happy home birthday!!

My friend Nichole and I took Timmy and Nini to "Homebirth" Day at the Capitol on Thursday... Basically, we were there to support HR 1341, a resolution which if passed would create a study group for legalizing direct-entry midwifery... which would then lead to legalized home-birth as an alternative option to pregnant moms in Georgia. Twenty-three other states already offer this as a safe alternative to a hospital birth.

To quote my friend Tiffany, a strong homebirth advocate:

"You may want to know (if you are not a homebirthing mom yourself)....what will legalizing homebirth do for Ga??? In a word....SAFETY. This would require that anyone catching babies at home be licensed, certified, trained and educated. This obviously is important to improve the already fabulous outcome of midwives. Just the C-section rate difference is staggering....at the hospital the rate of C-section is almost 40% (yikes!!!! has a moms body changed THAT much in the past 10 years?!) and at home the rate is less than 5%.
BIG difference."

In my personal choice to have a homebirth, which for the record was a very thought out, prayerful decision, we chose what we did because we truly believed that we could have a safer birth at home with less unnecessary medical interventions. Our midwife had over 1300 births under her belt and MANY years of homebirthing experience in multiple states. She was the primary midwife to the Amish community for many years and during that time, gained much experience in rural, normal AND emergency situations (the Amish would avoid a transport to the hospital over anything!). She also is a trained EMT. This gave us peace of mind that she could handle anything that might arise. Our local hospital is a 3 minute drive, and the local EMT have an excellent reputation around here as well.

Anyway, enough of the talk...here are a few pictures of the day:
(If you click on any of the pictures it will resize them to a larger size and then you can click on the yellow square in the bottom corner to make them even bigger....)

The kids and I under the dome surrounded by homebirthing families!

I love my kids...they were such a big help!

Outside the capitol

Okay...obviously we need some to add photo etiquette to our homeschooling agenda, I laughed so hard when I saw the kids in these two shots, but you would think that the guy we asked to take the picture (he was carrying a huge professional camera) would have mentioned that he couldn't see NINI!!!

Timmy and Nini outside, with the golden dome behind them...

Typical siblings, standing as far apart as possible! :)

"Next week, kids, we are learning what the word "CHEESE" means..."

This was during the press conference...there were over 150 people there supporting us.

Nichole and the kids are on the first step to the left, and my midwife, Terri, is the one standing in the front with the brown suit/dress. She helped write much of the resolution and did much work to get it to this point...

Fox5 was there filming as well.

It was a very memorable event.

By the way, the resolution was passed unanimously!!!YAY!

It was so cool for the kids to see what happens at the capitol... I figure now they have a better grid for our american government lessons... I personally had never seen the house floor during session, it was sooo cool! ... We even called our representative, Mickey Channell into the lobby to talk with him about supporting the coming homebirthing legislation.

(Well, actually, my friend Nichole did all the talking, I stood behind her with the crying baby!)

Then we went shopping and had lunch...

All in all, it was an enlightening and exhausting day!