Attachment Parenting in Arizona
My name is Jessica, I'm wife to an amazing man and mother to a bright and beautiful baby girl. My journey starts in a small one bedroom apartment in Glendale. Jeremy and I had only been married five months when we found out that we were pregnant. We were in no way prepared for a baby, mentally or finacially. We were broke, and clueless. We started reading everything we could about babies, parenting and childbirth. One of my aunts suggested we stock up on books by the Sears family. After reading the birth book by the Sears I was certain I wanted to have a home waterbirth and immediately set out to find myself a homebirth midwife. After two months and $600.00 later we reluctantly decided that we could not afford to keep paying the midwife $300.00 per month to reach our goal of $2600.00. My dreams of a home waterbirth were long gone and I was devastated. I felt like I was no longer in control of my birth. We decided to birth with a midwife at the Bethany Women's Birth Center. Two months later, we were told that the Birth Center was closing due to lack of funds. It seemed as if there was no way to get around a hospital birth. I started looking into Unassisted Childbirth and was amazed and intrigued. I introduced the idea to Jeremy, but he was very reluctant and scared. We decided to birth at Phoenix Baptist, they were more natural birth friendly and were already recieving women that were scheduled to birth at the Birth Center. We decided to hire a doula and soon contacted Sally Stevens. After realizing we could not afford it, my Mom hired Sally for us. At around 2:00am on August 27th, 2007 I started having contractions. I assumed they were Braxton Hicks and ignored them. Around 3:00am I was very uncomfortable and called Sally. She told me to get into the bath and relax and to call her if they got worse. I got into the bath and tried to relax, I was starting to fall asleep so I got out and laid down in bed. My contractions immediately got worse, so I decided to try and sleep semi-upright on the sofa. I could not fall asleep. Soon, I heard the alarm for Jeremy to wake up and get ready for work. Had I really been sitting here for 3 hours? My contractions were still steady, but too uncomfortable for me to sleep.