We initially contracted with Grace to provide us with 4 weeks of postpartum night & day support, but we quickly extended that to 8 weeks, then 12, and also added additional days/nights as we needed. We would have extended it further except that Grace had another client lined up to start at that point.
To say that Grace was instrumental in our postpartum lives would be a tremendous understatement. Due to the difficulty of having family visit because of CoViD, and because of a more-difficult-than-expected recovery for my wife, we were badly in need of all the support we could get. Grace stepped up and provided us with the best possible support we could have imagined. Grace was outstanding with our daughter Emmy - helping her to learn to take a bottle, introducing developmentally appropriate play, and perhaps most importantly, sleep more independently. In addition to the support Grace provided directly to Emmy, the support she provided for us as parents was invaluable. Grace helped us with baby wearing in the early days, provided tremendous breastfeeding support, showed us the best way to give Emmy a bath, and gave us helpful parenting tips that we were looking for in those very first days & weeks of being new parents. Grace also provided us with warm and validating support during a physically and emotionally intense and vulnerable time. She clearly loves babies and introduced a cheer and levity that helped us approach these early days with humor, even in the haze of sleep deprivation. I genuinely don’t know what we would have done without Grace helping our family.
On the practical front, Grace was adept at using and adjusting the Snoo, was preposterously flexible with scheduling, handled our skittish dog with aplomb, and recommended and collaborated with us to use the baby tracking app that we still use to this day. It’s hard for me to imagine that you could find a better postpartum doula than Grace.