Old posts

I am moving my personal blog to a different server, so I wanted to re-post here the entries that pertain to midwifery. Enjoy!

2008

Now that the Trust Birth Conference is over and I have gotten back into the swing of day to day life, I need to get things back on track. Only about 3.5 months left of my time as an apprentice; plans to graduate midwifery school by the end of this year; taking my NARM exam August 20; figuring out where I fit in my community as a newly-winged midwife. As a testament that I am interested in more than just midwifery, I am planning on enrolling in my local community college in the fall to begin a Russian language class. I am almost as excited about this as I am about the prospect of passing the NARM. In preparation, I bought a bunch of these flash cards today. I had a set of them when I lived in Russia as a high school exchange student, and they were fabulous. I did at one time speak quite a bit of Russian, almost to the point of fluency. I am hoping these classes and flash cards help to dig out of my memory the language that must be in the depths of my brain somewhere, and offer me a chance to learn proper Russian grammar.

I hope to use this blog to expand upon my thoughts on various midwifery subjects that I am studying for school assignments. Knowing that I want to keep this blog alive and well will help to motivate me to keep working on my assignments to meet my final goal: GRADUATION. Sounds simple enough, but I have been working at this (off and on) since 2001.

2008.

My excuse

I think so often about this blog, and sometimes, even about things I would love to post about. But, it is the same way with friends I haven't talked to in months: I think about them and want to call, but in that moment, I'm not free to gab away on the phone, so I put off calling until later, and then forget. So it is here with my blog.

I really do see a time when I will be able to be more devoted to keeping up with things here. I'm not sure when that will be, but definitely not for a few more weeks.

And, here is my big news that prompted me to come and post today.....

I finished my NARM PEP application tonight!!! Whew! All I have to do is get to the notary in the next day or two, and go get a passport photo of myself to send in along with it.

The sense of relief is enormous! Though, I know the next thing I will be worrying about once I get confirmation from NARM that my application was accepted will be the skills and written exams. But, for today, this week...all is well. :)

I'll be taking my exam August 20. It seems like eons away right now, but I know that it will be here in no time at all. I mean, we are just days away from March! That's shocking enough to me.

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In the world of birth, we have been busy with prenatals, but our last birth was in early January. We have 6 mamas who could have their babies anytime now, though 5 of them could wait a few more weeks. From this point on through the summer, we have plenty of births to keep very busy.

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I leave next week to The Trust Birth Conference. I can't really even say what I am most excited about. I sort of feel like even if all of the sessions were cancelled, it would still be wonderful: just getting to hang around with everyone attending and spend hours and hours chatting away about pregnancy and birth. But, the sessions are going to be pretty awesome, too, of course. I still feel giddy about it all.

Re-evaluating

I have been spending the last few days really considering what I want this blog to become.

I have such a hard-to-beat inclination to talk about what other midwives do/don't do in a critical way, mainly due to my own struggle to come to grips with the reality of maternity care, midwives included.

But, I don't want this blog to be about my judgement (that is what it is, essentially) of others. I want this blog to be about my own journey as a midwife and my own ideas. More "I" statements than "they" statements. LOL!

Often I feel compelled to post here about various topics because of an encounter with someone or something that I am in disagreement with. So, I will have to carefully check my tendencies to rant on and on about such things because I have been feeling like there is enough out there on the net and in books that bashes what others are doing. I want my blog to approach birth and midwifery from a positive light, spoken more from my heart and mind.