When You're Expecting Twins, Triplets, or Quads: Proven Guidelines for a Healthy Multiple Pregnancy


Barbara Luke - 1999
    Barbara Luke's practical, nutrition-based program has been proven to lower complications, resulting in much healthier babies. This revision offers more nutritional information, 50 recipes to maximize birth weight, and new guidelines on nutritional needs and vegetarian options. It also includes updated information that reflects the most current obstetric and pediatric practices, such as expanded safety information on exercise and reducing your risk for complications.

The Blue Cotton Gown: A Midwife's Memoir


Patricia Harman - 2008
    Over the course of the next five seasons Patsy will see Heather through the loss of both babies and their father. She will also care for her longtime patient Nila, pregnant for the eighth time and trying to make a new life without her abusive husband. And Patsy will try to find some comfort to offer Holly, whose teenage daughter struggles with bulimia. She will help Rebba learn to find pleasure in her body and help Kaz transition into a new body. She will do noisy battle with the IRS in the very few moments she has to spare, and wage her own private battle with uterine cancer.Patricia Harman, a nurse-midwife, manages a women's health clinic with her husband, Tom, an ob-gyn, in West Virginia--a practice where patients open their hearts, where they find care and sometimes refuge. Patsy's memoir juxtaposes the tales of these women with her own story of keeping a small medical practice solvent and coping with personal challenges. Her patients range from Appalachian mothers who haven't had the opportunity to attend secondary school to Ph.D.'s on cell phones. They come to Patsy's small, windowless exam room and sit covered only by blue cotton gowns, and their infinitely varied stories are in equal parts heartbreaking and uplifting. The nurse-midwife tells of their lives over the course of a year and a quarter, a time when her outwardly successful practice is in deep financial trouble, when she is coping with malpractice threats, confronting her own serious medical problems, and fearing that her thirty-year marriage may be on the verge of collapse. In the words of Jacqueline Mitchard, this memoir, "utterly true and lyrical as any novel . . . should be a little classic."

The Best Birth: Your Guide to the Safest, Healthiest, Most Satisfying Labor and Delivery


Sarah McMoyler - 2008
    Move over Lamaze and Bradley! Already taking the west coast by storm, the McMoyler Method offers a modern, medically savvy approach to labor and delivery that addresses the hopes and fears of todays about helping moms cope, involving partners every step of the way, and working with doctors and nurses for the best birth-no matter how it happens.

Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers


Barbara Ehrenreich - 1972
    This pamphlet explores two important phases in the male takeover of health care: the suppression of witches in medieval Europe and the rise of the male medical profession in the United States. The authors conclude that despite efforts to exclude them, the resurgence of women as healers should be a long-range goal of the women’s movement.

Changing Diapers: The Hip Mom's Guide to Modern Cloth Diapering


Kelly Wels - 2011
    Wels is a well-known powerhouse advocate and has become the main voice in the industry. The marketplace for this book is constant, as the US birthrate hovers over 4 million babies born per year, and the word is getting out about the benefits of using modern cloth versus disposables. Wels is a continuous presence on her popular blogs and is often featured by other bloggers in the industry. When Wels talks, her audience listens and responds, and her audience grows. She even received a Congressional Award for her work from Maine Senator Olympia Snow. These are not your mother's cloth diapers!

The Natural Child: Parenting from the Heart


Jan Hunt - 2001
    In this insightful guide, parenting specialist Jan Hunt links together attachment parenting principles with child advocacy and homeschooling philosophies, offering a consistent approach to raising a loving, trusting, and confident child. The Natural Child dispels the myths of "tough love," building baby's self-reliance by ignoring its cries, and the necessity of spanking to enforce discipline. Instead, the book explains the value of extended breast-feeding, family co-sleeping, and minimal child-parent separation.Homeschooling, like attachment parenting, nurtures feelings of self-worth, confidence, and trust. The author draws on respected leaders of the homeschool movement such as John Taylor Gatto and John Holt, guiding the reader through homeschool approaches that support attachment parenting principles.Being an ally to children is spontaneous for caring adults, but intervening on behalf of a child can be awkward and surrounded by social taboo. The Natural Child shows how to stand up for a child's rights effectively and sensitively in many difficult situations.The role of caring adults, points out Hunt, is not to give children "lessons in life"–but to employ a variation of The Golden Rule, and treat children as we would like to have been treated in childhhood.Jan Hunt is the Director of The Natural Child Project, Coordinator of the Canadian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in British Columbia, and on the Board of Directors for Attachment Parenting International. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

Itsy Bitsy Yoga: Poses to Help Your Baby Sleep Longer, Digest Better, and Grow Stronger


Helen Garabedian - 2004
    Start today.If you've been searching for an excellent way to bond with your baby and improve his or her health, Itsy Bitsy Yoga is the solution you've been looking for. Helen Garabedian, a certified instructor in yoga and infant massage, has developed over seventy yoga postures and thirty-five series for moms and dads to enjoy with their growing babies. You don't need any previous yoga experience. Learn the many benefits of yoga, posture by posture, in this accessible guide, with seventy beautiful black-and-white photos, at-a-glance reference charts, and memorable Itsy Bitsy Yoga rhymes. Yoga can help babies up to two years of age: -sleep better -get relief from gas pains and colic -digest food easier -stay healthier with a strong immune system -receive neuromuscularm stimulation -learn to relax The book also features seven Magic Poses that can soothe fussy, upset babies within minutes! So start enjoying more time with your happy yoga baby right now.

The Calm Birth Method: The Practical Guide for Modern Mamas to Create a Calm, Positive Hypnobirth


Suzy Ashworth - 2017
    Offering a direct and no-nonsense approach to birth preparation, this book is designed to give mothers, fathers, birth partners and everyone involved, confidence in the birth process. Hypnobirthing expert Suzy Ashworth explores the physiology and psychology of the mind and body during pregnancy and birth, and shares tools and techniques to help women work with the physiology of the birthing body rather than against it. This book explores: Why women are fearful of giving birth and how to eliminate these fears during pregnancy Practical tools and techniques promoting deep relaxation and mindfulness  How to unify birth partners and care providers, to ensure the birthing environment is stress-free and has the most conducive set up for a calm and relaxing birth Breathing techniques and visualizations to help with the sensations of birth Birth is a natural and normal event and, while it can be unpredictable, this book will show how women can make it a gentle and enjoyable experience, and a positively memorable first step into motherhood.

And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready


Meaghan O'Connell - 2018
    O'Connell addresses the pervasive imposter syndrome that comes with unplanned pregnancy, the second adolescence of a changing postpartum body, the problem of sex post-baby, the weird push to make "mom friends," and the fascinating strangeness of stepping into a new, not-yet-comfortable identity. O'Connell brings us into the delivery room rendering childbirth in all its feverish gore and glory, and shattering the fantasies of a "magical" or "natural" experience that warp our expectations and erode maternal self-esteem.And Now We Have Everything is an unflinchingly frank, funny, and intimate motherhood story for our times, about needing to have a baby in order to stop being one yourself.

The Birth Of A Mother: How The Motherhood Experience Changes You Forever


Daniel N. Stern - 1998
    Having a baby will redirect your preferences and pleasures and, most likely, will realign some of your values.As you undergo this unique psychological transformation, you will be guided by new hopes, fears, and priorities. In a most startling way, having a child will influence all of your closest relationships and redefine your role in your family's history. The charting of this remarkable, new realm is the subject of this compelling book.Renowned psychiatrist Daniel N. Stern has joined forces with pediatrician and child psychiatrist Nadia Bruschweiler-Stern and journalist Alison Freeland to paint a wonderfully evocative picture of the psychology of motherhood. At the heart of The Birth of a Mother is an arresting premise: Just as a baby develops physically in utero and after birth, so a mother is born psychologically in the many months that precede and follow the birth of her baby.The recognition of this inner transformation emerges from hundreds of interviews with new mothers and decades of clinical experience. Filled with revealing case studies and personal comments from women who have shared this experience, this book will serve as an invaluable sourcebook for new mothers, validating the often confusing emotions that accompany the development of this new identity. In addition to providing insight into the unique state of motherhood, the authors touch on related topics such as going back to work, fatherhood, adoption, and premature birth.During pregnancy, mothers-to-be talk about morning sickness and their changing bodies, and new mothers talk about their exhaustion, the benefits of nursing or bottle-feeding, and the dilemma of whether or when they should return to work. And yet, they can be strangely mute about the dramatic and often overwhelming changes going on in their inner lives. Finally, with The Birth of a Mother, these powerful feelings are eloquently put into words.

Fresh Milk: The Secret Life of Breasts


Fiona Giles - 2003
    In Fresh Milk, through a provocative collection of stories, memories, and personal accounts, Giles uncovers the myths and truths of the lactating breast. From the young mother grappling with the bewildering trappings of maternity wear to the woman who finds herself surprisingly aroused by new sensations, and the modern dad who learns the ins and outs of breastfeeding, the portraits in Giles's eye-opening book offer a funny, wise, and comforting resource for women -- and even their friends and partners who have had, or expect, intimate experiences with the pleasures and pain of lactation. By turns poignant and informative, sexy and witty, empathic and empowering, Fresh Milk delivers everything we wanted to know about breastfeeding that our mothers never told us.