I am pleased to announce the launch of the OmMama, LLC website and to welcome you to the first edition of the Pregnancy Pipeline, our monthly e-newsletter. OmMama, LLC has provided pre and postnatal yoga classes through Yoga Source since 2001. With the launch of our new website, we hope to extend our services both within and beyond the classroom. Each month in our newsletter, we will provide helpful tips, information, and yoga poses to enhance your pregnancy and postpartum experience. We also plan to use the newsletter as a place to supplement the questions and dialogue that come up in our classes. If you have a question you forgot to ask in class, or would like a more in-depth discussion of a particular topic, please e-mail your question to info@ommama.com.

Congratulations to all the new mothers in April! Several of our newest moms wrote in their birth stories. Their stories contain much information, wisdom and insight. See the Inspiration website if you’d like to submit your own story. We will publish as many as we can each month in the newsletter and on the website.

Our goal is to be the best resource for prenatal and postnatal yoga and related classes in Richmond. Please let us know if you have any suggestions for improving our newsletter or our services. We love to hear from you.

Namaste,

Leslie Lytle

If for any reason you do not wish to receive this newsletter monthly, please follow the unsubscribe link at the bottom of this email.

April Arrivals!

Congratulations to:

• Rita & daughter, Kate
• Lori & daughter, Ava
• Deanna & daughter, Avery
• Jenni Lee & son, Marshall

Submit your birth announcements and stories on ommama.com!

What's New

Class Updates

• Thursday Prenatal class now starts at 5:30 pm
• Baby and Me class cancelled on May 24
• Conscious Birthing Workshop: June 23
• Itsy Bitsy® Yoga: July 11- August 8
• Guided Relaxation and Visualization: July 14
• Getting your Groove Back: July 14

Birth Story

Katherine (Kate) Ward S. was born at 5:04 am on March 20. She weighed in at 8 lbs 6 ozs and she's doing just great. Here's her birth story:

As you may recall my doula had traveled to Jamaica for spring break and I was nervous that she might miss the delivery.To make a long story short Stephanie's flight home was delayed. She called me from the airport in Philly around 9 pm on March 19 (my due date) telling me she would be back in Richmond around 11 pm. I guess that's what Kate was waiting for. My contractions started shortly after I talked to Stephanie!

Read Full Birth Story

Prenatal Article

BRAIN: An acronym for informed decision-making
by Leslie Lytle

“I’m pregnant!”

The moment you realize you have entered this significant phase of your life can be a heady one, equal parts excitement, joy, fear and an awareness that unbelievable life changes are about to unfold. If you are like many women, you alternate between excitement about the upcoming arrival of the newest addition to your family, and apprehension about labor, birth and life with a newborn. Some women are concerned about their own capacity to deal with the pain of labor; others are anxious about the potential for unnecessary interventions. With a US Cesarean rate of 30.2% and climbing, most women are concerned about avoiding unnecessary surgery.

For many women, pregnancy marks their first significant foray into the healthcare system, and so they do not have a lot of experience navigating this complex structure. Suddenly you are making all kinds of health-related decisions for yourself and your baby, from whether or not to undergo a diagnostic test or ultrasound, to figuring out what pain management approach to use in labor, to deciding whether or not or when to vaccinate your child. The information you hear from your care provider, your friends, and the media is confusing and at times downright contradictory. It can feel overwhelming.

Whatever healthcare choices you are contemplating, you can positively impact your ability to make sound, personally appropriate decisions by learning to be an informed healthcare consumer. “BRAIN” is a helpful acronym to assist you in gathering the information needed to make informed decisions about your own and your baby’s health. Use this simple acronym the next time you are contemplating health-related decisions:

Benefits
Risks
Alternatives
Intuition
Nothing

Benefits

What are the benefits of the particular diagnostic test, pain management approach, medication, procedure, protocol, etc. being considered? This is an important question to ask in today’s healthcare climate, where so many choices are available. Corollary questions might include: What problem will this solve? How will this be helpful? If a test suggests a problem, how serious is it? If a treatment is suggested: How is this usually done?

Risks

What are the risks of a given test, procedure, protocol etc? What are the risks relative to the benefits? Are there any side effects? If this is not successful, what is the next step? What sources of information do you suggest I use to inform myself about this issue?

Alternatives

What other approaches might be taken? Particularly in pregnancy, where we are usually dealing with a healthy process rather than a disease process, there may be multiple approaches to a similar situation or condition. Teasing out potential options early on helps us to identify alternatives that fit with our particular circumstances, so that we feel empowered, rather than pressured, in the decisions we make. If alternatives are available, go through the BRAIN acronym for each one offered.

Intuition

What is my gut saying about a particular test/ procedure /intervention/ protocol? Intuition is an important and often overlooked piece of information: taking the time to listen deeply for what our intuition is telling us helps us to make decisions that are rooted in our own values and experience. Including intuition in your decision-making process leads to decisions that have an internally derived logic, integrity, and authority. Decisions made in this way are rarely regretted later.

Nothing

What would happen if I do nothing? Corollaries to this question might include: What would happen if we wait an hour? A day? A week? You might apply the first part of the BRAIN acronym to doing nothing: What are the benefits of doing nothing? What are the risks? What are the alternatives? What does my intuition tell me?

Taken together, the questions in this acronym provide a logical, comprehensive framework for eliciting information from care providers and yourself, creating a broad context for decision-making. This simple acronym is also useful in many arenas you will be entering as an expecting or new parent: it can be used to look not only at health care decisions, but childcare related decisions, approaches to parenting, etc. Congratulations on your pregnancy and good luck with your decision-making!

Postnatal Article

Newborn Babies and Sleep
by Elizabeth Pantley, author of The No-Cry Sleep Solution

Congratulations on the birth of your new baby. This is a glorious time in your life – and a sleepless time too. Newborns have very different sleep needs than older babies. This article will help you understand your baby’s developing sleep patterns, and will help you have reasonable expectations for sleep.

Read, Learn, and Beware of Bad Advice

Absolutely everyone has an opinion about how you should handle sleep issues with your new baby. The danger to a new parent is that these tidbits of misguided advice (no matter how well-intentioned) can truly have a negative effect on our parenting skills and, by extension, our babies’ development…if we are not aware of the facts. The more knowledge you have the less likely that other people will make you doubt your parenting decisions.

When you have your facts straight, and when you have a parenting plan, you will be able to respond with confidence to those who are well-meaning but offering contrary or incorrect advice. So, your first step is to get smart! Know what you are doing, and know why you are doing it. Read books and magazines, attend classes or support groups – it all helps.

The Biology of Newborn Sleep

During the early months of your baby's life, he sleeps when he is tired, it’s that simple. You can do little to force a new baby to sleep when he doesn’t want to sleep, and conversely, you can do little to wake him up when he is sleeping soundly.

Newborn babies have very tiny tummies. They grow rapidly, their diet is liquid, and it digests quickly. Although it would be nice to lay your little bundle down at bedtime and not hear from him until morning, this is not a realistic goal for a tiny baby. Newborns need to be fed every two to four hours — and sometimes more.

Sleeping “through the night”

You may believe that babies should start "sleeping through the night" soon after birth. For a new baby, a five-hour stretch is a full night. Many (but not all) babies can sleep uninterrupted from midnight to 5 a.m. (Not that they always do.) This may be a far cry from what you may have thought "sleeping through the night" meant!

What's more, some sleep-through-the-nighters will suddenly begin waking more frequently, and it’s often a full year or even two until your baby will settle into an all-night, every night sleep pattern.

Falling Asleep at the Breast or Bottle

It is natural for a newborn to fall asleep while sucking at the breast, a bottle, or a pacifier. When a baby always falls asleep this way, he learns to associate sucking with falling asleep; over time, he cannot fall asleep any other way. This is probably the most natural, pleasant sleep association a baby can have. However, a large percentage of parents who are struggling with older babies who cannot fall asleep or stay asleep are fighting this powerful association.

Therefore, if you want your baby to be able to fall asleep without your help, it is essential that you sometimes let your newborn baby suck until he is sleepy, but not totally asleep. When you can, remove the breast, bottle, or pacifier from his mouth, and let him finish falling asleep without it. If you do this often enough, he will learn how to fall asleep without sucking.

Waking for Night Feedings

Many pediatricians recommend that parents shouldn't let a newborn sleep longer than four hours without feeding, and the majority of babies wake far more frequently than that. No matter what, your baby will wake up during the night. The key is to learn when you should pick her up for a feeding and when you can let her go back to sleep on her own.

Here’s a tip that is important for you to know. Babies make many sleeping sounds, from grunts to whimpers to outright cries, and these noises don’t always signal awakening. These are what I call sleeping noises, and your baby is asleep during these episodes.

Learn to differentiate between sleeping sounds and awake sounds. If she is awake and hungry, you’ll want to feed her as quickly as possible so she’ll go back to sleep easily. But if she’s asleep – let her sleep!

Help Your Baby Distinguish Day from Night

A newborn sleeps sixteen to eighteen hours per day, and this sleep is distributed evenly over six to seven sleep periods. You can help your baby distinguish between night sleep and day sleep, and thus help him sleep longer periods at night.

Have your baby take his daytime naps in a lit room where he can hear the noises of the day. Make nighttime sleep dark and quiet, except for white noise (a background hum). You can also help your baby differentiate day from night by using a nightly bath and a change into pajamas to signal the difference between the two.

Watch for Signs of Tiredness

Get familiar with your baby's sleepy signals and put her down to sleep as soon as she seems tired. A baby who is encouraged to stay awake when her body is craving sleep is an unhappy baby. Over time, this pattern develops into sleep deprivation, which complicates developing sleep maturity. Learn to read your baby’s sleepy signs -- such as quieting down, losing interest in people and toys, and fussing -- and put her to bed when that window of opportunity presents itself.

Make Yourself Comfortable

It’s a fact that your baby will be waking you up, so you may as well make yourself as comfortable as possible. Relax about night wakings right now. Being frustrated about having to get up won’t change a thing. The situation will improve day by day; and before you know it, your newborn won’t be so little anymore — she’ll be walking and talking and getting into everything in sight…during the day, and sleeping peacefully all night long.

Excerpted with permission by McGraw-Hill/Contemporary Publishing from The No-Cry Sleep Solution: Gentle Ways to Help Your Baby Sleep Through the Night by Elizabeth Pantley, copyright 2002 http://www.pantley.com/elizabeth

Ask the Teachers

Send in your questions to info@ommama.com and we will try to answer them in the next newsletter.

Featured Community Service Organization: Mother’s Gift Circle

Each month OmMama will feature a service or non-profit organization that focuses their efforts on improving the lives of women, children, and families. Our first group was formed by several former prenatal students and receives the bulk of its donations from our current students. Read on to hear what they’re up to:

At any given time hundreds of Richmond teenagers are facing the challenges of pregnancy. In addition to the inherent difficulties (exhaustion, anxiety…you know the list), these girls’ burden often includes shame, poverty, and violence. A group of former prenatal yoga students has organized a group to help lighten the load for these young mothers. Mother’s Gift Circle collects, wraps and distributes gifts to teens enrolled in the Department of Public Health’s Resource Mothers Program. These presents spread joy and help keep girls involved in a program that educates them about pre-natal health, caring for newborns, birth control and the importance of staying in school. Mother’s Gift Circle is in constant need of:

• New and truly like-new clothes, toys, and baby accoutrements
• Lightly used gift bags, tissue paper and ribbons

Please save these items and bring them to their spring pick-up. If you can’t make the drop-off time, you may also take donations to the Children’s Market and Exchange, 2926 W Cary St. The Children’s Market and Exchange will also accept donations of toddler age clothing to exchange for infant clothing for Mother’s Gift Circle.

Mother’s Gift Circle Spring Pick-up

• Saturday May 19th 10 - 10:45 am
• Tuesday May 22 nd 5:45 - 6:15 pm

Cary Court parking lot near the Yoga Source entrance

Questions? Mother’s Gift Circle 804-795-7443