We were very excited when we first met and hired Katrina as our midwife. She just fit our personality types very well (laid back, sensible, professional, nature-driven) and we knew that it was a good fit.
Well, here we are now, over 7 months later with a baby in our hands, so I thought I’d write a little about our overall experience.
Katrina was wonderful throughout Martina’s pregnancy. She was always gentle, informative, flexible and friendly. No question was ever too stupid, no concern ever too trivial and no need ever unmet.
The thing about being an independent midwife is that it’s a “one-man show”, so when one of her clients goes into labour, she might have to do some rescheduling, as she can’t be doing your prenatal visit while she’s busy giving hands-on attention to a birthing mother. So accept that there may be the odd occasion when she may have to reschedule you (for perfectly valid reasons) and you’ll be fine.
Katrina was always very professional, but friendly at the same time: it’s essential to build up a trust relationship with your midwife so that when she’s helping you give birth, it’s like a friend is there assisting you. She also brought her birthing assistants along to several of our prenatal visits, so that we could get comfortable with them too.
Katrina always operated in a “whatever-you-need” mode, so when we thought we needed her to come around for what we thought was labour (but turned out to be a heavy bout of Braxton-Hicks contractions), she showed up on our doorstep at 3am. And when we finally did go into labour, she got another call at 11 at night and she came on over, despite the fact that she’d probably been working all day, and stayed there until the job was done almost 24 hours later.
She fully supported our every wish and gave us the birth experience that we really wanted, despite many difficulties during labour.
All in all, we just can’t say enough good things about Katrina: we know we made the right decision in doing a home birth and we know that Katrina was the perfect choice for our midwife. I highly recommend that, if you’re trying to decide whether to a home birth, do it, and if you’re on the lookout for a midwife in St Pete, Katrina should be your first call.