Germs at Home

Twist. Turn. Punch. Wiggle wiggle wiggle! This little girl is one active baby. Honestly, the only time I don't feel her moving is when I'm sleeping, although I know she's moving then too because I feel her as soon as I wake up to pee! LOL I'm hoping she does sleep at some point otherwise those first few months are gonna be some LOOOOONG months!

I found this article and wanted to share an excerpt from it, although you can click the link and read the entire article if you'd like:

Normal Household Germs Do Not Affect Mother or Baby
Myth #4 — A hospital is a more sanitary place to have a baby than at home.

Childbed fever killed thousands of women in the 19th century — about the time physicians, who also cared for the ill and dying, began to attend births in clinics. As hospitals became the places to go for birth and death, infections became a plague upon childbearing women and other hospital patients.
About 100 years ago, in Austria, a doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis attempted to lower the number of maternal deaths from infections — as high as 40 percent of those delivering at the Vienna maternity hospital.[1]

Semmelweis discovered that simply by washing their hands between performing autopsies and attending births, the rate of infections caused by doctors dropped dramatically. Semmelweis was ridiculed by his colleagues, and it wasn't until five years after his death that his findings began to gain acceptance. With the advent of aseptic technique in the late 1800s and the development of antibiotics in the 1940s, gradual improvement was seen. [Ed. — As antibiotic-resistant bacteria have evolved so that they are unaffected by antibiotics, it can be expected that this trend will be reversed, and we can expect to see an increase in deaths from hospital-acquired infections.]
In the 1930s, studies in New York City and Memphis, Tennessee, show that fewer women died from infections and hemorrhage during homebirths than died from the same complications in the hospital.[2]

Today, strict and expensive infection control procedures have still not eliminated nosocomial, or hospital-caused infections from common and dangerous organisms, like resistant strains of staphylococcus.
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the nation's hospital-regulating agency, The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations, is failing to enforce infection control standards — compromising the health of hospital patients: "The Joint Commission allows dangers to health and safety to go uncorrected for weeks, months and even years. Sloppy, irresponsible hospitals have little to fear from the Commission: punishment in recent years has been nearly nonexistent."[3]

Each family becomes accustomed to its own household germs and develops a resistance to them. Since fewer strangers are likely to be present at a homebirth than at a hospital birth, the chances of acquiring foreign germs are less likely in a homebirth situation.
Every effort is made to provide a clean environment at homebirths. Midwives and homebirth doctors wear sterile gloves and use sterilized instruments for cutting the umbilical cord.
Homebirth research studies indicate much lower rates of infection in the mother and the baby than is likely in the hospital. In a 10-year study (1970-1980) of 1,200 births at the Farm in Summertown, Tennessee, 39 mothers suffered postpartum infections, and only one baby developed septicemia.[4]

Calling the hospital nursery a cradle of germs, Dr. Marsden Wagner, European Director of the World Health Organization, warned doctors at an international medical conference in Jerusalem in the spring of 1989 that hospital births endanger mothers and babies primarily because of impersonal procedures and overuse of technology and drugs.[5]

The Birth Gazette, Fall, 1987, review of The Cry and The Covenant, p. 32-33.
The Five Standards of Safe Childbearing, 1981, Stewart, p. 240-241.
The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 12, 1988.
The Five Standards of Safe Childbearing, 1981, Stewart, p. 127.
Mothering, Oct/Nov/Dec, 1989.

22 weeks

Well, um, I've got no excuse now. I'm out of school (for the holiday), and thankfully I passed all of my classes with a B or higher. Come Wednesday, I will be on a flight with Ellie to Sammamish, Washington to spend the holiday with Tom's family. Tom will be flying in the following Monday since his unit only approved a certain time-frame for the entire unit's block leave. We're kinda used to rearranging our schedule by now. We took our Christmas picture a couple of weeks ago and although I'm not a fan of ANY picture of me right now, the picture we kept of Ellie is adorable. I wish I could remember everything that was happening since my last post, but honestly, my brain is completely frazzled at the moment.

Ellie is doing great in school, and depending on what happens with Tom PCSing or not (we're really hoping he does), we may have her tested to start Kindergarten early. Her biggest problems are (1) cutting a straight line and (2) keeping her focus when other kids are talking. If we move, I'm not positive we'll worry about school simply because it just may be too much for her all at one time, but we'll see where the road takes us.

Tom is still Tom. LOL Nothing changes with him! We're hoping that within the next six months or so we'll be getting orders to leave San Antonio, but we're not really counting on it. Other than that, nothing much as happened with him.

Onto news about the pregnancy. For those of you who haven't already heard, we found out that we're having another little girl! We're both really excited about this, even if we can't agree on a name. I will be posting a poll to see what name everyone likes best, but I honestly don't think we're going to pick out a name until she's born... that's how torn we are with the names. Things have definitely leveled out as far as how I'm feeling. I'm still sore, but that's to be expected. I have also found that I am no where near as hungry as I was at the beginning of this trimester, so I'm hoping the weight gain starts slowing down a bit.

Other big news about the pregnancy is that we officially hired a midwife to deliver this baby... at home! That's right. We are having this little girl in the comforts of our own home. Our midwife's name is Salli Gonzalez and her website is Empowerment Birthing. There is a lot of information to view if you want to check it out. If we lived farther away from a hospital in the event of an emergency I'd probably not be as comfortable with our choice to have a home birth, but honestly I'm not worried. I know to some it seems new age to have your child at home, and for a long time, that was how I felt too. Now... it feels like the best option and most natural way to have this baby. There will be a birthing pool in the event that I choose to deliver in the tub, or even just as a source of pain relief. I asked a lot of questions about how to prepare Ellie, and what to do about our animals, and the germs in the house, and how to clean before the baby gets here, and what vaccinations I'm going to need, and the list goes on and on. In a nutshell, I'm in good hands. I will go into more detail in the coming weeks, with articles included to help back up what's being said, and hopefully help people see that I'm not absolutely crazy! LOL

I was reading an article on NPR about giving birth at home, and this is one of the quotes from the midwife that I love:

"People talk about how painful contractions are because they're so strong. But what we want woman to know is that the strength of that contraction is the strength of their own bodies. They are as strong as the contraction is. And so they are able to manage it."

Anyone who knows me knows I never do anything the easy way :)