Happy Homebirth

What's the difference between a worry and a knowing?

 

Megan Wilson first joined the Happy Homebirth Podcast in 2020. Six years later, she's back. She's a wife, homesteading mama of four from deep East Texas, and was expecting baby number five when we recorded. In this episode, she shares the long-pushing water birth of her tiny daughter Vivian, the health struggles that followed, and the loss of her baby Kai. Then she tells the story of her rainbow baby, Elodie: a pregnancy full of recurring dreams and strong knowings, weeks of early labor that few people took seriously, and a birth so fast that Elodie arrived in the car, minutes from the hospital, at almost 34 weeks. This is a tender, faith-filled conversation about grief, healing, and learning to trust your intuition.

 

Links:

FREE Peaceful Birth Reset: https://www.myhappyhomebirth.com/birthreset

Whole Mother Homebirth | https://www.myhappyhomebirth.com/wholemotherhomebirth (use code PODCAST for 10% off)

Youtube Episode Link: https://youtu.be/80Inb4dftXc

Learn more about Samaritan Ministries: https://samaritanministries.org/happyhomebirth

Megan's first episode (2021):  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/happy-homebirth/id1446934537?i=1000510201363

Have you ever been handed the exact thing you were most afraid of… and found, when it actually arrived, that the fear just wasn't there anymore?

Two births, same mother, worlds apart. In this episode, Kaitlyn Vogelmeier shares a hospital first birth shaped by pressure she didn't want– a membrane sweep, Pitocin, three hours of pushing, and a hemorrhage with a manual placenta extraction– and then the redemptive homebirth she prepared harder for the second time around. Partway through labor, her midwife felt something that wasn't a head, and Kaitlyn, calm and sure, chose to stay home for the birth of her Frank breech baby boy. It's a story about how the right provider, and two years of quiet preparation, can change everything about how a birth unfolds.

 

 

Links:

FREE Peaceful Birth Reset: https://www.myhappyhomebirth.com/birthreset

Whole Mother Homebirth | https://www.myhappyhomebirth.com/wholemotherhomebirth (use code PODCAST for 10% off)

Youtube Episode Link: https://youtu.be/SpE_VXHYFo8

Learn more about Samaritan Ministries: https://samaritanministries.org/happyhomebirth

Have you ever lost something so specific that the people around you didn't even know to name it?

 

Marley Collins is a wife to her husband Clayton, mama to Maren and Lenora, and an engineer in Temecula, California who's currently doing part-time consulting and teaching herself to sew. Her family is from the Netherlands, where several of her aunts gave birth at home, so she knew she wanted a homebirth before she was ever pregnant.

 

In this episode, Marley shares two births. Her first, in Texas: her water broke at 39 and a half weeks, and what followed was the better part of two days of labor and pushing against a cervical lip that would not move, an unhurried transfer, and a cesarean. Her second, in California: an HBAC at home in the water, with her mother's hand in one of hers and her husband's in the other, and Marley reaching down to catch her own baby herself.

 

She's honest about the very specific grief that sat between those two births — not the surgery, not the transfer, but the fact that she missed Clayton becoming a father — and honest about the exact moment it lifted. She's also wonderfully clear-eyed about choosing her birth team, switching midwives mid-pregnancy, and knowing precisely where she stood.

 

In this episode:

 

Why finding a homebirth midwife felt like a dating app

Switching from a midwife trio to a solo midwife at 20 weeks

What a cervical lip is, and everything her midwife tried

What an unhurried, well-handled hospital transfer actually looks like

The hardest part of her cesarean, which wasn't the surgery

Finding her HBAC midwife through a raw milk co-op

Why she hired a doula for her VBAC and then let her go at 35 weeks

Learning to catch her own baby at a 37-week birth class in her own kitchen

The dime-sized reality check she found funny instead of discouraging

Her midwife's husband charting every word she said while pushing

 

Links:

FREE Peaceful Birth Reset: https://www.myhappyhomebirth.com/birthreset

Whole Mother Homebirth | https://www.myhappyhomebirth.com/wholemotherhomebirth (use code PODCAST for 10% off)

Youtube Episode Link: https://youtu.be/da8D7DISicc?si=PDWpBjoP_AKWKy2h

Learn more about Samaritan Ministries: https://samaritanministries.org/happyhomebirth

What happens when the birth story that scares you most is your own sister's?

 

Shey Munoz has given birth to both of her boys at home in South Florida, and both times her baby came faster than anyone planned — under five hours the first time, under two the second. Both times her husband set up the birth pool, and both times she never got in it.

 

In this episode Shey shares the midwife who made the decision simple, a first labor that was over by 8:18 in the morning, the fear she carried into her second birth after her twin sister gave birth in under two hours with no midwife in the room, and the one question her midwife asked that shrank that fear down to something she could actually answer. She also tells us about her mother's twin cesarean in India in the nineties, what she counted on to get through her contractions when she had nothing else in reach, and the work she does now helping mothers understand what's actually normal in the first year after birth.

 

Links:

FREE Peaceful Birth Reset: https://www.myhappyhomebirth.com/birthreset

Whole Mother Homebirth | https://www.myhappyhomebirth.com/wholemotherhomebirth (use code PODCAST for 10% off)

Youtube Episode Link: https://youtu.be/Vv5VV8gH2Rc?si=qitcTwWXQ0mGsYV_

Learn more about Samaritan Ministries: https://samaritanministries.org/happyhomebirth

Guest Instagram: instagram.com/thepeacefulpostpartum

Has someone who loves you ever told you what your body would and wouldn't be able to handle? And did some part of you file it away as true?

 

Emily Lewenczuk had already done the research — for a client — and found that nobody in St. Louis would take twins at home. A few weeks later she was looking at two positive pregnancy tests of her own.

 

Emily is a wife to Josh, a mama of three, and a birth and postpartum doula and childbirth educator who was working in birth long before she had babies of her own. In this episode she shares her first homebirth — gestational diabetes managed through diet, a Christmas Eve baby ten days after her due date, and a postpartum transfer for a tear — and then her twin pregnancy: MoDi twins, a velamentous cord insertion, biweekly scans from sixteen weeks, and an MFM ready to induce her at thirty-eight weeks.

 

She also shares what she said back to him. The top goal of healthy mom, healthy baby, Emily told him, is the floor. It isn't the ceiling.

 

Her boys were born at home on the one day her midwife had said she couldn't come, with three midwives, a student midwife, a doula, her mom, her husband, and her almost-three-year-old in the house. Baby A arrived in the caul in about four pushes. Baby B came an hour later. Emily is honest about the bleeding that followed, about the fear she carried into that morning, and about what it meant to have her daughter in the room singing Jesus Loves Me while the midwives joined in.

 

If you've just found out you're carrying two, or you've been told there's only one way this can go, this conversation is for you.

 

 

Links:

FREE Peaceful Birth Reset: https://www.myhappyhomebirth.com/birthreset

Whole Mother Homebirth | https://www.myhappyhomebirth.com/wholemotherhomebirth (use code PODCAST for 10% off)

Youtube Episode Link: https://youtu.be/mc3l9weex6Q

Learn more about Samaritan Ministries: https://samaritanministries.org/happyhomebirth

Guest Instagram: instagram.com/emily.lewenczuk