Erin Eastabrooks

Maternal Child Health patient at Highland Hospital

My baby is 17 months. She’s a little girl named Greta, and she’s just perfect to me. She’s walking and starting to talk, and it all happened so fast. She’s going to be a 2-year-old before we know it.

I was hoping to do a home birth, but we needed a backup plan. I was really surprised by how similar it was here to what I imagine it would have been at home, because they really allowed for that. That’s what I was hoping for—not to feel like you were in a hospital so much, as little intervention as possible.

I had to be induced early, and so I had to be here. The woman who was going to be our midwife, who was my mother-in-law’s best friend, was allowed to be here, and she worked really well side by side with the midwives.

I never felt rushed or like things had to be moved along, or that there were time constraints they were working on based on a bigger picture. I felt like they were really just working on my level and what I needed in that moment. It was women-oriented, and the midwives were really supportive, and it was everything I would have wanted.

I was kind of expecting to be let down, being at a hospital. I really didn’t want to get induced. But I was just completely, 100% pleasantly surprised.

My husband and I talk about it all the time, how it was just really the most amazing birth. And it was everything we wanted, and probably better than if we had had it at home. Now we can look at it that way. It was a roomier, cleaner, more sanitary version of home, and loving, and more women. And there was a bathtub and everything, and someone else cleaned it up, and then we left. It was just what we wanted, but we got to have it here.