for me. I may invest in some of those ovulation predictor things to make sure we try right around ovulation. Since I've been tracking my cycles for years with MyMonthlyCycles.com, I checked the ovulation predictor for October. It'll probably depend on my next period and whether it's as late as this one was, but we're tentatively scheduling boy attempt #1 for the full new* moon next month. WOOT! Now that it's all coming together, it's coming together fast!
I'm so happy. I just hope it all works out.
*edited because I realized that website uses the opposite symbol from my calendar.