Planning Appointment With Your Postpartum Doulas
All postpartum doula clients, whether you just need one overnight, or a full 40 hours a week of support, are offered a postpartum planning appointment to allow both doulas and your family to share expectations, goals, and concerns about having a newborn.
What You Can Except From Your Postpartum Doulas In Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill
Team of Doulas: We assign two doulas per client because two doulas are always better than one. This gives you the security to know that you will always have a doula available for you. If one doula has unexpected illness or family issue, the other doula will be available.
24/7 Support: Our postpartum doulas are always on call for you, no matter what. That means in between postpartum shifts, you can rest assured that your doulas are available for you if needed.
Customize Support: Whether you need daytime support, nighttime support or combination of the two, we will work with you to provide exactly what you need.
Planning Appointment: Ideally this appointment occurs prior to your baby arriving, but it can be done whenever. We use this appointment to learn about you, and your goals for having a postpartum doula. This gives us a clear idea of how we can best support you.
Topics Covered In The First Planning Appointment
We take the time to learn about you, your family, your goals for your newborn, and other important information we should know prior to beginning our postpartum doula support. The following topics are talked about, plus much more to ensure that your care is completely customized to your unique needs:
General newborn care: We will talk about what you are most excited about, as well as what you are most nervous about with having a newborn. By learning about your concerns, we can continue to customize our support to ensure that our support is as unique as you.
Sleeping goals: This is where we can talk about where you would like your baby to sleep, what you would like him or her to wear, and other preferences we can beginning introducing to newborns and infants.
Feeding goals: We are trained in basic breastfeeding support, as well as bottle feeding with expressed breastmilk or formula, and can you help develop a plan for feeding your newborn. We have had clients who do not want us to wake them up for overnight support for feeding, but rather only give expressed milk. We have had families who would like us to wake them up for each feeding, but then get the baby changed and back to sleep, so the parent can quickly fall back to sleep.
Meal preferences: If meal planning and preparing are services that you are interested in, we will talk the time to learn about what you and your family love to eat, hate to eat, and everything in between to ensure that our meal planning and preparation fits into your life style. We will even learn how you feel about leftovers, including how you prefer to store your leftovers.
Self care practices: We take the time to learn about activities that you love and that make you feel good so that while we are caring for your baby, we can remind that you really love to curl up with a book and cup of coffee.
Your postpartum physical and mental health and wellness: While we are not medically trained, we are trained what is normal and what is outside the range of normal for postpartum recovery.
Your home + 1: We can help you prepare your home for the arrival of your newborn. This can mean preparing a nursing care basket for yourself that includes the real postpartum essentials (phone charger, each to eat snacks, water, and chapstick), or even an older child snack basket for them to enjoy a special treat while you are feeding the newborn and cannot easily get up and down.
Other family members preferences: As postpartum doulas, we support the entire family, so we also need to learn about your partner’s preferences, as well as any other children in your home. We will even learn about your fur babies, because they matter too! And yes, we can take your dog for a walk if that is something that will help.
Nonjudgemental support: Throughout the entire process, we are learning about you and your partner, so that we can best support you when we are your postpartum doulas. We are learning about your
Importance of Postpartum Planning
We have talked about how the fourth trimester can be challenging, and our goal is to help you prepare as much as possible. Research has shown that just 15 minutes of postpartum planning can reduce the likelihood of postpartum mood disorders, increase milk supply if you decide to breastfeed, and a whole host of other wonderful benefits that all new parents will enjoy. At this appointment, we will also give you our postpartum planning guide to fill out as much or as little as you feel necessary for your family. We can assist you, or not. But our goal is to help you prepare as much as possible.
