The main source of my inspiration for doing newborn home visits are my 4 children, who are now 12, 10, 9, and 6 years old. Although they are now all school-aged, not so long ago there was a stretch of time over several years when I was either pregnant or postpartum, and had a baby or a toddler (or both!) Those years are a blur due to a combination of sleep deprivation, both from night time feeds and working a lot of night shifts in the NICU, stress, and feeling like I was al

We need to stop pretending that it's no big deal to have a baby. We need to stop convincing ourselves that we should be able to"bounce back" and return to our "normal" lives within weeks of giving birth. We need to stop making breastfeeding seem like it is always easy and natural, and to spend time preparing moms for the struggles that might come up while they are trying to nurse. We need to stop inundating new moms with visitors during the first few days home from the hospit

I did my pediatric residency training at UMass so this recent article about the discontinuation of the visiting RN program for babies discharged from their NICU in Worcester, MA really hit close to home. I experienced my first newborn visit with one of the UMass VNA nurses back when I was an intern in 2003. I had taken care of twin girls born at 32 weeks' gestation, Isabella and Ava, who were discharged home from the NICU when they were about a month old. We visited their hom