A Singaporean mom who was infected with the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 in March while she was pregnant gave birth to her baby, and the baby was born with antibodies against the virus. In what continues to be promising news as we learn more about the SARS-CoV-2 novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, a mama has given birth to a baby who was born with antibodies against the virus. According to the Straits Times Newspaper,  Celine Ng-Chan gave birth to her second baby, a son, earlier this month. She named him Aldrin, and though she’d contracted COVID-19 when she was just 10 ..read more

Having a brand new baby is hard. Period. Those first days and weeks–okay let’s face it, months and years–leave us with more than enough to to do. And yet, during the seemingly endless waiting game that is pregnancy, how many of us have found ourselves fixated on the thought of having not one, but two, little ones on the way? Maybe it’s the novelty of it. After all, even though the number of twins born in the US is significant, (the most recent CDC reports that 32.6 of every 1,000 births result in twins), it still remains a relatively uncommon occurrence. Related: Two Pairs and a Trio: Bre ..read more

The decision to be ‘done’ is a hard one. A personal one. One that often leaves people judging or questioning, no matter what you decide. We remember the thoughts of a mama who was real and vulnerable for us. –A Guest Post By A Mama Who Wished To Remain Anonymous– I have five children, and five children is a lot in these modern times. Five children means a larger car, a hard and expensive time booking holiday accommodation and mountains of washing and food. It means four school lunches to pack each morning and busy nights driving children to soccer and ballet and swimming lessons. Five childre ..read more

Image: MilkandHannah/InstagramWe’re always fans of the gorgeous photography talented artists share of the beautiful moments that come with childbirth, but sometimes, we run across something even extraordinary…like beautiful pictures of a 9-year-old boy lovingly filling the role of his mama’s doula, as she gave birth to his baby sister. The process of childbirth is one that often whole families get involved in, and the memories and normalization of childbirth are irreplaceable. But when they’re so beautifully photographed as treasures, it’s even cooler. Such was the case for Hollie Lau, who in ..read more

A recent National Institutes of Health study found that about 1 in 4 women experienced high levels of depressive symptoms at some point in the three years after they gave birth, leading researchers to recommend postpartum screening for longer periods of time. The study looked at 5,000 women and also found that the other 3 in 4 women had experienced low levels of depression in the three-year span past giving birth. Researchers from NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) identified four different trajectories of postpartum depressive symptom ..read more

When it comes to giving birth, one piece advice I’d give to first-time moms is to forget everything they’ve seen on TV and in the movies about birth. First of all, most of the portrayals are wildly inaccurate. Even worse, a lot of them are downright scary. Sure it helps add to the tension of the story if either mom or baby might die at any minute, but birth is rarely that way. I set out to find realistic births in movies, but also to find the worst. It was surprisingly difficult to find ones that seemed to reflect a typical progression of labor. So often movies show a woman in the middle of an ..read more

Science continues to back the benefits of skin-to-skin contact and in babies, and new research confirms that being held by a parent in painful situations can help dampen a newborn baby’s brain response to the pain. Why we ever thought that babies ‘don’t feel pain,’ makes us cringe. Never has the inability to express feeling meant the feeling didn’t necessarily exist, but for generations, many mamas were led to believe all those pokes and jabs and the doctor’s offices didn’t mean much to the baby as they didn’t really even respond to the pain, but the ‘surprise of the jab.’ Thankfully, science ..read more

Recently I wrote a post about the unexpected ways I’ve found community through my kids. I shared that for me this was not part of my initial plan, that community had happened but was not something I had sought. That was a bit of an oversimplification, though. One particular response to that post has echoed in my head, because I heard it several times over and because, initially, it surprised me: “I wish this was the case for me.” These comments left me thinking about how I got to this point – a member of a busy, thriving “village” of friends and families – as well as remembering how it f ..read more

In a world where racial disparities and effects bubble with charged emotion and concern, black mothers in the U.S. are overwhelmingly more likely to die from childbirth than a white mother is and it’s time we all take a look at how to change that. As a natural-minded mama and advocate of doula and midwife care for mothers during their pregnancies, I recently read an article about black mothers turning more to midwives when they were pregnant so they felt more cared for. In my head, I cheered, thinking, “Good! More women cared for in pregnancy and childbirth is always a good thing.” But as I ke ..read more

There’s new research out about how oxytocin, the hormone that is best known as the ‘love hormone,’ may mean that breastfeeding makes women happier, and may be an aid in helping prevent postpartum depression. Researchers from Kyoto University and Azabu University in Japan released the results of a new study that found oxytocin levels in mothers correspond to their sensitivity to “happy and angry adults.” What this means is that mothers with higher levels of oxytocin were more able to recognize positive and negative expressions on the faces of others, and less flat affect observation can lead to ..read more