Sweetwater Doula with Krista Cain

02/24/2024

2013: Taught my first childbirth class
2014: Attended my first birth as doula
2023: Attended my final birth as a doula
2024: Announced big changes are coming to my childbirth classes and more!

1. Given that I am no longer offering hands-on doula support, I am rebranding my childbirth education under a new name. This page will soon become Next Level Birth.

2. I am excited to also be launching a doula mentoring program in 2024! It will be called Next Level Birth Pro and will give me a chance to pass along my decade of experience and expertise to small cohorts of doulas who have already trained / certified elsewhere and are ready to take their practice to, you guessed it, the Next Level.

There's more to come but that feels like a lot already so I'll save further details for another post (spoiler...there will be a party!)

It's been an amazing 10+ years serving individuals and families as they prepare to welcome their little ones.

Here's to many more years of learning and growing together!

Yours truly, Krista Cain

02/21/2023

While I continue to update the website and get it back to full functioning, here's the link for those of you wishing to schedule an initial consultation / interview. I'm currently accepting clients for Placenta Encapsulation, Doula Support.

If we've already spoken, have a look in your inbox later today....I'm sending contracts & registration information your way this morning!

All my best, Krista

Schedule your appointment online

02/11/2023

Parents-to-be: As you plan for baby's arrival, one excellent way to strengthen your connection with loved ones is to be very clear about your boundaries when it comes online etiquette and privacy.

Loved-ones: A terrific way to affirm that healthy connection is to abide by the parents' wishes.

Can amends me made? Yes. But it's nice when they aren't necessary.

xo, Krista (Sweetwater Doula)

Emma Roberts' days of hiding her son's face on social media might be over -- here's why.

01/27/2023

My website isn't down but it's just kind of wild over there right now because of some major technical issues. If you need to get in touch with me, feel free to reach out via messenger while I figure things out over there. xo

01/19/2023

Looking to get trained in pediatric CPR by Sherry at Great Lales CPR?

$75
Find the sign up link here:

https://www.greatlakescpr.com/join-a-course/

I get NO kickbacks for your participation. I'm simply sharing for anyone who might. E interested 🎉

Yours, Krista

“Hands Only” CPR Demo/Practice Session This is a NON-CERTIFICATION course for community members who would like to learn “Hands Only” CPR for adults. (Child and Infant not included)

11/18/2022

I was just talking with someone about whether or not home birth is becoming more popular and it turns out it is.

The vast majority of my doula clients have had their babies in the hospital but my birth classes are filled with a mix of folks preparing for home and hospital birth.

I'm curious, where did you give birth?
Home? 🏡
Hospital? 🏥
Birth center? 🏠

There were more than 50,000 home births in the United States in 2021, an increase of 12% over the year before and the highest level since at least 1990, according to a report released Thursday from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics.

05/24/2021

Malcolm... part nine.

I think it’s incredibly important to discuss how often the vision we form of what we hope our birth experience will look like through our pregnancy will differ from the way our birth actually looks and feels when we experience it.

I’m not just talking about birth trauma here, not at all.

When we are pregnant, one tool we have to prepare ourselves for an empowering birth experience is to spend a lot of time reading, watching and learning about positive, peaceful and ideal birth stories. We use this as a tool to help us trust our bodies, our babies and to train our brain to believe that we CAN have a birth experience like that.

But what happens when from the outside our birth actually does meet those hopes and expectations, but our lived experience isn’t peaceful and empowered but instead filled with a lot of disillusionment regarding our own strength or peace of mind?

The lived experience is different from the outsiders view and that can make it difficult for the birthing person to unpack the complexity of how they are feeling about their own birth story.

What happens when birth goes sideways and ends up needing intervention you felt desperate to avoid?

I always tell people that you can have a birth experience that ends up needing a ton of unwanted interventions and still leave that experience without trauma as long as you were educated on your options, apprised of what was happening the whole time, have a voice in your own story, and get to be part of the decision.

I fully believe that those things dramatically lesson the rate of birth trauma in undesired birth experiences. But just because there isn’t capital T trauma, does that mean that there isn’t a complexity of emotions, grief, loss, and confusion to process through in the end? No. Not at all. And that’s what I want to talk about today.

I don’t think there could be a person more prepared and accepting that our birth had a high possibility that it would end in a c-section than I was.

Logically, I felt super comfortable with the statistics and potential reasons we might have a belly birth from the start.

Emotionally I.did.the.work. To process my past experiences that were certainly coupled with a lot of trauma. To work through the what if’s and how comes as much as absolutely possible. To prepare myself, my partner, and my birth team that if it was needed, I was truly at peace with everything as long as I got to try.

Every single word of that is true. I couldn’t have been more prepared for however our birth was going to play out, and still... 13 days after delivery... we are unpacking pieces of the sadness I feel daily.

Here’s the thing, I feel 100% sure we did the right thing in our birth. We had a beautiful experience and a perfect outcome. But it still means the vision I created so strongly in my heart and mind of what this va**nal birth would look like, didn’t happen, and that’s something I have to work through.

I know plenty of people who fight for a VBAC, have a “beautiful and successful” va**nal birth and find themselves struggling in the aftermath because it was so different than their vision of what that birth would be that they wish they had just had a repeat c-section from the start.

I have worked with and witnessed parents who have to unpack feelings of disappointment, sadness and inferiority when they had hoped to have an unmedicated birth and ended up with an epidural. Those feelings are valid.

I have worked with and witnessed parents who have to unpack feelings of disappointment, sadness, and even anger when they had hoped for an epidural and ended up having such a fast delivery that they had no time. Those feelings are valid.

This is important because we need to acknowledge that we can be happy, content, empowered, and at peace with our birth experience while STILL having to grieve the loss of the vision.

Marnie and I spent a lot of time dreaming about our upcoming birth. In our vision, so strongly, marnie helped to catch Malcolm as he was born into the world and placed him directly on her own chest. To be honest, this is the only part of our birth vision that didn’t happen.

We got to experience labor together, we got to work through every single stage of labor over the course of five days time fulfilling every part of what I envisioned it would be to have Marnie by my side supporting me. The only part that changed, was the way he came into this world at the very end.

But in the realm of early postpartum days, where sleepless nights are met with unbalanced hormones, incredible amounts of love and the “baby blues”... missing that piece, that part of the vision that felt soooo important and incredible for all the months we dreamt of it... it feels sad to know that that opportunity and that vision are over.

And that’s had me thinking a lot about how much we need to validate the differences in our vision vs our lived experience and the vast complexity of emotions that occur because of it.

05/23/2021

05/22/2021

Malcolm... part seven.

Just before our favorite midwife was to leave for the day, we had her come in to check my progress since I was feeling all the indicators of being ready to deliver my baby with each contraction.

Tired and uncomfortable there was this part of me that felt so confident that everything we spent all of these days going through had worked and that the epidural was the ticket we needed. I was eager to get checked knowing we were so close to meeting him.

This other part of me went into the cervical exam feeling apathetic and emotionally removed because there was this corner of my heart that felt just as sure that something wasn’t right.

She checked me... I was waiting for “okay Kristin, your fully dilated, baby is nice and low, let’s try a few practice pushes”, but her face told me something else before she even spoke.

Nothing at all had changed.

I was still 4cm, 50%, and -1.

This isn’t normal. Something was wrong.

There isn’t a single other thing that we could have done to help me progress. I am confident both professionally and personally that we used all of the tools, preventative tools and aggressive intervention tools. I tried it all. I left nothing behind. I pushed myself all of the way. We did it all.

“I’m having a c-section”

I expected the midwife to say yes. I expected her to be the one to call it and tell me it was time to have surgery. But she didn’t. She assured me that no one was medically ready to make that call. That Malcolm was picture perfect through it all. That I was healthy and not in any kind of danger at this time.

She checked one more time and then assured me that the baby was well applied and his position and station were not the issue.

She was as surprised and confused as the rest of us, the big question now was WHY?

Earlier in the labor WHY did he go from low and engaged to floating back up to a ballotable position?!?

Ballotable means that the head can be moved around, that it bounced up and down or is able to be moved side to side because it is not engaged in the pelvis.

It’s very strange, almost unseen that a baby will be well engaged in the pelvis for weeks and then DURING induction of contractions disengage and go high... there was a reason for this.

WHY did my cervix stop dilating and effacing after 4cm and 50%?!?! Labor was not false, the contractions were powerful and strong enough to make change. Baby was well applied to the cervix again... there was a reason that labor continued and my cervix did not.

I had zero pressure from my medical team to stop my attempt of a VBA2C. After the cervical exam was done, and we spoke with our trusted provider for a short time we asked for some space to talk alone.

It wasn’t a hard decision at this point, something inside me knew clearly that it was time. I told Marnie that even though we were both very strong and healthy still, I just knew that if we continued to labor and put more stress on my body and on Malcolm that something was going to happen..

Babies are very wise. They are intuitive creatures who make decision in the womb to help protect themselves. It was time to listen to what he was trying to tell us before anything became emergent.

We called our team back in and shifted gears to prepare ourselves to meet our baby very soon and very differently than we had hoped...

(I’d encourage you to not stop reading here... the next chapters are very important parts of our story)

05/21/2021

If you only read one of these installments, read this one.

Consent.
Informed decision making.
Trauma-informed care.

These are major concepts and skill areas I help my own clients strengthen. But care providers have a major hand in these, too.

This part of Kristin & Marnie’s stories sheds light on how it could and should be in any birthing location and with every care provider.

xo, Krista

Malcolm... part five.

Rest and reset, that was the plan. After a good cry and the redirection to surrender to whatever needed to happen next, I found myself doing big figure eights with my hips leaning over the bed while we “watched” Mrs. Doubtfire to distract from the focus of labor.

At one point I felt the shift and all of the sudden we needed to move the monitors far down on my belly again. I knew I had managed to move him out of the way and give him room to find a better position, he was re-engaged and things started to pick back up a little more intensely.

One of the doctors and residents who had checked on us earlier came in to see if things had changed enough to break my water...

I want to explain to you what happens during a cervical check if you are pregnant before you go into labor or when you are already in labor.

Every time a doctor, midwife, or nurse does a cervical exam they are measuring three things.

1: they are checking to see how effaced your cervix is. This is a measurement of how soft and thin the cervical band is. Before you are in labor this is thick and hard (0% effaced) throughout the process of labor the cervix will soften and thin to about the width of a piece of paper (100% effaced).

2: they are checking for cervical dilation. This is the opening into your cervix. During your pregnancy you will be 0cm dilated, the cervix is fully closed to keep your baby protected while they grow. As labor progresses your cervix will continue to open, 1cm is usually measured as one finger width open... in order to deliver a baby va**nally the cervix must open all the way to 10cm or “fully dilated”.

3: they are checking the station of the baby. The station of the baby is the measurement of where the babies head is in the birth canal. -4 station is when you baby is floating high in the pelvis and not well engaged. 0 station the baby has reached the pelvic brim... +3 your baby is crowning. The baby had about 8 stations to transcend down the pelvis through the birth process.

Before labor begins, and in the earlier stages of labor, the cervix is typically in a posterior position... this means that the cervix is tipped towards the spine and behind the babies head, if you can imagine this means for the provider to reach the cervix to assess effacement, dilation and station they must reach far up and back into your va**na. As labor progresses, one of the markers we see change throughout labor is that the cervix will move forward towards the front of the body, making it far easier and less painful to check.

And this is where we are going to talk about trauma informed care and consent.

Pay attention here, because this alone made it worth it to drive 4 hours to have our baby.

Every single time someone touches your body they should be asking for consent to do so. Every. Single. Time.

If this isn’t the standard of practice, (which it sadly isn’t in most places) and they haven’t been trained in informed consent and trauma care, then I know how awkward it can feel as the care provider to ask so frequently for “silly” things like taking a blood pressure or checking an IV. I promise you that the more you practice this model of care the more natural in becomes and the less awkward it feels for everyone.

Whether or not someone has a history of trauma, (physical, emotional, sexual, etc) or not, we should be practicing the model of care that assumes we never know what someone has experienced.

The 2021 CDC statistics states that “Nearly 1 in 5 women have experienced completed or attempted r**e during their lifetime.” Most of which occurs in adolescence or young adulthood. This doesn’t even count other acts of moleststion or other sexual trauma. This is an incredible number to consider.

Every time BEFORE my body was touched by ANYONE I was asked “is it okay if I...”, “may I touch your...”, even if I told them they didn’t need to ask, they asked. That’s how this should work.

The doctor came in and asked me to tell her a bit about my other births. During that conversation I explained that I could not tolerate cervical checks at all in my past.

Without any other explanation needed the response from the doctor was, “what can I do to help make the exam better for you? Is there anything specific you need for me to do or not do? You are in complete control here”.

I want you to read that again.

This is trauma informed care. To treat each person without shame, shock, or assumption while giving them the tools to speak up for their own needs as part of the shared decision model.

It makes all the difference.

Never was I touched without my consent. Every step of every procedure, blood pressure check, cervical exam, etc. was a conversation where I was asked if it was okay, they waited until consent was given, continued to inform me of what was happening along the way, and made sure I understood each step.

“May I touch your belly”
“You’re going to feel my hand”
“Is the pressure I’m using okay”
“If you want me to pause say stop, if you want me to stop all together say done”
“You are in charge”

It was time to see if I had made change, would they be able to break my water?

The resident checked me first and “couldn’t hardly reach my cervix”, it was painful and discouraging and I felt more confused than ever. I explained in detail what I knew about the shape and placement of where my cervix was positioned from prior checks and the doctor asked if she could try one more time.

In a matter of seconds the conversation had shifted from “I can’t reach it”, to “oh you’ve made great progress and I can break your bag of water now if you’d like”. As soon as I gave consent she broke my water.

The entire room cheered. Marnie and I both wept in excitement and relief, the doctor exclaimed “I’ve never been SO thrilled to break someone’s water”, laughter and tears filled the room and immediately things intensified.

Our doula returned, contractions were every couple of minutes, and grit and determination took over. The surrender worked and our baby was on his way...