Can you soothe a crying newborn, adjust the straps of an infant seat, use saline and a nasal aspirator to relieve congestion, do tummy massage for gas, take a rectal temperature (yikes!) and use swaddle techniques to help your baby sleep longer? 

If there is a new baby in your future, check out our Newborn Essentials class and learn a whole lot more than how to diaper, burp and bathe your baby. (Yes, you’ll learn those things, too). This 3 hour prenatal class uses dolls and lots of hands-on practice to demystify the rituals around newborn care. Particularly great for first time dads-to-be.

Feel confident welcoming your baby home! Check upcoming dates

Trying to balance career and pregnancy. Trying to balance nutrition and cravings. Trying to balance, well, yourself from tipping over…Balance can be especially elusive during pregnancy. But you can find support for all these typical challenges in an Isis Maternity prenatal yoga class.

In Isis’s safe and nurturing environment, a practice of gentle stretches, movements and postures can help to strengthen and tone your changing body, while breathing and relaxation techniques can release your tension and fatigue. Added benefits: mindfulness, confidence, trust in your body, and a community of wonderful mothers-to-be. All this, we hope, can help you achieve balance. Here’s a pose to get you started:

Mountain Pose
Mountain pose is the basis for all of yoga’s standing poses and helps one work to feel strong and stable.

Stand with your feet parallel, the insides of your feet touching and your toes facing forward. Try to spread your toes apart and center your weight over your feet. Stand up tall while imagining that you are being held up and lifted as a marionette puppet on strings, and simultaneously dropping your tail bone and feeling grounded. Concentrate on your breath and standing tall  — The Mountain.

Because Momma, your pregnancy is just the beginning of striving to find balance as a woman and a mom.

Find a prenatal yoga class that fits your busy schedule.

Free time during your third trimester of pregnancy is very valuable real estate. There are showers to attend, thank-you notes to write, car seats to install, maternity leave replacements to train, pints of Häagen Dazs to consume. Why take a childbirth class when you can kill two birds with one stone, putting your feet up with a pint of vanilla bean while watching Special Delivery on Discovery Health? Why? Because in both cases, there are far better options…

True, you’re not alone if your idea of childbirth classes is a bunch of people lying on the floor learning how to breathe — something we already know how to do, as evidenced by, well, life. But taking a class can be extremely valuable and beneficial, no matter what you hope your delivery experience to be. A childbirth class can help you make informed decisions, learn pain relief options, and dispel fears or anxieties. And learning about the process of labor and birth, you will almost certainly come to appreciate this miracle even more.

Labor and Birth Process
When you take a class, you begin to really envision what labor and birth are all about, and what your experience will be like. Because the objective of a class is to prepare parents for that experience in all kinds of ways, you get facts, tips and suggestions, options, and hands-on tools and techniques for support and partnership. And yes, you get movies, and handouts too!

Pain Relief
According to Chris Just, Isis’s Director of Childbirth Education, there is an absolute physiologic connection between fear/tension and pain/discomfort. And knowledge helps to reduce fear. Whether you have fear surrounding pain, birth, or outcomes, information about what to expect can help to reduce that fear. Meanwhile, detailed information about pain intervention options, medical and alternative, are explored.

Support
Isis’s childbirth classes strive to treat each couple as a team, and recognize that both mother and partner need support in gaining knowledge and techniques. Partners of pregnant mothers need preparation, too – after all, people probably haven’t been coming up to them for months volunteering free and often unsolicited advice about how they should handle the labor and birth.

In the last session of an Isis childbirth class, partners are separated from pregnant mothers as both groups discuss how they envision their lives changing with the arrival of their baby. And this can be the most moving part of the whole childbirth class. Certainly, they imagine, there will be less Häagen Dazs, less feet up, less of that valuable weekend real estate. But with excitement, trepidation, and gratitude, parents anticipate the wonders that lie ahead!

Explore Isis Maternity’s full range of childbirth education options.

Use Your Words
What was the most valuable part of your childbirth education?

From Goodnight Moon to The Giving Tree, we parents are very accomplished at reading stories. Yet how often do we get to tell our own? Now that the main event has arrived, it seems that people no longer want hear about the wacky ultrasound technologist and his hairy knuckles, and eyes glaze over at the recounting of the dream in which my baby is born an owl flapping around Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain. Rightly so, folks would rather ooooo and coo at the baby.

But not so with our friends at SMITH magazine and the delicious pickle maker Ricks Picks, who have an enduring appreciation of all things bump. And now, they invite you to enter their pregnancy story contest when you share your tale of this momentous time in your life in 100 words or less. Whether your pregnancy experience is amazing, unusual, or simply memorable, it’s guaranteed an audience who wants to hear your story, and earns you a shot at winning one of several excellent and cravings-worthy prizes.

Read some of the entries, visit the gallery of Beautiful Pregnant Women, and enter to share your own story.

If you’re pregnant and concerned that wearing a seatbelt will harm your in utero passenger, don’t be. A new study confirms what we’ve heard all along: seatbelts save lives. According to researchers at the University of Michigan, about 200 fetuses are lost each year due to motor-vehicle crashes where the pregnant woman is unbelted. Read more, and see for yourself:

Buckle up, and safe travels!