A year ago tonight...

...we were settling in for our first night as the parents of a brand-new baby.

We never could have imagined then all the immeasurable ways that Eden would change our lives for the better, and it's impossible to overstate how much richness and joy she's brought to our lives.

We love you, baby girl.

We're still here (for now)

It's been a long time since I've posted, partially because we've quickly gotten extremely busy, and partly because so many things have been happening and changing so fast that anything I'd planned to post quickly became obsolete before I got the chance.

To make a long and repetitive story short, while I have been able to start getting some GYN clinical hours done and I'm very thankful for that, a clinical site for me to do births has never really materialized in this area. The closest option was doing them at a busy hospital close to two hours away. Both in birth setting and geographic location, this was far from ideal. Going to Clinical Bound strongly reconnected me with why I went to midwifery school in the first place--practicing homebirth. Both from the perspective of providing this option to women and families AND the fact that it nourishes my own soul in a way that I don't think the alternative can. I recently went to the How to Start a Homebirth Practice seminar put on by a local midwifery practice at the annual ACNM conference, and one of the key things they said was that at a certain point, you have to decide whether you want to be a missionary or preach to the choir. Put that way, it makes it sound like there's something noble and romantic about blazing a trail--and maybe there is, but in my own practice, I've found it to be an embittering and futile exercise, full of dead ends. I've concluded that trying to provide natural birth options to women who don't especially want them and in the company of doctors and other hospital personnel who are dead set against them is at best doing no good and at worst, burning me out by spinning my wheels. (Can you smell the burnout yet? It's been lingering in my nostrils for months now.)

So anyway, as we've long admired the Amish and loved taking trips up to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, I was beyond thrilled to find an absolutely amazing homebirth/birth center/ hospital birth practice that agreed to take me on when our lease is up at the end of the summer. Not only is it the holy grail of clinicals, since I get to learn to practice in every possible birth setting, but I'll be doing so from a group of midwives with whom I share at least a majority of philosophies. Not to mention the fact that their clientele (70% old-order Amish or Mennonite)makes *us* look like a bunch of tech-obsessed yuppies in comparison.

Matt and I have actually both found part-time jobs up there as well (farming and birth assisting at homebirths!) and so all that remains is housing. We've actually found that trickier than we thought, but we're trusting that the right thing will come up at the right time. And the plan after I'm done with clinicals (hopefully by mid-December) is to move back to Iowa--back where it all began. Ironically, we left Iowa because I decided to become a lawyer because the political climate there was so hostile to homebirth midwives. Now, we're moving back in part because the laws themselves are actually more permissive than they are in most states (it's a complicated set of circumstances), and I should be set to do what I thought I'd never be able to: help bring little Iowans into the world AT HOME. (Including, I'm sure, a few of our own.) Unlike when we considered moving back a year or so ago (you know, like when I was getting teary just because we were changing apartments), we feel like we're really on the same page about moving and that we're both ready to go. We have some wonderful friends here that we will absolutely miss like crazy (especially you, April!) and that is our one big regret about leaving. Otherwise, though, it's always been our intention for our kids to grow up close to our families (in every sense of the word). Farming on at least a small scale is also still a dream of ours, and seemingly very possible there. And being within a couple of hours of our parents and all of our siblings? Priceless.