Birth is a normal, healthy and natural part of life. How your birth unfolds will profoundly affect your life.
As a Lamaze Certified Childbirth Educator (LCCE), I offer evidence-based information, breathing exercises, guided relaxation, and hands-on activities to help expectant families give birth with confidence to experience a satisfying birth.
I teach private in-home classes. Please visit my contact page to inquire about booking a private class in your home.
Classes cover:
- Anatomy of pregnancy and birth
- Normal labor, birth, and the early postpartum period (stages of labor)
- Body positions and movements to facilitate the normal progress of labor and birth
- Breathing, massage and relaxation techniques to ease the pain of labor
- Labor support tips for the birth partner
- Skills to communicate effectively with your health care team and caregivers
- Guidance in making informed decisions about unexpected circumstances
- Benefits and risks of interventions: induction, labor augmentation and epidurals
- How to avoid cesarean birth and what to do should it become necessary
- Birth plans/preferences
- Newborn procedures and baby plan
- Importance of mother & newborn skin-to-skin bonding & peak hormone period
- Breastfeeding initiation
- Postpartum health for mom, including baby blues & postpartum depression
- Lots of time to ask questions
You have the right and responsibility to get complete and accurate information about birth and to choose what’s best for you and your baby based on that information. Taking my childbirth education class will help prepare you for your journey into parenthood, increasing your confidence and strengthening your self-image. Your baby’s birth is a life-changing event, and it is your experience — not the doctor’s, not the midwive’s, not the nurses’ — to remember and cherish.
The potential for positive impact is great, but it takes planning, advance preparation, and safe, respectful nurturing. I’d urge women to take their upcoming childbirth very seriously. It matters too much to turn the experience of a lifetime over to someone else.”
Penny Simkin, childbirth educator
Women’s satisfaction with their births has little to do with the length, difficulty, or painfulness of their labors and more to do with their personal expectations, their involvement in decision making, and how they were treated by their caregivers.”