To me, homebirth is the best thing that has happened to womankind and I thank G-d as often as I can for my wonderful birth experiences. I live in Brooklyn as I imagine you do or did. When I became pregnant I was told that ‘everyone’ in my community had their babies with Klinger/Dori/Garelik. When I came to realize that I was leaning to having a more natural birth, I was recommended to go to the Park Slope Midwives. Having read your birth story, I am glad I didn’t. I ended up having my babies at home with Joan Bryson.

However, the one who convinced me to have a homebirth was actually an older sister of mine, who had a traumatic birth in a Chicago hospital. It wasn’t even as bad as yours to convince her to get the he** out of the hospital and get everyone who she cared about to rethink their birth choices.

I will certainly be sharing your birth story with anyone I know, and I must thank you for taking the time to tell your story so honestly and straight-forward, although it must be terribly hard. I imagine that you cannot be the only woman who had such an experience, but everyone else must be trying to cover up their grief, or convince themselves that it was not bad.

With blessings of comfort and health,
Shaina

She is only 2 months old, and she looks like she is 6 months. My step-mother in-law watched her for 6 hours one day and she left her to cry herself to sleep, because she said that she doesn’t need to be held all the time. She is only two months old, she was crying for a reason. With children most people relate size to age, I learned that I can not trust her anymore with my daughter and that I have to remind people of her age. If I neglect to do so they treat her as though she was older. And I agree the diet thing is completely wrong. If I do not feed my daughter more than other children, her body takes in so much of what I give her, she struggles with constipation. If the child looks healthy for his size then there should be no problem. It is really hard to even say a baby is over weight. Over weight for a baby is where they can not hold up their own weight because of being so large. Which if you struggle to hold him down for a hair cut he can definitely hold himself up. The only thing that I can suggest is to let him eat often to keep up his metabolism, and make sure he doesn’t eat full meals each time he eats. It should be snack time size. He will eat more while the eating habits promote muscle development. Good Luck, on everything. I am learning to figure out how to manage how people react to my daughter, but I just wonder why everyone still forgets how old their own granddaughter/niece/cousin is and treat her differently because of her size. I can see complete strangers doing that, but family.

I’m a reporter with The Daily Beast, and I’m wondering if I can ask your help with something: I’m working on an article about C-sections, and I’m hoping to illustrate it with one of the images from Cesarean-Art.com. In trying to track down the (anonymous) artist, I came across your interview with her (http://grabapple.net/entry/259), back in 2006. I know this is a long-shot, but would you happen to have any contact information for her? We’d need to get her permission before running anything.

Thanks very much.

All best,
Danielle Friedman

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Danielle Friedman
THE DAILY BEAST
http://www.TheDailyBeast.com
cell: 678-524-2279

Best of luck in setting “g”goals. Sometimes I think it’s the small successes that mean the most to me in the long run. Those “G”goals are nice, but the little “g”s make the world go round.

Good luck.