Supporting evidence

During the time of pregnancy one gets inundate with information in the western culture. First there are doctors who want to inform the expectant parents about the hundred "important" prenatal tests and want to impose the pregnant woman a new "safe" lifestyle (e.g. don't stroke your cat anymore, she can pass on toxoplasmosis). Then there are a lot of friends and family members who had never or 10-50 years ago children and they tell a pregnant woman all kinds of stories. As soon as the expectant parents start to look for information in the internet, they will find all sorts of information and statements and it will not be easy to filter it. And when the pregnant woman decides to just buy one book with all the necessary information, she will get lost in the jungle of pregnancy books...

Exactly that is what I experienced in my first weeks of pregnancy, a flood of all kind of information. I would say, that the overflow of information is here more challenging than in any other life situation. I was from one day to the other new to the field and for sure I only wanted the best for my child and our small family. The first weeks I needed to clarify for myself what I really want and in retrospect I would say that I searched my soul and found my inner intuition and attitude. From these weeks I was clear what knowledge I was looking for, I had my own inner direction and did not loose confidence. From these days I really filtered all the information and chose well-directed information and sources. The doctor had to explain in more detail all the tests and after thinking about the dis/advantages we decided to a large part to not conduct this examination. We decided ourselves to have all the possible medical check-ups with the midwife. She provides completely different knowledge than the doctor and it just felt more natural to accept her advice.
I borrowed several books from the library about different topics. I compared critically all the informations I found and was surprised how they replenished each other. I used the internet to look for additional information. Honestly I have to say that I skipped the most information about diseases and contingencies and focused on the information about a natural and powerful pregnancy. To some books which interested me the most I wrote a critical book evaluation and took some further research about the author. In this project I combined the knowledge of different sources that felt coherent for myself. Someone else would have taken value from other knowledge. But pregnancy is such an individual time, that every woman has other needs and is interested in other knowledge. I just tried to collect the most valuable knowledge from my researches and collect it in several blog articles with the hope that I can inspire other pregnant woman.

Title & Summary: 420

Project introduction: 675

Project Design: 627

Personal story: 580

Thematic focus: 1057

Project Development: 1205

In Total: 4564

Not included are sections marked with optional and Xmindmaps.

Peer Meetings with Mona Speth

Mona lives in a small village not far away from my hometown. We are in a good peer-contact and I visited her and we exchanged about our projects. The other day she visited me and we together created a Karrabirdt for our OP-creation process.

Here is a description of the day Mona visited me and we produced a Karrabirdt

Documentation of a peer-meeting call with Mona in June

Main Advising and Mentoring Training
Since August 2017 I am a participant in the Main Advising and Mentoring Training offered by Jennifer English Morgan. We have approx. all two weeks a content call. I really appreciate the exchange with other GaiaU associates via Slack.

Calls
Rights of nature call

Main Advising
One Main Advising Session with Laura Kaestele