Our postpartum doula services include:

• Comprehensive Childbirth Preparation: Clients who engage our services during pregnancy have free or discounted access to our live online series, Zoom in on Childbirth. This is a 10-week series that covers everything you need to know about birth and early parenting from Stages of Labor to Feeding Your Baby. The series rotates so families can jump in anytime, and take as few or as many classes as they would like.
• Expert Consultation: Phone, text, and email support during your pregnancy and the fourth trimester.
• Prenatal zoom intake session: During our prenatal intake consultation we will discuss expectations for your postpartum preferences and discuss goals for working together. During our session we can also provide resources and suggestions for preparing for life with a newborn and answer your lingering questions about the final weeks of pregnancy, about birth, and about bringing baby home.
• Nurturing care and support: Our clients receive gentle guidance and coaching so parents can learn about themselves and their baby and build confidence during baby’s first few days and weeks after birth. We support parental recovery with practical coaching for physical recovery, along with time and space to process the many emotions of your pregnancy, birth, and postpartum experience.
• Support with physical recovery: We support physical recovery from birth with practical tips whether baby was born vaginally or via cesarean. We encourage people who have given birth to stay in bed as much as possible after birth, and our physical presence supports people to stay in bed for an optimal recovery.
• Decoding baby behavior: We help you learn about your baby’s unique behaviors, temperament, and emerging personality. We help families learn how to make the most of babies’ amazing capacity for social engagement, and help you figure out feeding cues and developmental milestones.
• Practical support: During daytime and evening sessions, we may be able to provide practical support in the home including helping to set up baby’s environment, light meal preparation, and help with tidying up after baby.
• Individualized sleep support: During overnight sessions, our focus in on helping families learn about newborn sleep so they can optimize sleep for the whole family. Sometimes it looks like respite care to help a sleep deprived family catch-up and get off the struggle bus, and sometimes it looks like one-on-one coaching to help parents learn tips and tricks for night time parenting. In any case typically the goal is sustainable solutions to help everyone sleep better.
• Ongoing support:  After we finish working together, we are available for text and email support for topics covered during our sessions. Unlike the myriad of parenting books at your disposal, we know you, and we know your baby, and we know your story. Whether you have a newborn or a toddler, don’t want to tell you how to parent – we want to help you discover what kind of parent you want to be, and help you reach your parenting goals. Our clients enjoy a discount on future parent coaching sessions as baby grows older and parents navigate parenting an older infant and toddler, and credit for any unused postpartum sessions can be applied to virtual parent coaching sessions as your family grows up together.

You may want to consider postpartum doula support for a variety of reasons:

• You don’t know much about newborns. Lets face it – most people haven’t seen an newborn baby since childhood, and maybe not even then. Even if you know a lot about babies, newborns are different – and it can be helpful to have a trusted guide to help you learn about who your baby is and how you can support their needs.
• You are learning how to be a new parent. Whether this is your first baby or your fifth, you are a new-born parent on your baby’s birth day, learning all about how to be a first-time parent or fifth-time parent. Each new stage comes with new questions, challenges, and triumphs and we help you adjust to your new life and new normal.
• You don’t want a one-size-fits-all approach. While there are some helpful books and classes out there to help you learn how to take care of your baby, many parenting books try to dictate schedules and routines, and set families up with unrealistic expectations about life with a newborn. We give families space to figure out their own parenting style with individualized information that applies to their baby and their family.
• You want support for the whole family. For families with multiple caregivers, it is important for everyone to get on the same page. We help the entire family learn how to work together to support and care for each other to be able provide optimal care for baby.
• Or, you are a single parent. Do we really need to say more? You can probably think of a dozen reasons why it would be helpful to have an extra set of hands around the house as a single parent – now multiply that exponentially with a newborn in the house and a tender postpartum body that needs to heal and recover from birth. We can be an additional layer of support to take care of you, so you can make sure you are also taking care of yourself.
• You have a colicky baby. This is just hard. Thats all there is to it. Families with colicky babies benefit greatly from both daytime and overnight postpartum support. A few hours of trusted support while you sleep can be a game changer for parents stretched thin by the challenges of colic.
• You are sleep deprived and you need more sleep to be a functioning human. Even if your baby is not colicky, newborns really don’t sleep by themselves all too well. Some newborns need to be held for a while before sleeping in a bassinet or crib, and some newborns don’t want to be put down at all! For all families, this is makes sleep challenging. Postpartum doulas can help to care for baby while parents nap or sleep nearby.
• COVID-19 has impacted your original plans for support. Many people without family nearby have grandparents or other family members visit for the first few days or weeks after baby is born, but, COVID-19 has messed up those plans. Without family nearby, postpartum doulas can help to be an extra set of hands for practical help too!
• You have concerns about COVID-19. Maybe you do have friends or family nearby, but you don’t want to risk exposure for elderly loved ones. Or, maybe you’re worried that your loved ones aren’t following CDC recommendations to reduce the risk of spreading/contracting COVID-19, and you’d rather have professionals in your home that were already taking precautions to keep your family healthy, even before the pandemic began.

Our Postpartum Doula Services are a wonderful option for new families because you have an extra, veteran parent in the home to provide professional guidance and coaching to help families find their footing and get off to a great start. We often see parents leave the hospital with apprehension and unease, sometimes even unsure of how to hold their new baby. We come in to bolster confidence and help families develop skills and strategies for working with their baby and working with each other. During each session, we can provide individualized suggestions and provide resources and information that is relevant to your current situation – we meet you where you are. We provide that extra bit of support so that you don’t have to feel like you’re doing this alone. Because, really, no one was ever meant to do this alone.

Pricing:

Virtual Postpartum Counseling

1-Hour Session – $150

What does it look like to work together?

Families can choose to work with us for daytime support, overnight support, or a combination of both (and many of our clients work with us during their pregnancy and birth as well!) We frequently find that families benefit most from daytime support during the first few weeks, typically 1-3 sessions per week. For overnight support, some families might want only a few sessions sprinkled here or there during the first few weeks while most families will choose to book 2-3 nights per week for the first 3-6 weeks.

While we sometimes have immediate availability for families who are expecting their baby/ies very soon or already had their baby/ies, our calendars do get booked out early, often several months in advance. We encourage families to think about their postpartum support needs sooner than later if they want to ensure our availability for their due date. We create a custom quote for each family, for both daytime and overnight support, depending on their needs, which is booked online and requires a deposit to hold the space on our calendar. We understand that babies can come a couple weeks before or after their due dates, and we provide the flexibility families need to work around baby’s schedule. (And we also work with families who understand that babies truly rule our schedule as we are also on-call as birth doulas and offer us flexibility in return)

How do families know what kind of support they will need in the future? 

Often times, they don’t. For most people, scheduling a consultation gives us a chance to talk through their anticipated needs, and we can help to provide suggestions based on our experience and predictable milestones and stages of development, both for babies and new parents! For example, we know that the first few weeks are the most helpful for concentrated daytime support because many of our clients feel like they’ve gotten over a hump and started finding a good rhythm around 3-4 weeks after their babies are born. And we also know that babies have some predictable growth spurts and nighttime marathon feeding sessions, making overnight support really valuable during the sleepless nights that accompany those weeks (usually around weeks 2-4 and 6-8.) We also know that both daytime and overnight support is extremely helpful if one parent or caregiver will be returning to work shortly after the birth, and/or during their transition back to work, if one parent will be adjusting to solo parenting while the other is at work. We might also suggest planning for additional support for people who have a higher risk for postpartum mood challenges, which is also very unique to each family and something we can help navigate.

Please contact us or schedule a consultation to speak with our team for more details and/or to discuss your goals for postpartum and how we might be able to support your family.