November 2024

Kristin Revere and Jacqueline Kincer discuss how partners can support breastfeeding and pumping on the latest episode of Ask the Doulas podcast.  Jacqueline is a breastfeeding expert and CEO of Holistic Lactation.     

Hello, hello!  This is Kristin with Ask the Doulas, and I am thrilled to chat today with Jacqueline Kincer.  Jacqueline is a breastfeeding expert and the CEO of Holistic Lactation, where she combines her clinical experience as an IBCLC with a commitment to supporting breastfeeding families.  With a background as a lactation consultant, Jacqueline has developed premium lactation supplements and leads The Nurture Collective, an online program offering guides, courses, and IBCLC support.  Her holistic approach addresses the diverse challenges mothers face, emphasizing the importance of both practical guidance and emotional support.  Jacqueline’s dedication continues to inspire countless moms and families, helping them find the solutions they need to define their own breastfeeding success.

Welcome, Jacqueline!

Yeah, thank you, Kristin!  I’m super excited to be here and chat with you today!

Yes!  And our topic is so important.  It’s how partners can support breastfeeding.

Yeah, they can do a lot!  I’m really excited because I think this is a topic that doesn’t get spoken about often enough, and it really should.  This is an episode that your listeners are probably going to be like, hey, babe, I need you to listen to this episode.

Absolutely!  So let’s get into a bit about your personal journey.  What led you to focusing on supporting families with lactation?

Definitely was not on my radar at all.  I was actually a stockbroker when I was pregnant with my first.  He’s 11 now.  Yeah, loved it, great job.  I was doing really well.  In fact, I actually got promoted while I was pregnant, and I saw myself going back to it, but taking a bit more time than the standard maternity leave in the US.  But then I had my son, and I took a Bradley method class for preparing for the birth, which is 12 weeks long.  And I read a book or two and did some research.  I thought I was super prepared.  And then this baby came, and I realized I was not prepared at all.  And my birth didn’t go the way I had planned, either, so I invested all this time in planning a birth that is hours long, right, and then I did not prepare for postpartum.   Initially, I had a doula.  I had a midwife.  I had the whole thing, right?  They’re trying to help me with this latch in the hospital, and I even took a breastfeeding class, actually, but it mainly taught us about the benefits of breastmilk; very little about breastfeeding.  That was not very helpful.  I brought the packet with me to the hospital.  I remember that and looking at it going, none of these things are helpful right now.  It’s like the latch hurt.  My nipples are bruised.  What’s going on?  And there was a lactation consultant.  She came in, and she would just grab my baby, slam his head on my boob, and be like, yeah, just do that.  And I was like, do what, exactly?  I can’t – that seems forceful, for one, but two, I’m not able to do that.  And she would walk out, and that’s it.

So I go home thinking, okay, well, this is just how it is.  I was determined to breastfeed, for whatever reason.  I don’t know, it just didn’t really enter my mind to not do it, I guess.  I didn’t know anything about formula.  It wasn’t something I’d researched.  I wasn’t having an issue making milk, so that was good.  Well, I didn’t really know, but it didn’t seem like it, right?  I mean, he had diapers and he was putting on weight.

I went to the pediatrician.  She was also a lactation consultant, an actual IBCLD.

Nice!  That’s rare!

Yeah!  I chose her specifically for that reason.  So I go to her, and I was like, it really hurts.  You know, what about this position, or this one?  I figured I just needed a different position.  And she was like, stop worrying about the position.  Just do the basic whatever works.  And I was like, okay.  But there was no discussion about how breastfeeding was painful for me and that it was potentially a problem or any of that.

So then fast forward to six weeks postpartum.  I go to my first Le Leche League meeting, which I think was the first time I had left the house myself with the baby and not with my husband or someone else.  And I heard at that meeting for the first time ever that breastfeeding isn’t supposed to be painful.  What I did was I got internally angry because I was like, well, breastfeeding is painful for me.  There wasn’t a solution.  It was just part of a discussion that they were having in the meeting, and it certainly wasn’t an affront to me.  No one even knew breastfeeding was painful for me.  I hadn’t brought it up.  But then I remembered just feeling angry.  Like, what do you know?  Breastfeeding is painful.  And I just felt alone and rejected and I don’t know; it was weird.

So breastfeeding stopped being as painful as time went on and I kept with it, and it wasn’t until – gosh, I don’t know.  I got involved in doing breastfeeding support because I always – I felt like I just kept trying to figure out why it was hurting or why was he so fussy, why was he spitting up.  There were all these things that I kept looking into.  Like, is it normal that I leak so much?  He has baby acne; what’s going on?  I’m researching all of these things.  And I guess I never stopped.

So then I decided that I would make a career out of it.  In my studies to become a lactation consultant, that’s when I figured out, oh, pain is actually a problem, and it turned out that my son had a tongue tie and a lip tie.  And once we got his lip tie fixed, which was when he was a toddler – he was 21 months.  I was still nursing.  For the first time ever, I experienced comfortable breastfeeding.  It wasn’t painful at that point.  If you had asked me if I was uncomfortable, I wouldn’t have said I was.  But all of a sudden, I felt the difference, and it was crazy to notice that.  Anyway, that made me super passionate about tongue tie and lip tie.  I still wasn’t certified.  I was still doing my clinical hours, but that’s what really got me excited about how other moms need to know this information.

Absolutely.  Yeah, that would have been my guess when you were describing pain.  My son, my second child, had a tongue tie, and I didn’t have pain nursing my daughter, but certainly with my son.

Yeah, it doesn’t have to be painful with that.  That’s the other thing.

So what was your experience with your partner’s involvement in supporting you personally?

It was interesting.  Again, I wasn’t prepared.  I had no idea what it was going to be like on the other side of things.  I don’t know what I thought.  I think that’s common, though.  I didn’t have any siblings.  I didn’t have any other friends with babies, so this was really new territory.  My husband was the oldest.  He has a sister.  So there wasn’t any previous exposure to raising and taking care of babies that either one of us had.  I dove into research mode.  I was taking a pause from work, and I had the time.  Of course, he had two weeks off or something, and then he went back to work.  And he worked from home, so he was here to help out.  Like, he could stay with our baby while I took a shower quickly or something like that.  He could sometimes hold him while he was on a conference call or something.  So that was great.  All of those things in terms of physical help were really great, but there were things where – I don’t know that this is uncommon, but it also is unique to me as a person, that I internalized a lot of things.  I felt like my husband couldn’t understand what I was going through, why I was – he would kind of criticize me.  “You’re just constantly researching things,” and I’m like, yeah, because I don’t know anything about having a baby, and you should maybe research, too.  And I would try to share things with him, and he wouldn’t really read the article or he wouldn’t listen to the podcast episode or he wouldn’t look at the book.  And so I just started to feel a bit of distance in terms of that, coparenting with him.  And so I started a moms’ group and I really leaned into that and found my tribe of people that understood.  I got most of my emotional and parenting support through that.  But yeah, my husband, one, didn’t seem quite as interested in the parenting adventure as I was.

Very typical until baby is there.  Then it’s a totally different thing.

Right?  And I think he kind of felt like, well, she seems like she’s got this.  She’s the one doing all the research, and she’s not working right now, so I’ll just let her handle it.  But then over time, some resentment did build on both of our parts where I was like, well, you should be more involved, and he was like, but you won’t let me be involved.  So I’m not saying – it wasn’t good or bad.  There’s both sides.  But I think we were just really unprepared and we faltered in our communication with one another.  It was a rocky road at times.

So what is your advice, working with families and how partners can be supportive of the breastfeeding and/or pumping journey?

I think one of the best things that you could do is talk to people that you know and trust who have children, ideally have had babies recently, and ask them, what were your initial days like with the baby?  What would you have done differently?  What do you think worked really well?  Ask those questions to real people that you know and trust because they’re going to give you the real story.  No book, no podcast can truly ever prepare you, you know what I mean?  Like, and what I mean by that is, I have a really good friend who I wish I had met earlier in life.  And we had a mutual friend who was pregnant, and she gave her the best advice.  I will mince words; I will not say it as well as she did, and she’s Australian, so she has a cool accent and it sounded even better.  But she was like, look, this is going to be the hardest thing that you’re ever going to go through in your life once you have this baby.  This whole transition of you becoming a mom – it’s awful.  You’re going to be sleep deprived.  You’re going to be this, you’re going to be that.  No one really tells you what it’s like.  But it’s also going to be the best thing that’s ever happened to you.  That’s the best way to sum it up.  Of course, I’m the woman, the mother who’s gone through it, so it’s sometimes difficult for me to really say what it’s like to be the man or the partner or the husband or whatever, but I think that’s true for them as well.  And we can’t leave them out of the equation.

So I think honest communication up front.  Be on solid ground with your communication with one another.  You have to be open.  You have to be willing to receive each other’s emotions about things and be curious about how they’re feeling and all of that because hormonally, for the mother, there’s all these big changes.  Her brain – I mean, we know, there are real changes that happen to a mother’s brain very, very quickly during pregnancy but especially immediately postpartum.  And you really need to have a good read on your partner and you have to have a good sense of how they’re feeling.  You have to have great communication.  So I think on both sides, but really, the one who isn’t birthing the baby is going to have to take on a bigger load for not just a week or a couple weeks.  Well, forever, honestly.  But it’s going to be really intense because your partner is healing.  She just gave birth or had a C-section and that’s a major surgery, and she is going to need taking care of.  But that means you have to take care of yourself so you can take care of her, too.  So it’s a lot.  I would just say it’s a lot.  It’s not scary.  It’s not bad.  But it’s a lot.

And I find that dads tend to love to figure out the gear.  I know my husband – my daughter was in the NICU, so he figured out the hospital grade pump that we rented and all of the gear that I hadn’t prepped for with taking a breastfeeding class and thinking that I would just feed my baby.  But we had some transitions before I could adjust, so he loved figuring out all of the feeding gear.

Yes, which – see, that’s where I would caution people when it comes to breastfeeding because you think that you’re so prepared, and I know you want to put it on the registry so that other people can purchase these things for you, but there is so much that you don’t know whether or not you’re going to need or if you’re going to need that exact brand or item until you’re on the other side.  Like, I always tell my clients, I wouldn’t buy bottles ahead of time.  Like, unless you know you’re having a preemie or something, then buy a bottle specifically for a preemie.  You can get a pump through insurance if you’re in the US, those sorts of things.  But really try not to go nuts and just ask for gift cards or tell people, I’m going to be adding things to the registry once the baby is here, and that’s a great time.  Because people still like to buy you newborn gifts and things.  I know the gear is – what a lot of families do is they go and read reviews on products from other parents, but as a professional and seeing that not all baby bottles are designed well – in fact, most of them are not, and so you don’t know, right?  Is this one going to cause your baby to spit up?  Is it going to feed them too quickly?  Just because some other family “liked” the bottle doesn’t mean it’s a good bottle for your baby.  So I try to caution parents, like, other than diapers and clothing and whatever, those kinds of things – I usually suggest holding off.  Dads are like, oh, I want to get all technical.  Sorry, guys.  Don’t, not yet.  Be prepared; have options.  Have a couple things.  Or at least, I tell people, if you have these things purchased for you, don’t open the packaging so that you can return it in case it doesn’t work out.

So true!  100%.  I’m a baby registry consultant in addition to being a birth and postpartum doula, so I agree with you.

Yeah, don’t open it.  Don’t wash it.  Don’t put it away.

Exactly.  If it is purchased, hold off.  You just don’t know exactly what your baby’s needs are going to be, as you mentioned.  And as far as taking classes, an evidence-focused, very hands-on breastfeeding class – I know the one that we teach at Gold Coast is very partner-involved and demonstrates different latches and so on.  Do you recommend that partners attend and do some preparation during pregnancy?

I do.  I think just to be good support is knowing the things that your partner needs to know, especially during their recovery when they may not remember or their brain just went through something crazy and then they’re sleep deprived.  We need someone who’s got it together to remind them, right?  Hey, remember in that class they showed us this, and then you’re like, oh, yeah, thanks.  And someone who gets it, because I think what’s really hard is there’s a lot that can be going on in the moment for a mom.  Let’s say she’s trying to get her baby to latch and she’s struggling and her partner is right there.  If she has to explain to that person what she learned in a class, like, now that’s just double labor for her.  We don’t want to create a situation like that.  He should come in knowing the basics and be there to support her.  I think also what’s important about taking a breastfeeding class or going through that, for the dad’s side of things, is that it also helps them not give what they would perceive as supportive advice but really isn’t.  What I mean by that is, I can’t tell you how many appointments I’ve had with clients where the dad will just say, “I just don’t understand why she’s doing this to herself.  Can’t we just give formula?”  And they think that they’re offering a solution, right, like a lot of men like to offer solutions instead of really hearing the struggle, and that can be very frustrating.  But it’s well intentioned.  Over here, the mom is in tears saying, I have put in so much effort and I am trying my hardest and I just want to breastfeed this baby.  I want to have this connection.  I want to do it for the health benefits.  Whatever the reasons are, and for you to suggest formula is completely dismissive of my feelings.  So we don’t want a scenario like that.  I think most importantly, ask your partner.  Hey, what are your goals?  You plan on breastfeeding?  What does that mean to you?  Why do you want to breastfeed?  What do you know about it?  What are your goals?  How can I support you in those goals?  Just asking lots of questions and having a foundation of a great breastfeeding class, that’s an awesome way to start.

Exactly.  And how can partners support with supply issues?

Good question.  Don’t suggest formula.

As you mentioned, that is the first go-to, but I feel like there’s so much more, especially with your education, that partners can do to help.

Yes.  Don’t worry; the pediatrician or lactation consultant will do that.  You don’t need to, hopefully.  I mean, if you’re truly concerned about the health of your child, then yes, obviously, please suggest that.  But realistically, just listen to their concerns.  Hey, I can see that this is really upsetting for you.  Do you want to talk about it?  Just asking those questions, being curious.  Don’t make assumptions.  Don’t offer solutions.  Don’t come home with lactation cookies and lactation tea and be like, hey, I got everything for you.  Unless you know that she wants that, don’t assume.  Ask her what she needs.  Ask her what she wants.  If she doesn’t know, then you’re welcome to make suggestions, but I think it’s when moms don’t want to disappoint.  They’re like, okay, well maybe I should try this.  My husband bought me this stuff.  Maybe it’s not the right thing.  I think trying to get out of that solution-oriented problem solving and just talking, communicating, listening, lending an ear.  I think also just reassuring your partner.  Saying all the things that they’re doing great or that are going well.  Hey, you know what?  It’s awesome you’ve been able to give our baby breastmilk for two weeks.  That’s more than a lot of moms, and I’m so proud of you.  Just that kind of thing, that kind of encouragement.  Like, look, when he’s latched, he just relaxes.  He’s so calm.  He loves when you nurse him.  Or when she’s pumping, wow, you are working so hard at pumping for our baby.  You are so dedicated.  I appreciate you.  Just things like that.

Affirmations go a long way.

Yeah, affirmations, listening, support.  Stay away from solutions and problem solving.  Feel free to make suggestions, like, hey, I see how hard you’re struggling.  Maybe it’s time to reach out to a lactation consultant to get some more help.  Instead of saying, like, I really think you should see a lactation consultant.  It’s all about those kinds of things of just tuning in, asking questions, not making assumptions.  I think pumping is also especially hard where sometimes dads and mothers-in-law and other people will say things like, why don’t you pump so I can just feed the baby a bottle?  You didn’t really reduce the amount of labor for her if the alternative was that she could have nursed the baby.  But if she is pumping because she needs to or wants to, you can be so supportive and helpful with washing and drying all of those pump parts and making sure they’re ready to go for the next time.  Bringing her a glass of water, because as soon as that milk starts flowing, I guarantee she is thirsty like she’s never been thirsty in her life.  Getting her a snack, having something ready and available for her to eat quickly because you get very hungry when you’re making milk a lot of the time.  Those sorts of things can go a long way.  If it’s the middle of the night, you already woke up.  You heard the baby.  Go and get the baby out of the bassinet or the crib.  Bring the baby to her for her to nurse the baby, and then go lay the baby back down for her.  Participate in it.  Know the struggle with her.  Understand what’s going on.  And you’ll do great.

Beautiful advice.  So how can our listeners connect with you?  I know you have so many different programs and ways that no matter where our listeners or doula clients live, they’d be able to connect with you.

Yeah, really just our website is kind of the hub for everything.  So they can go to Holistic Lactation, and on there, we have our Nurtured Collective program, which is a collection of courses but also a community.  I didn’t really create it to be a course that you go through, like here’s the introduction and part one and part two and then the conclusion.  It’s like choose your own adventure.  If you join and you have a six-month old, you can go to the section for things that happen when they’re six months old, or I have a clogged duct, or whatever it is.  You don’t need to worry about the rest of the content, although you certainly can.  And then we have a community, so the members and us – myself and another IBCLC, Kate, where we’re giving you the expert advice.  We’re encouraging you.  We’re answering your questions.  But then the other moms – every time one of our members posts or comments on another member’s posts, I am always blown away.  It’s like – I don’t know.  I guess they just follow the lead that Kate and I have set, and I’m like, you said what I would have said.  That was amazing.  There’s so much thought and intention put into the responses.  We’ve tried to really curate the content in a way that you know when you come into it, this is not a hot mess mom’s group.  There’s no mom shaming.  There’s no – everyone is so empathetic and understanding.  It is like a sigh of relief in there.  I love the Nurtered Collective.  You can kind of choose your own adventure in there and be a part of it for as long as you want.  So yeah, we would love to have people.  And then we’re really active on Instagram @holisticlactation.

And you also have supplements, correct?

I do.  I don’t even want to come across as super salesy about it, but yes.  Currently, we have two.  One is the Advanced Lactation Formula, which is mostly meant for milk supply and breastmilk quality and postpartum energy.  And then Lactation Flow Formula, which also is for milk supply, but clogged ducts, mastitis, engorgement, and those sorts of things.  And then we’ll be introducing others soon.

Exciting!

Yeah, I made those supplements.  They’re unique blends because I was recommending individual herbs or supplements to clients and then trying to take three or four things and then get the dosages right and it’s expensive and it all adds up.  They were like, isn’t there just something all in one I can take?  Which I get.  Mom life, right?  And I was like, no.  And then they were like, you should make something of your own.  I was like, oh, ha ha, I don’t do that.  Here I am.  I did it.

I love it.  You see a need; you might as well solve the problem.

Exactly.  And our course material is more like – like I said, it’s not exactly a course.  Kate and I have put a lot of work into this where it’s concise, but it’s also in depth.  You get what you need.  You get all the practical stuff.  There’s no fluff.  It’s the realities of breastfeeding, what to do when you encounter all of these different challenges.  So you don’t have to beat around the bush and scan 15 blog articles and watch videos on YouTube and all of that.

That is so beautiful.  Any final advice for our listeners, Jacqueline?

Yeah, I would say that a lot of people, especially moms who obviously deeply care about these babies that they’re having, can be too hard on themselves.  I’m speaking from experience.  And what I would say is that the sooner that you can really know that you are doing the best you can at this moment in time and that you don’t need to beat yourself up.  You’re not a bad mom.  You’re not doing things wrong.  Problems are real.  Do not dismiss your own problems.  Do not think that you’re a failure because something is not going the way that you thought it was going to go or the way you want it to go.  Things happen.  You’re going to be okay.  You’re doing great, and you are totally not alone.

Excellent advice!  Thank you so much for sharing all of your wisdom!  We’ll have to have you on again!

I would love that!  Thanks for having me, Kristin!

IMPORTANT LINKS

Holistic Lactation

Birth and postpartum support from Gold Coast Doulas

Becoming A Mother course

Buy our book, Supported

 Kristin Revere and Aly Dabbs discuss how dropping naps too soon can affect sleep at night in the latest episode of Ask the Doulas podcast.  Aly gives tips on how parents can push through this phase.  She is the founder of Restful Baby and has a podcast called Aly, The Restful Mama.

Hello, hello!  This is Kristin Revere with Ask the Doulas, and I am thrilled to chat with Aly Dabbs today.  Our topic is all about toddler naps.  Aly is a wife and mama to two wildly curious boys and lives in the Nashville area.  She graduated from Center from Pediatric Sleep Management in September 2023 and started her business, Restful Baby, in February 2024.  Aly hired a sleep consultant with her firstborn and saw firsthand the benefits of teaching her baby to sleep independently.  When pregnant with her second, Aly kept feeling this pull to help other moms navigate a time that feels really, really hard and often isolating.  Through working with families, watching her own toddler grow, and taking continuing education classes, Aly has developed a love for all things toddler sleep.  It is her passion to help exhausted toddler moms work through those big toddler emotions, to get their child to sleep through the night, and in their own bed.  Her approach is to lead with love and take this dreaded thing – bedtime and naptime – and turn it into something fun.

Since starting her business, Aly has learned a ton about networking with local businesses, marketing herself on social media, and has also launched her own podcast, Aly, The Restful Mama. 

Welcome, Aly!

Hi!  Thanks for having me!  I’m so excited!

Yes!  This chat is so important.  Even the doulas on my team – and we have four sleep consultants at Gold Coast – struggle with getting their toddlers to nap.  It’s those battles that continue when you’re dealing with a newborn and trying to get naptime in an established routine.  I would love to hear your thoughts on navigating that very important naptime for toddlers.

Absolutely.  Naps can be so tricky.  They’re a little bit more complex and a whole thing in and of itself.  I think it’s such a great topic.

Absolutely!  And I know that naptime effects sleep time, and so it’s important to continue that, even if you’re getting some resistance from your toddler.

Yes.  Especially those two-year-olds that have the whole fear of missing out.  It’s a real thing for these little guys, and they can really start to fight naps and not want to miss out on anything.  Moms, it’s just a phase.  We have to push through.

Yes!  So where to begin, Aly?  I would love your tips.

So a lot of moms – and I do work primarily with toddlers, even though I do help the little ones, but the season of this summer, I’ve worked with a lot of moms who are expecting second babies.  They are realizing that sleep is going to be a lot harder once they have maybe a toddler who’s fighting naps and having issues at bedtime, and then they’re going to have a new baby and starting all of the middle of the night wakes and feedings.  The exhaustion multiplies, so they have those feelings and fears, and they want to get sleep in a better place before a new baby comes.  So I’ve been working with a lot of soon to be second time moms wanting to get sleep in a better place for their toddlers, whether they’re dealing with inconsistent naps or fights at bedtime.  For naps for the toddlers, it is so common for a two-year-old to start protesting, resisting, fighting, having big emotions, about naptime.  For all of those reasons: not wanting to miss out, feeling like they really don’t want to sleep.  And a lot of moms are like, okay, my toddler is done napping.  We made it to two years.

Right.  I see it on social media all the time.  It’s like, okay, my kid said they’re done today.  Naptime is not a thing anymore.

Yes, and I think the statistic is that 2.5% of two year olds are napping, but they don’t need to, and then it’s really the 97.5% are more like four to five years old.  Naps come up a lot, and I always tell my moms, really try to get it to four.  If you’re getting those nap strikes at two, it’s just a phase.  Keep going.  You can get to the other side and naps will get in a better place.  Those are some things that I work with my families on, whether it’s just a nap strike or just getting naps more consistent.  And then I have some tips and tricks, too, for when it is time to drop the nap closer to four or even five.  Some kids continue to nap later into life, which is awesome.  Keep the nap as long as possible.  But then there are some transition tips for when it is time to drop a nap and getting some quiet time in replacement of that nap as well.

That is so important, even for those three to four year olds where the mom wants to rest when baby is during the day and there isn’t a set naptime and the child’s got a very short daycare or preschool phase and may be home during naptime.

Oh, yes.  I think it’s probably harder sometimes for the stay at home moms because if they’re there and their toddler is fighting naps, they maybe kind of give up or they assume, okay, my child is done napping.  Or they spend an hour or two trying to get them to nap, and then naptime is past, versus daycare having a little bit more structure.  And toddlers are so much like monkey see, monkey see.  If the other kids are laying down, even if they have some trouble with naptime – because I have worked with daycares, too, to help with that – but they maybe are more likely to lay down just like the other kids are, where they maybe don’t do that at home, right?

Absolutely, yes.  As you mentioned, it’s more of that imitation, and if that’s the routine at daycare and there’s not that structure at home, then even on weekends, those routines that are established may go away unless following the patterns of the daycare is something that’s done in the household.

Yes, and through sleep training, whether with the little ones or the toddlers, my big push is consistency, right?  We want to make sure that we’re being consistent on all fronts, and that way the toddler knows what to expect.  If you’re maybe enforcing it one day and not the next, it can be a little confusing and probably frustrating for the child and for the parent, if I’m being honest.

Yes, I totally agree, Aly.  And what are your thoughts on the theory that if you eliminate the toddler nap during the day, that they will sleep longer at night?

You will very likely find an overtired toddler who missed their nap, is super fussy, extra cranky, giving you a hard time at dinner or right before bed, or the toddler who gets the second wind and is doing the zoomies all over the house right before bedtime, running around like a crazy person, because they’re just so tired that they really can’t function anymore.  You are more likely to start seeing pushback at bedtime, fighting bedtime harder, or maybe your toddler normally sleeps through the night pretty well, but now they’re waking up throughout the night or super early in the morning, and it seems so backwards, but when your child is overtired, it’s more disruptive to sleep, and you start seeing other disturbances and early morning wakeups, middle of the night wakeups, or the overall bedtime fight because they’re just too tired.  And I know it seems so backwards.  I hear a lot of moms or grandparents say oh, the child is going to sleep so well tonight because I ran them so hard at the park.  They didn’t take a nap.  They’re going to be exhausted!  And in my head, whenever I hear that, I’m like, oh, no, it’s going to be a long night.  Even for my own mom, when she takes my three year old and maybe he takes a shorter nap or she skips it and then they go do all these things and have so much fun and she’s like, oh, he’s going to sleep great tonight – and in my head I’m thinking, it’s going to be a long night.

Exactly.  That is the truth!  The theory that if you skip it or tire them out, that it’s going to be an easy night, it’s not reality at all.

Right.  So kind of my tips for if you have the two year old or three year old who’s fighting nap – again, push through.  Hold on to that nap.  Keep going.  Working on your nap routine, making sure it’s consistent with a mini version of what you do at bedtime.  I really like the Hatch sound machine because it has a light feature that you can use and you can change it from your phone.  So kind of like the OK to Wake clocks, if you’re familiar with that, the light is red overnight while you’re supposed to be sleeping, and then in the morning when you’re able to get up and leave the bedroom, the light turns green.  I use kind of a modified version of that for naptime, kind of like the stoplight, where when the light is red, you need to be actively laying down trying to sleep.  And then the light can change to yellow, maybe 30 or 45 minutes into to the nap, and then for another 15 to 30 minutes, the light turns yellow.  At that point, the toddler can get out of bed.  They can play with some quiet, approved toys in the bedroom that you’ve already discussed with your toddler.  Maybe take out anything really loud or crazy that they have, and they can maybe do a puzzle or play with some blocks.  My toddler can’t read yet, but he picks up his books and kind of pretends that he’s reading, and he’ll kind of remember stories that we’ve told him based on the book.  Have some of those things that they can do quietly for the allotted time while the light is yellow.  And then when the light turns green, they’re able to get up, leave the room, and play.  Naptime is over.  And that’s the bigger thing when we’re transitioning away from naps and still having quiet time because even if your toddler is four and they drop a nap, 12 to 13 hours in a day is a long time without any rest for your toddler, especially when they’re used to having that nap.  So from napping even an hour a day to nothing can be really hard and you can have those fussy, cranky evenings.  Whereas if you start implementing quiet time, even after they are old enough to drop that nap, it can kind of help get you through the rest of the day.  And so when you have that two or three year old that’s fighting it, if we are working on getting naps more consistent or pushing through that nap strike, we’re going to be following kind of the same steps that we’re doing in maybe a sleep plan overnight, but if they’re really fighting it, I would much rather you implement the quiet time than skip it altogether.

That makes complete sense.  So what other tips do you have for families who are trying to navigate the stressful time – or if there’s a caregiver in the house, say an au pair or a nanny – how do you work with families where other people need to implement the daytime and overnight plans?

Great question.  My answer for both would be communication.  One of the reasons that I absolutely love working with toddlers is because they can communicate with you.  They can be involved in the decision making.  They can really get into the process, whether it’s overnight, fixing bedtime, or working through nap problems.  You can really get them on board and involved in such a different way than we can with the little babies who are working through sleep training.  And same with day care or nannies or maybe grandparents are helping out.  I find that a lot of times, people really want to help.  If you go to your daycare provider and you let them know, hey, this is kind of what we’re going through.  This is what we’re working on at home.  More times than not, they are on board and they want to help you.  They want to do the same things that you’re doing at home or tell you what they’re doing there so you can kind of mimic what they’re doing a little bit.

Same with a nanny coming into your home.  I think communication goes a really long way and letting them know what you’re working on and why it’s so important.  Same with the little kids.  My big push is, every time I work with a family with toddlers, I want every family that I work with to call a family meeting.  Let the child know what’s expected at bedtime or naptime and why it’s so important.  I send little videos to the toddlers that I work with.  They’re like, “Hi, I’m Aly.  I’ve been working with your Mommy.”  I talk about why sleep is so important for your body and all of these things, and they really, really get into it.  That gets them really excited about it, and then you’re also talking to them about it in a positive way.  You can make it really fun.  You can have it where they send videos to grandparents after naptime to say, “I waited for my light to turn green,” or whatever it is that you’re working on.  And then when that goal is reached, celebrate it.  Let them call grandparents.  Let them call aunts and uncles.  If they’re in daycare, they can tell their teacher in the morning.  Whatever it is.  If you’re working with a sleep trainer and they do send videos back and forth like me – I love getting videos back from my toddlers, especially when they’re so excited because they’ve reached that goal.  It’s a big deal for them.

Absolutely.  I love that you mentioned grandparents, Aly, because grandparents are often caregivers now that we’re in this childcare shortage.  And with inflation, it’s hard to afford childcare.  So it can be challenging for grandparents who are used to parenting a certain way to follow your individual family goals that may differ from even their other children and how their other grandkids sleep or don’t handle naptime, for example.

Absolutely.  I’ve definitely worked with families who had the maybe over-opinionated mother-in-law who says, you know, we didn’t do this whenever I was raising your husband or whatever.  Or their own moms are like, well, you didn’t sleep like that.  You were fine.  Look how you turned out.  But again, I think talking to them and kind of meeting them where they are – and I know people are different, but more times than not, I think that people are really on board with helping, especially if they know why.  If you tell them, look, my little guy is waking up seven times a night, even if only briefly.  They’re getting up out of bed and they’re coming into my room.  I’m just so tired.  We really have to work through this, and even if it’s going to be a week or two weeks of a push, we’re going to come out on the other side and let them know, like, hey, this is temporary.

And I’m not the sleep consultant who’s super rigid and strict.  Nothing has to be so serious.  I’m all about having fun with it.  A lot of moms come to me and they’re like, you know, I want to do this, but I want to be able to still have my toddler in my bed with me sometimes.  I want to still be able to snuggle with my baby.  And I am all for that.  I think when those are the exceptions, that’s different than the norm.  And we can get sleep in a better place, and then every now and then, you can still have those fun nights, or maybe when it’s storming or a little one is sick or maybe a family fun night where we watched a movie and we’re going to stick you in bed with us just because.

Yeah, absolutely.  So what is the benefit to working with a sleep consultant or coach like yourself versus reading a book or going through a program that is not customized the way you’re talking about meeting individual needs and so on?

Oh, my gosh, great question.  So for all of the information out there on Google – there is a million things.  You can type in one question about your little one’s sleep, and you’re going to get a million different answers, a bunch of different ways to treat that issue.  It can be really overwhelming.  You’re maybe asking your girlfriends what worked with their kiddos.  You’re in Facebook mom groups kind of stalking all the questions and trying to find the answers.  But every kid is different, so what worked for your best friend or another mom in a Facebook mom group might not work for yours.  And then for those generic sleep plans – you can type into Google a sleep plan for a six month old, and something is going to come out.  They’re going to spit out something.  But what if you are the working mom, and that sleep plan says your baby wakes up at 7:30, but you have to be out of the house by 6:45?  That now has skewed the whole schedule.  That doesn’t work for you.  If it has these nap schedules but daycare doesn’t do that – Google doesn’t take into account what you’re going through.  It also doesn’t take into account what sleep issues you have, and more importantly, what sleep goals do you have.  What are you wanting to achieve out of this?  I can come up with a sleep plan based on age, but my number one is, I want to know that mom or dad’s sleep goals.  What are they actually working towards?  Because if I give them a sleep plan – yeah, it will get your baby sleeping, but maybe you had something more specific in mind that you’re really, really wanting to focus on those 5:30 a.m. wakeups or you’re still breastfeeding and you want to be able to do that through the night, which I am all for.  Those custom sleep plans really get to the heart of what are you going through, and what does your child respond to?  I worked with two kiddos this summer, different families, same age, a boy and a girl, and we worked on different things.  I really try to get what motivates the toddler and then going more towards, let’s have fun with it.  Let’s get them involved.  Let’s see what they respond to.

The little boy, he was working towards being able to go get a Build A Bear.  He had a sticker chart, and he working towards earning a bear.  And he went to Build A Bear and he got to pick out his stuffed animal.  He was telling all the workers that he learned how to sleep in his own bed – because he was sleeping on the couch with mom and then being moved into mom and dad’s bed after he fell asleep.  He was so excited, and I got videos all the time for him.  He was really, really into.

At the same time, the little girl I was working with, same age, she told her mom that she could throw that sticker chart in the trash.  She didn’t want it.  She didn’t need any more toys.  We switched gears.  We were working on the OK to Wake for sleeping in because she was getting up at 4:45 every morning, and we were trying to get that closer to 6:30.  We were going to do it where she had a date with Mom.  They could go have a pancake breakfast or something, just the two of them.  But she was like, I spend enough time with you.  She was not into any of these little rewards that we were coming up with.  So we had to really get creative: what does she want?  What will she respond to where she’s going to work towards that?  And we figured it out.  It was pretty funny.  But it just goes to show you that kids respond differently.  They work towards things differently.  They have different motivators.  They’re just all so different and so special.

They are!  So now I’m invested – what was her motivator?

Candy.  It was so funny.  I pulled out all the stops for this little girl.  They were so funny.  They were cracking me up.  But we did Bedtime Passes, so she would get so many Bedtime Passes at night, and then if she kept them, however many – let’s say she had three Bedtime Passes.  If she got up in the middle of the night, Mom would take one of her Bedtime Passes away.  Then if she still had one or two in the morning, she could trade them in for something.  She didn’t care about it.  She was getting up all the time.  So I was like, give her extra Bedtime Passes – the goal being we want her to be successful.  We want her to win.  We don’t want her to go all night and not have any because we want her to learn that if she keeps a pass, she gets something – for a temporary basis as she’s working towards later sleep.  So we shifted it to candy because the mom says she really likes sweets.  And I was like, well, if you’re okay with her having maybe some M&Ms in the morning, let’s just try it.  And this little girl – we told her the night before.  She had her Bedtime Passes.  She knew what she was going to get if she kept them.  She kept every single one of them.  She didn’t get up one time.  And then when her light turned green, she ran out of her room, and she was like, I get candy!

Oh, so funny!  I love it.  And I also think it’s so unique that you’re in the thick of it with your own kids, so you can be so relatable to your clients.

Yeah, we have a one year old and a three year old, both boys, so it has been neat kind of being back in the baby days and everything with multiple naps and following wake windows and all of that.  We finally got him down to one nap a day, so they nap kind of together.  Whereas before, my baby would nap twice a nap, so from 10:30 to 12:00, and then my toddler would go down, and when my toddler would wake up, the baby would go down for a nap.  Every day, one of my children were napping.  It was like we didn’t leave the house.  We couldn’t do anything because we really don’t want to mess up naptime.  It felt crazy.  I’m so glad that now they’re kind of napping once a day at the same time, and it’s really opened up some of that time for us to go and do things again.

That’s perfect.  So any final tips for our listeners, Aly?

What I tell every single mom is give yourself some grace.  It is super hard.  Mom life is insane, and it’s amazing and wonderful and beautiful, but it’s also very challenging.  You question yourself, and you’re always wanting to be the best.  And you are.  You are the best person, the best mom for your kid.  Lean into that, and it will all be okay.

Agreed.  Great advice!  So how can our listeners find you?

The easiest way is Instagram.  I am @aly_sleepconsultant.  Super easy to find there.  Give me a follow.  And then my website is restfulbaby.com.  And I do have a podcast, Aly, The Restful Mama on Apple, Spotify, wherever.  It’s all things momhood and sleep.  I also have my sleep packages, and if you guys are listening, you can just let me know that you found me from Kristin, and we can do $50 off.

Excellent!  What a gift!  And as you mentioned, you live in the Nashville area, but you work with clients all over the country, correct?

Yes, that is the beauty of it.  I’ve worked with people in New York and Texas and California.  Everything is virtual, so we can get on regular phone calls, Facetime, texting.  It just depends.  Some moms are anti-phone calls, which I get.  It’s so much easier to text.  That’s totally fine.  I also send videos back and forth with mom’s permission for their little one to be involved.  I email over the sleep plans and all of that good stuff.  So yes, all virtual.  Wherever you are, we can work together.

Beautiful!  Thank you so much, Aly!  Appreciate all of your wisdom today!

IMPORTANT LINKS

Restful Baby

Birth and postpartum support from Gold Coast Doulas

Becoming A Mother course

Buy our book, Supported

Sarah Marie shared her personal birth and maternity leave stories in this informative Ask the Doulas podcast episode.  She gives listeners tools and resources to better plan for birth and baby on the emotional vs. physical level. 

Hello, hello!  This is Kristin Revere with Ask the Doulas, and I am thrilled to be chatting with Sarah Marie Bilger.  Aside from being the owner of Entering Motherhood, Sarah Marie is a mom of two, wife, and birth and postpartum doula.  Sarah is certified as a postpartum nutrition professional through Postpartum University and holds a doula certification specifically centered around VBAC preparation through the VBAC Link.  Sarah Marie loves capturing motherhood moments through photography and is an active member of Birth Worker Academy.  She is the host of the Entering Motherhood podcast.  After an unplanned Cesarean with her daughter in 2019, Sarah Marie quickly realized the lack of support and misinformation surrounding pregnancy, birth, and postpartum.  Later noticing she had postpartum anxiety, postpartum depression, and was needing to work through some past trauma, she sought out any help she could get her hands on and began healing as she navigated motherhood as best she could.

Welcome, Sarah Marie!

Hi!  Thank you so much for having me!  I’m excited to be here!

I’m excited to chat!  Our topic today is the mental preparation that is needed for the birth as well as the postnatal phase.  Let’s get into it!

I think this is super important because it’s so much a part of my story and really what happened in my situation and what I see in clients and so much of what I feel we’re lacking right now because there’s so much physical preparation.  Do all the squats and eat this way and all the doing.  We don’t really focus on what it takes to mentally prepare for not only birth but the postpartum phase as well.

Yes, I 100% agree.  At Gold Coast, one of our primary classes that we teach is HypnoBirthing, which I’m sure you’re familiar with, the mental preparation that is involved in that class, whereas some classes are focused more on the physical end of things.

Yeah, that is one thing that I took during my VBAC and something that I recommend to clients, even first time parents, because it really helps you drop into that space to focus on what you need to be doing and it helps just block out any sort of external factors that might be happening.

Exactly, definitely.  And then as far as your personal story, how did you utilize some of those mental tools, not only for your labor, but also in the motherhood phase?  We are mothers all over again, whether it’s baby one or baby three.

For my first – my daughter was born in 2019, and she was an unplanned Cesarean.  I had my water break first.  That was the first sign of any sort of labor.  All of my birthing classes and people had said, oh, your water is not going to break like in the movies, and it’s not going to be the first thing that happens; don’t worry!  And so when it did – and that’s what happened.  I think what was playing over and over again in my head was, this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.  This isn’t how it’s supposed to be happening.  And I couldn’t get out of that loop of, this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.  And I didn’t have the tools and the resources that I have now and that I teach my clients of how we can really flip it around, and even if something unexpected happens, we can navigate and figure out what our next move is going to be.  And so Hypnobabies, HypnoBirthing was something that I took for my son’s birth, my VBAC.  And also just really exploring the what-if’s on a deeper layer of kind of understanding, if this does happen, how are we going to approach it, or what is that going to look like?  And if something goes not necessarily according to plan, how can we navigate that moving forward without being flustered or upset?  The same has really flowed into my motherhood experience and how I raise my children and how we navigate different things that happen at home and just all those little things that maybe you didn’t necessarily plan for but happen anyway because it’s life, and we’re not supposed to know everything that’s going to be happening.  How can we really approach it with a better mindset and a more optimistic outlook?

Yes, and not let fear get in the way, even with a prior birth experience that wasn’t the way you had envisioned.

Right.

Very helpful!  Let’s lean into a bit of your mothering journey.  Now, you mentioned utilizing some of the similar tools.  Is that more in those stressful moments, utilizing visualization or breath work?  Can you walk our listeners through some examples?

Yes!  I think for me, a lot of what was going on in my early motherhood experience was a lot of anxiety, a lot of the unknown, a lot of, well, what does this mean, or how do we handle this.  I’ve never done this before.  And I think it was just – you know, I went to therapy for the first time in my life, which is useful for, I would say, most people, even if you go for a short duration of time.  And it allowed me to really just get deeper and ask questions and see what was going on internally as opposed to just how I physically was feeling or looking.  And it allowed me to really just think about, what am I doing, and do I want to be continuing to do this?  You know, I was having those thoughts of, like, what if she goes over here and how does this happen?  Am I doing this right?  And I think it really just helped solidify and build that confidence that I needed in my motherhood journey and allowed me to feel more confident in the things that I was doing and know that the choices that I was making were the right choices at the time and the right choices for our family specifically.  And so I think that’s a lot of what I really try to instill in new moms.  You’re not going to know everything.  You’re not supposed to have it all figured out.  But be confident in the choices that you’re making and really root back to, why do you want to do that.  I think when we have our minds made up of why something is important to us, it’s a lot harder to really break away from that or teeter on the line of, like, should I do this?  Shouldn’t I do that?  And I think that can carry through in a lot of different aspects of our motherhood experience.

Exactly.  I’m really happy that you talked about your personal journey with anxiety and depression because I feel like it’s being talked about more, but not often enough.  And the fact that you sought out therapy for the first time.  What were some of the signs that you noticed that it was beyond the typical baby blues and that you needed additional support?

I had gone back to work.  At that time, I was working as a mechanical engineer, and I had gone back to work at eight week – nine weeks postpartum.  So I had eight weeks off for the Cesarean.  I took an extra week off of vacation.  And so at nine weeks, we dropped our daughter off at daycare, and I started back at work.  And I think up until that point, I was really just existing and going through the motions of trying to navigate everything and trying to figure out what was going on.  I didn’t really take the time to stop.  And so when I went back to work, again, it was just one more thing that was just, you know, I’ve just got to make it through the day.  I’ve just got to go and pump and do all these things.  And I can’t remember exactly at what point – maybe it was about three months postpartum or so.  I was just crying on my bedroom floor, and I was like, who am I?  What am I even doing?  What is going on?  I don’t get to see my daughter at all.  We would come home and it would be bedtime almost for her.  And so it was just like this really big shift, and a lot of people talk about the identity shift and new things that are happening and everything like that, but it was so much more than that because I was really just struggling with like, is this even what I want to be doing?  Why am I feeling so strongly about all of my emotions and all of my feelings and everything that’s going on?  And my husband just kind of looked at me like, I don’t know.  He was kind of lost for words.  I had never felt like this in my life, and I just really said, I think I just need to talk to somebody.  And it was just a lot of very strong feelings, and I’m proud of myself for really being so self-aware that I could put myself in that space of saying, like, okay, well, let’s just try therapy.  Let’s try all the things.  I think I’ve always been a go-getter in that kind of stuff.  If something’s not working, I need to fix it and solve it and put the pieces together.

That’s the engineer in you!

I was like, this doesn’t seem like how it’s supposed to be.  And I know that there is all the untalked about conversations and the parts that nobody tells you about, but this was just so much more of an internal struggle.  I really didn’t know who I was or what I was doing or what I wanted.  So going to therapy was super helpful for me to really solidify those thoughts and have a professional to speak to.

Yes.  Very helpful.  And you mentioned taking an extra week off, but you were working in a male dominated field.  What was it like?  You talked about pumping and that back to work environment.  Of course, there’s the childcare and the struggle we have right now, being in a childcare crisis for working families.  So much additional stress happens with that return to work. 

Yeah, I think for me, I was very fortunate because there was another mom who had literally just gotten back from maternity leave right before I left, so she was just a few months ahead of me on her journey, and we sat right next to each other.  So as soon as I came back, I had a pumping buddy.  I had somebody who was literally going through it with me.  And then a couple months down the line, at one point, four of us were sharing the room.  But it wasn’t for the mom before me – we had no place to pump.  There wasn’t a designated lactation room.  There wasn’t anybody that had asked or needed one before us.  And so she really pioneered that in our office and said, hey, look, we need somewhere to store our milk.  We need a private space with no windows, no way of seeing in.  We need somewhere that we can pump.  We need outlets.  We need all these different things to efficiently be able to do that.  And so they set us up in a room downstairs with a little mini fridge and there was a table.  The sink was actually outside of the room, so we had to kind of bring all of our pump parts into the other room, but it was so nice to have that designated space.  If we didn’t ask for it, I don’t know really what would have been done.  But yeah, it was something that we really had to explain to them and say to them, this is what we need to exist so that we can efficiently store our milk and pump.

And then the daycare was right across the street, so I was able to go there at lunch.  I was only pumping a few times a day and then physically going over to the daycare and nursing my daughter at lunch.

That’s amazing.

That was really nice, and it broke up my days.  But if we had a meeting or something going on that I couldn’t make it over there, it was kind of hard to go the full work day without seeing her.

Of course!  So how did you make the big transition to birth and postpartum work from being an engineer?

It was a journey.  It was a lot of just – again, going to therapy and starting that journey of saying, what is it that I really want to be doing?  I think for engineering, it was kind of the thing of, I was always really good at math and science.  I was always really good at schoolwork.  I was able to get things done and accomplish all of that stuff, but it was never something that I was truly passionate about.  It was just something I was good at.  And I always say that I just kind of fell into it.  It just sort of worked out, and I don’t regret any of it.  I learned so much being in the field.  I met my husband, who’s a mechanical engineer as well, at college.  A lot of good came out of it, but it was never something that I said, like, oh, wouldn’t it be so cool if I did this, or am I truly passionate about this?  Work was work, and I went, and I did it, and I was good at it.  But in becoming a mom, I needed to have more of a passion for my work, and more of a – you know, if I’m leaving my children to go and do this, it has to be worth it.  And so I bounced around a bunch of different ideas.  I started my podcast in 2021, and that really just sparked off the conversation around birth and postpartum.  I enjoyed talking about it, and my whole motherhood experience.  And I enjoyed communicating with different birth workers and digging into all the research and finding out as much as I could about every different aspect of birth and postpartum.  And in doing all of the research and all of the knowledge that I had gained, I really just focused on doula work because it felt the most connected to my purpose of what I’m really supposed to be doing.  Now, it’s been five years of a stretch of figuring out what I wanted to do, and now this is what I do full time.  I do birth and postpartum work, and I just love it.  I feel so called to it, and I just feel like this is what I was meant to be doing all along.  It was just a journey of getting here.

Right!  And many of us get into birth and postpartum work from our own personal experiences, whether they were positive or they were challenging.  I didn’t enter the doula space until I had my second child, but I had hired doulas.

Yeah, I had no idea what a doula was until I got pregnant with my first.  That’s how out of touch – I had no idea about the birth community and everything.  I just figured, oh, I’m pregnant.  I’m going to go to an OB.  I’m going to have a hospital birth.  That’s what your options are.  That’s why I feel even more lit up and passionate about it because I want people to know what all of the different options are and all the different possibilities, and it’s not this world that we live in.  It’s very practical, and there’s so much a part of doula work that can be helpful for any kind of birthing experience.

Right.  And with my first birth, I didn’t know – I knew what doulas were, but I didn’t know how to find them in my area.  They weren’t that popular.  My daughter is going on 14, and I knew about them after her birth, getting more engaged in the breastfeeding community.  And that was my first call once I knew I was pregnant again was to doulas I had met through some breastfeeding activism.  But I agree, back in the day, it was seen of more of a crunchy thing.  And even in TV and movies, doulas are still sort of given those labels and associated more with homebirth or unmedicated birth.  But doulas support all locations for birthing and all types of birth and certainly the postpartum doula role is even less familiar to many than the birth doula role.  I love that you are a professional in both areas and you’re also focused on nutrition, which again, we’ve learned so much about the depletion that results in the deficiencies in minerals and vitamins and nutrients after having a baby, but certainly during pregnancy.  I’d love to hear a bit more about why you were led to focus on the postpartum nutrition.

Yeah, I think that was part of my healing journey with my first.  It was something that really kind of drew me in because I was thinking I was doing all of the things to heal properly, and it still just didn’t seem like things were clicking.  And so again, I just went into the research of it and really tried to understand, why am I still not feeling back to – I’m not saying back to yourself, but just feeling like I can really heal in the way that I felt like I needed to.  And when I focused on my nutrition and I really learned about all of the different deficiencies and what could be going on, I just felt so much better.  I was seeing the work physically in myself change, and so I just felt like I needed to shout it from the rooftops and say, there’s something to this, and there really is a science behind it of how we need to be nourishing ourselves during pregnancy and especially in the postpartum period.  I completely 180’d my experience with my second.  When you talk about postpartum hair loss, for example, I was losing a lot of hair with my daughter and a lot of just that – I would say common experience that we’re seeing now with, oh, yeah, you lose your hair; this is normal.  And while it’s common, I wouldn’t say that it’s normal.  You have to really evaluate what is going on and how much hair loss are you experiencing.  Maybe it is a nutrient deficiency and it’s not something that should be occurring in the magnitude that it is.  I didn’t lose nearly as much with my son.  I mean, you lose hair every day, but not in the amount that I had with my daughter compared to my son.  And I just felt so much more myself, quickly, and I felt like the healing and nourishing side was happening so much more that time around.  It’s something that I share with my clients and something that I really try to instill in them, to honor their body during that time, to rest, to heal, to eat nourishing foods, something that’s comforting and warm and soothing, to be replenishing their body during that time.

Yes, exactly!  And especially for pumping and breastfeeding moms, you’re even more deficient, and so that focus on nutrition can help prevent some of the anxiety and depression.  As you mentioned, hair loss; the tired feeling that doesn’t go away.

Yeah, absolutely.

I could talk to you forever, Sarah Marie, but we are running short on time.  I would love to circle back to our topic and see what final thoughts you have related to mental preparation for birth and postpartum.

Yeah, I think really just trying to tap into that intuition.  I know sometimes that can be difficult for a lot of us to really trust ourselves and trust the process, but just doing little steps here and there to try and listen to that inner voice and listen to what your body is telling you and what your baby is telling you and really just hold on to that mental preparation of birth and the postpartum experience because there’s a lot to be unpacked and a lot that we can open up to if we really tap into that and allow ourselves to honor that time and experience all that birth has to give us.

Excellent advice!  Thank you, Sarah Marie!  So how can our listeners connect with you?

The easiest way would be to head over to Entering Motherhood.  That is the podcast that I host, so wherever you’re listening to this podcast, you can search Entering Motherhood, and you should be able to find it there.  I also have a website, enteringmotherhood.com, and I am most active on Instagram @entering_motherhood.

Excellent!  Thank you, and I hope we can connect again soon!

IMPORTANT LINKS

Entering Motherhood

Birth and postpartum support from Gold Coast Doulas

Becoming A Mother course

Buy our book, Supported

Kristin Revere and Jayme Bess discuss the options for embryo donation for families and the benefits for donors in this informative episode.

Hello, hello!  This is Kristin Revere with Ask the Doulas, and I am thrilled to chat with Jayme Bess today about embryo donation.  Jayme is the founder and CEO of Acts of Kindness Embryo Donation.  Acts of Kindness is a team of compassionate women who help intended parents start or grow their family through embryo donation.  They embrace all family types and offer a comprehensive range of options including non-identified anonymous, semi-open, and open donor recipient relationships.  Their dedication to inclusivity drives them to provide resources tailored to each individual’s unique needs, ensuring that everyone receives the support they deserve.

Above all, Acts of Kindness is focused on offering hope and opportunity to all and to give each embryo the chance at life it deserves.

Welcome, Jayme!

Thank you!  Pleasure to be here this morning.

I would love to hear more about how you personally became passionate about embryo donation.

A few years ago, I was working as a financial counselor for another fertility group, and we just decided that donor conception was really expensive, so we decided to offer an in-house program at a cheaper rate, and this is how we started embryo adoption was through donation.  We just offered it as a cheaper cost.  So over the years, the need for that program just grew because it was a more affordable option for everybody, and from there, we just decided earlier this year to break off from that company and start our own.  That’s kind of where we are today.  We’ve refocused, and we’ve decided to offer different options and focus more on those who have gone through IVF procedures in the past and had embryos left over that are looking for a recipient family to donate their embryos to us and for us to find recipients for those.

It’s so beautiful, and as I mentioned to you in a prior conversation, I had a doula client years back who went through that process of donating her embryos, and I was fascinated by that.  She spent a lot of time finding the perfect match for donation, so I love that there is a service that helps connect families and that you made it easier because it took her so long to be able to donate her embryos.

Yes, private matching can be very difficult because there’s a lot of steps involved and it’s a very intricate process, especially with several of the different REI labs and different clinics.  They all have different stipulations on what they will accept and won’t accept, so just having a service out there that provides that support is invaluable for these people.

Absolutely.  As far as the work you do, you serve anyone, anywhere, correct?

Correct.  So we are trying to branch out and go global.  We’re actually working on one case now that’s being shipped to Iran, so that’s pretty big for us.

That’s huge.

Yes, and we’ve dealt with one in Canada so far.  We’re just looking to expand our services and really open this up to anybody who’s looking for a more affordable option to grow their family.

Can you give us a range, when you say affordable, about what that would look like financially for a family?

Yes.  We don’t actually charge for the embryos themselves.  We don’t sell embryos.  We just have an exclusive package that’s a flat fee for our services and the transfer of ownership paperwork in our package is $7,000.

That is affordable.

It is, and then if you stick with our partner clinic, which is in St. Louis, Missouri, they’re only $3,000.  So for a total of $10,000, you can go ahead and get your matching with your embryos and have the FET treatment.  That’s usually about a third of what IVF costs.

Exactly.  I am familiar with those costs for IVF, and that is big savings.  So as far as the length of time a family would have to donate, do you have any tips on that?  How many years would an embryo be able to be good for, as far as matching?

We’ve had embryos older than 20 years that have been donated to us, and as long as the embryology team at the accepting clinic knows how to thaw the slow freeze methods and is able to use them, these embryos can go as far back as needed.

Fascinating.

Exactly, so they’re all frozen at about day five, day six, day seven; sometimes a day three.  And they just don’t develop past that, so when they unthaw, it’s just like they’re fresh.

Beautiful.

Yes.

You mentioned IVF and different family planning methods.  What does your typical family look like?  Have they tried IVF and that wasn’t successful, or looked into adoption?  I would love to hear more about what you’re seeing as far as your clientele.

You know, it honestly really varies.  We see a lot of different aspects of life.  We see them all the way from, hey, we’re a young couple who’s tried IUIs who just can’t afford IVF so we’re going to start here.  Genetics just don’t matter to us.  We’ve seen some who have done IVF nine times and it’s just every time, their egg quality is not good or it just doesn’t inseminate or for some reason they’re all abnormal; egg quality factors.  They come to us for that.  We’ve also seen women who are older who were career driven and just didn’t preserve their oocytes in time who want to come back and now have a child in life.  So it’s just all different ranges.  LGBTQ+, we cater to them as well.  We’re friendly, so that’s another great family building option for them, as well.

Yeah, I saw you pride yourselves on being inclusive.  That is fantastic.  As far as the process goes, what would the average length of time be for a family from beginning to work with you to the process of being matched and beginning the journey to conception?

It honestly can go pretty quickly.  The way our program works is when we get a donation in, we actually bring those embryos on site to our clinic.  So the embryos are all ready to go, ready to match, as soon as we find a recipient.  We house everything online in our online database.  That’s available to all our recipients for free.  What they do is they go in and they look at the donor profiles, and if they want to match with one, they just hit “Reserve Now.”  At that point, we’ll look at the donation preferences just to make sure it’s a good match for everybody, and if the match looks like it matches everything up, then we’ll go ahead and complete the adoption, basically.  So it can go as quickly as 24 to 48 hours for them to match and have the adoption completely completed, and then they can either come for the FET, which normally takes about 30 to 45 days to set up, or they can have it shipped off site which may take one to two weeks.  Within 30 days, they can match and have their treatment done.

That is amazing.  And are surrogates involved?

Sometimes, yes.  Surrogacy is tricky.  Gestational carriers require a lot more testing on the embryos than some of them do have because a lot of these are patient-donated embryos.  They were created for sexually intimate partner use, so they did not have the infectious disease testing.  Some of these donors don’t want to have that done afterwards, either.  They are still FDA compliant; you just have to put the warning on there, you know, it carries the risk that infectious disease can happen from the transfer of these.  But some clinics, especially the ones that are dealing with GCs, just won’t accept those.

That makes sense.

That’s kind of the hiccup we have there, but we do get other embryos in that were donor created that have all the testing, so if we’re dealing with a recipient who’s using a GC, we normally tell them to look at those profiles first because we know that those are more widely accepted.

Excellent.  What are some common questions that you receive from potential clients?

Usually, it’s how long does this take?  What does the embryo grading mean?  Will my clinic accept these embryos?  How does the process work?  They’re all just really fascinated with it because it’s still new.

Right.  I’m fascinated!  I love learning about all of the options for families. 

Definitely.  And then the one thing that we did do differently is that we offer all the different types of donation and adoption cases.  Most of the agencies just focus on either private matching directed donation cases or they’re anonymous, where we actually offer all three.  We offer the closed donation, the semi-open, and the open.  So our recipients do find that to be very proactive, and they come to us for that reason because we cater to all the different types.

Yes, it does seem like it’s a rare service.  So what does semi-open entail?

Semi-open is basically that we utilize a third party program called ADC Donor Nexxus, and what that is, it houses the donors’ and the recipients’ information as far as their demographics, their stories, their medical history, and it requires that they report back every two years with any changes that they may have.  That program also allows them to opt in for secure communication.  And in most cases with semi-open, they’ll go in every two years and give updates.  Sometimes they’ll send pictures.  Once the child turns 18, they’ve agreed to meet up.

That’s so helpful that they’re able to share medical information that could be needed for the child later in life.

Yes, especially if it’s a split recipient, because then you can add both recipients, and every family gets each other’s updates.  So if there’s half-siblings out there that are actually true siblings, you can see where they’re at in life, as well.

I love that.  And then what would a fully open donor mean?

It’s along the same process, only they just stay in communication more, and they have the option to meet up in person.

And then obviously anonymous makes sense; no information is given?

Right, no contact information is exchanged.  However, with us, we do have all the physical characteristics, the genetic history, the medical history of the family, and photos are shared.  So they do have a lot of the information.  It’s just no contact.

And is that medical information updated over time, or is it just at the time of donation?

Just at the time of donation, unless they opt in to share that, through that platform.  But it’s optional with the closed questions.

And another question I have for you, Jayme, as far as the families who are considering their choices and what to do with the remaining embryos, why should a family donate?

So really, you only have a few options when it comes to your embryos and what you’re going to do with them.  The most obvious one is to continue storage, which is going to cost you roughly anywhere between $500 to $600 a year to continue storage on those.  So if you’re never going to use them, you’re just paying on something you’re not going to ever utilize.

Yeah, that’s expensive.

It is.  It can be expensive over time.  The other option is to medically discard them.  And let’s just be honest, when you medically discard something, you’re putting it in a red plastic trash bag, and you’re just throwing it away.

Right, and for people who are pro-life, for example, that is important to them.  That may not be a choice.

It’s hard on your morals, yes, definitely.  The other option would be to donate it to medical research.  There’s a lot of programs out there that just do not accept them anymore.  So that is hard to find.  And then the last option, which we’re hoping to bring more light to and make it more widely known, is donation.  With donation, you’re actually giving your embryos a chance at life and to be able to thrive.

Right.  I didn’t realize that there were as many options.  I didn’t even think about the medical research aspect with embryos, but as you mentioned, that’s so limited.

It is.  We actually started a new program, a student teaching program, that will accept any abnormal embryos for medical research and for student teaching.

Okay.  So what else should our listeners know about this important service that you offer?

Really, that it’s just out there.  It exists for anybody who’s looking for a different way to grow their family.  We would love to see this more known for people, more accepted.  Usually, donor conception is not talked about very often because it just seems kind of bizarre in some ways to people, so we want to break those barriers open and just let them know that this option exists and it’s okay.  And we would love for you to check us out and recommend us to anybody that’s looking for this service.

Any other final tips for our listeners, Jayme?

Really, just help one another, you know?  Life goes on no matter what happens, and wherever you’re at in this fertility journey, we know that it’s painful, but we’re here to support you in any way that we can.  So even if you’re not looking at this for an option and you just need somebody to talk to about where you’re at on your journey, we’re here for you as well.

So how can our listeners find you?

We’re available through our social media and also our website.  From there, you can see all of our different resources.  We have a Donors page, a Recipients page, and then one that you go to for extra support if you’re looking for extra support on your journey.  We’re available on Instagram @aokembryos, as well as TikTok, and then on Facebook at Acts of Kindness Embryo Donation.

Excellent.  Well, thank you for offering this service globally now to the world and for the work that you’re doing.  It’s so important.

Thank you so much.  It was a pleasure sharing with you!

IMPORTANT LINKS

Acts of Kindness

Birth and postpartum support from Gold Coast Doulas

Becoming A Mother course

Buy our book, Supported