Bloom Community Midwives

Hey bloom families! Our next FREE homebirth information night will be happening Nov 16th in our clinic space. Come learn about homebirth and see all of our equipment set up that we bring with us when supporting safe birth at home. Email or chat with our wonderful Jenny at your next appointment to sign up if you are interested and please tell your pregnant friends!

Our next homebirth information night will be Wednesday May 25th at 6:30pm! Please email [email protected] or talk to Jenny at your next appointment to sign up!

International day of the midwife is fast approaching! To help celebrate, our Midwives Association is collecting stories from families who have worked with midwives across the province. If you are interested in sharing your story, please email your responses to [email protected] 🧡

💥📣 Our favourite prenatal classes by have lots of availability in the Feb-March session- held in our very own clinic space! Head over to the link in our bio for more information and registration. In person and zoom classes both available 🌈❤️

💥📣 Reminder to our current clients that all pregnant people aged 18+ are eligible for their COVID-19 booster dose 6 months after their second dose.
The recommends pregnant people get all doses of the Covid-19 vaccine as soon as they are eligible, regardless of how many weeks pregnant they are.
❗️To book an appointment, call 1-833-838-2323 and self-identify as pregnant.

Happy New Year to our beautiful community of families and colleagues!
It has been a wild and busy year with many changes and MANY cute babies. A little recap of 2021:
🌟 Midwife Kelsey had a baby! Welcome Arakletes!
🌟 We welcomed two new midwives to team Poppy: Liv and Olivia, who have been wonderful additions to our blooming garden.
🌟 We welcomed 239 babies into the world this year!
🌟 Our busiest month was MAY- 26 bloom babes! Holy spring fever!
🌟 Our quietest month was December- only 12 bloom babes! The midwives enjoyed many silent nights ;)
We are entering 2022 feeling so grateful for our amazing clients who roll with the punches of the ever evolving covid pandemic and who trust us to walk with them through their journeys to bring little parcels of joy into the world. Bring on the new year!

Special thanks to all the bloom babies for staying in their womb-homes last night so our clinic could gather for a festive evening! Happy holidays all! (Especially you, well behaved babes ❤️)

Bloom is excited to be hosting home birth information nights! Come see all the equipment midwives carry to make planned homebirth a safe option and discuss the FAQ of planning an out of hospital birth. Contact our clinic manager at [email protected] or talk to Jenny at your next appointment to sign up! Our next session is on OCTOBER 25th 🌷❤️
Poster credit: Bloom’s artistic director, Nola, age 12 🎨💕

Grace is our wonderful 2nd year student joining team lotus for the next few months. Swipe to read her student bio. Welcome Grace!

Please join us in welcoming senior student Jessica! She will be working with team tulip until April 2022 as she completes her last year of midwifery training. Swipe to read through Jessica’s bio 🌷

Happy International Day of the Midwife!
Today we celebrate our incredible profession and the hard work all of our colleagues do around the world, making a difference in the perinatal experience of families globally 🌍💕
Today Midwives in Canada are on the news outlining the barriers our profession faces in our province and country as our profession grows. Currently in BC Midwives provide care for 26% of our provincial deliveries.
See these news articles for more info!

https://globalnews.ca/video/7835958/health-matters-international-day-of-the-midwife

https://www.citynews1130.com/video/2021/05/04/pandemic-increases-demand-and-pressure-on-midwives/

Shout out to those showing us love today 🥰Featured here are one of our cutie-pie Bloom Toddlers who loves his midwives, and a physically distanced selfie of our Bloom Midwives and MOA who got to take a break from catching babies to have fun! 😉

We are so thrilled that our Maternity Colleagues at St Paul’s are piloting a program to support women to express their colostrum in pregnancy! If you are pregnant, at your next appointment at Bloom ask your midwife about a colostrum collection kit 🥛💦

Repost from :
St. Paul’s maternity unit is currently doing a pilot project on colostrum collection during the end of pregnancy. Expectant moms who have care with our family practice maternity clinic or Bloom midwifery group may be able to participate in this project. Colostrum collection after 36 weeks of pregnancy is a great skill to learn and to perfect even before baby is born. Any drops of colostrum that are collected can be frozen in special syringes and brought into the hospital when it’s time to have your baby. These collected drops can be given to baby if they need any extra nutrition in their first day of life.
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These glorious sunny winter days in Vancouver mean so much while we are all struggling to keep each other safe and keep our distance!
Not from today, but a sweet postpartum photo shared with us from one of our lovely Bloom families- out sporting their cute Bloom toque! ( 📸 taken by dad ☺️). Enjoy your Vitamin D, y’all! ☀️😎💕

Attention Bloom Postpartum Families- having babies in a physically distanced time is hard!Our colleagues at St Paul’s have started a fantastic postpartum parent meetup on Zoom to make families feel less socially distanced, and to offer great info and resources. Topics vary each week.
TO SIGN UP: email [email protected]

With our Bloom Baby Group being cancelled since COVID began, we are so happy to see there is an avenue for families to connect and learn from each other!
(Special shout out to Bloom baby B and his lovely Lactation Consultant mom who will be helping guide the breastfeeding meetup this week 🤗💕)

This weekend our St Paul’s maternity unit was fortunate to receive protection as frontline healthcare workers and receive our COVID vaccines! 🧪💉💕
Our team of Bloom Midwives & students were grateful to be prioritized so we can continue on safely caring for our pregnant and postpartum families.
Thanks to our midwifery colleagues at and , and our St Paul’s nursing, obstetrical, and paediatric colleagues for the moral support in getting poked- we’re in this together! ()
😷

January has already been a busy month at Bloom with the vast majority of our January babies having decided to make their appearances already!

This year started off with Bloom’s first birth on Jan 1st at
6:12am with a wee gal born at home with midwives Zoë and Charlotte 🥰 Congrats to this sweet family!
Here’s to lots more cuties and their strong + resilient families this year 💪🏽💕

(shared kindly with permission)

2020. QUITE the year. For our Bloom families, our midwives, our office administrators, our new paediatrician, our community of healthcare providers at BC Women’s and St Paul’s- for our world 🌍

- We welcomed 192 Bloom Babies in 2020! 💕
- Most popular baby names were: Arthur, Leo, Lucie/Luciana, Matteo/Matthew, Luna, Jude, Hugo, Georgia, Zoe(!)
- We weathered nutty birth storms in October and November…. ⛈👶🏽⛈… the busiest months were Oct (21 babies!) and quietest month was Dec (8 babies)- thanks for the festive breather, babies!
- Our lovely French midwife Agathe Le Roy joined Patricia on our bilingual team- Team Tulip! 🇫🇷🇧🇪
- Our new Postpartum Team Daffodil began this summer, with Midwife Jasmine Freed providing postpartum care to many of our twin families in Vancouver! 👶🏽👶🏽💕
- Our new Paediatric Team Lilac started in the fall, with the lovely Paediatrician Dr Jovan Vuksic providing newborn care to our babies with further medical needs 🧑🏻‍⚕️🏥
- Our amazing Midwife Heba AL-Nashef moved to a different style of practice in Vancouver- we miss her! 👸🏻❤️
- Our previous MOA and doula Erin moved onto another position- we wish her best of luck! 👏🏽
- …..and Jenny joined Bloom as our new Office Administrator! 🙋🏻‍♀️

As we roll into 2021 we send our families courage and strength as our community continues to weather the challenges of this pandemic. May we stay strong together, follow Dr Bonnie’s Rules, and continue to grow and thrive in new ways- with these growing cuties❤️

These past months have brought lots of exciting changes at Bloom 🌿🍃🌱
We are thrilled to introduce one of our new Teams of Midwives- meet Team Tulip- Patricia! 🌷
Patricia is currently a solo Midwife providing care for families planning St Paul’s (where she is also our Midwifery Department Lead!). She is originally from Belgium, and provides care in French and English.🇧🇪💕
Featured cuties here are baby Hazel (born on Mother’s day!) and baby Nada and her mama❤️ And fresh from a morning homebirth with Midwife Emily from Team Poppy!

@ West End, Vancouver

....in suit of our last post...most often for a hospital birth you have your Midwife and your Labour & Delivery Nurse caring for you... but occasionally you get more than what you bargained for- multiple midwives! 👯‍♀️👯‍♀️These tandem midwife situations are delightfully fun for us as colleagues, as one can see from these photos 😉 We love catching babies with our Bloom Team in tow!
Keep ‘em coming!🤘🏽💕

@ Vancouver, British Columbia

Dear Bloom Families, BC Midwives need your support!⚡️
・・・
Now in BC, midwives attend 22% of deliveries in our province. Last October, BC midwives voted down an offer by the NDP government because it failed to incorporate requirements that are critical to sustaining the profession and ensuring midwifery care is available to birthing families in BC.

This week Midwives are back at the bargaining table with the BC Ministry of Health- at a time when support and demand for midwifery is at an all-time high. As per a recent study, 1 in 3 BC midwives say they are likely to leave the profession within five years if support remains deficient. We are midwives as it is our calling, but no amount of passion can attract sufficient recruits without an urgent and robust rollout of ministry-funded infrastructure.

Want to help our profession “Bloom”?
1) Visit Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter pages- please share or re-post our campaign to raise some noise 🎶
2) Visit www.supportBCMidwives.ca to send a letter to Premier Horgan, the Honourable Adrian Dix and your local MLA
3) Post your reason for loving midwives and tag our BC decision makers and , using the hashtag

Thank you for your support! 💕
Source:
@ Vancouver, British Columbia

Today is International Day of the Midwife 👶🏻👶🏾👶🏽 For our profession the cherry on top is the World Health Organization celebrating 2020 as the international year of the nurse and the midwife- even though it feels like the international year of the strange and unsuspecting infectious pandemic diseases!

Through the past weeks, as your midwives and as essential workers, we have been overwhelmed by the support from our clients, families, colleagues, local business and community members in working together to protect families and create safe spaces to be pregnant and birth our babies. We want to thank all who have supported us in this time of uncertainty and have done their best to care for families having their babies in stressful times. Every moment we show compassion for our fellow humanity, our clients and our neighbours, we are all heroes in bettering our world our children enter.

Thank you to all for supporting us in the tireless work we do!

We are very proud of our Bloom Midwives recently representing and supporting our profession in our province 💪🏽 (check out this clip of our midwives Zoë and Emily!)
https://bc.ctvnews.ca/mobile/video?clipId=1952702 @ West End, Vancouver

In the midst of this global pandemonium, midwives keep working, babies keep coming, and families still need our support.
Following our client COVID19 email update earlier this week, we have added a COVID information & updates section on our website to keep families informed, found here: www.bloomcommunitymidwives.com/bloom-covid19

We are so fortunate to both be midwives and pregnant families in Canada with our universal healthcare and resources during this public health crisis ❤️ .
WHO Director General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus: "I want to start today by acknowledging that even though COVID-19 has captured the world’s attention, there are still many other health issues people continue to face every single day and that WHO is continuing to work on. Babies are still being born. Essential surgery is continuing. People still need emergency care after road traffic crashes. People still need treatment for cancer, diabetes, HIV, malaria and many other diseases. And for all of these, we need health workers.
Today I want to send a personal and sincere thank you to every health worker around the world — especially nurses and midwives, who we are celebrating this year through the International Year of the Nurse and the Midwife. You do a heroic job. We know that this crisis is putting a huge burden on you and your families. We know you are stretched to the limit. You have our admiration, our respect, and our commitment to doing everything we can to keep you safe and enable you to do your job." THANK YOU 🙏🏼 Artist:

As midwives we know how crucial it is that research is carried out to support families to achieve their healthiest outcomes!

Our colleagues at UBC are working hard to improve perinatal mental health research and support, and are developing a Pregnancy-Specific Anxiety Scale! Please consider signing up for their study (whether or not you have ever experienced perinatal mental health issues yourself)
Thank you 🤗

Are you pregnant, over 19 and have a BC CareCard/Services Card? This picture below could be you signing up for our study and filling out the Pregnancy-Specific Anxiety Scale! 🤰🤰🤰

To learn more or to join our study today, please go to www.midwifery.ubc.ca/psas

*Please note that any comments or shares of our posts are not anonymous and maybe seen by other Facebook users*

As we sink into 2020 and reminisce on the past months, there are so many “mammaries”! There were lots of changes in 2019 at Bloom- for our families, midwives, office administrators.....!
- We welcomed 178 Bloom Babies in 2019
- The most popular baby names in 2019 were:
- Benjamin, Luca(s), Spencer
- Maya, Sophia/ie, Olivia
- Our french-speaking midwife Patricia Rohlfs joined our Bloom team! 🇧🇪
- Our lovely German Blue Team Midwives, Katherina and Rashmi, both moved back to Germany with their young families 👩🏼‍⚕️👩🏼‍⚕️🇩🇪
- Our previous MOA Gina went off to Midwifery school at UBC! 📚🏥
- .....meaning Erin joined Bloom as our new Office Administrator! 🙋🏻‍♀️
- We weathered nutty birth storms in April and September.... ⛈👶🏽⛈

And another new year rolls on! Wishing happiness and warmth to your lovely Bloom families ❤️Stay tuned for more updates on our new team at Bloom! 🤗 @ West End, Vancouver

After serving as a Bloom Midwife for 5 years (mainly on the Blue Team), Rashmi (and her adorable son) have journeyed back to Germany!🇩🇪

Always cheerful and lighthearted, she couldn’t help bring great vibes and laughter with her into birthing spaces and visits. We miss her dearly, and wish her brightness and positivity as her family plants its roots back in Germany. 🌱💕

Wir lieben dich Rashmi, sie sind Deutsche Qualität!! 😘

❤️ @ Vancouver, British Columbia

We couldn’t be more thrilled to have seen all of our Bloom Families at our Autumn Gathering! The wee ones streaming in in costume was WAY too cute and loads of fun. So lovely to catch up with our sweet families- hope you made some new neighbourhood friends. Thanks so much for everyone who stopped by to see your costumed midwives and office managers- you made our day!!

!
@ Coal Harbour Community Centre

We are so looking forward to seeing and catching up with our Bloom Families tomorrow for our Autumn Bloom Gathering at Coal Harbour Community Centre from 1:30-4pm! 🍂🌜 🎃 ☕️ 🍁

Cutie-pie April Bloom Baby Monsieur Skeleton seems to find his first Halloween a rather non-humerus event 💕👶🏼 🦴💕😂

Dear Bloom Families,

Autumn is in full swing, and it’s that annual time of year that Bloom Midwives would love to see those lil’ Pumpkins and how they’ve grown!
Please join us for a family-friendly afternoon to see old and new faces, meet other Bloom families in the community, and to get that oxytocin flowin' from those sweet baby snuggles. We will be at the Coal Harbour Community Centre from 1:30-4pm for you to pop by for a visit with tea and snacks, some Halloween treats, and a play-area for those busy little people on-the-go. Please feel free to show off those adorable Halloween costumes to your midwives- we’ll be dressing up too! 🎃🍭🕸🦇 Looking forward to seeing you there!

Shared with permission and we declare no conflict of interest sharing this post.

Lovely Bloom clients please see attached description, any help would be appreciated for one of our clients💔❤️

“Hey people,

As some of you know and as none of you know - Lauren was being monitored for a heart condition prior to deliverying new baby Alma. She was considered a high risk pregnancy and was carefully walked through her pregnancy and delivery with a fantastic midwife and obgyn team. She successfully delivered baby girl Alma Birgitta on Sept 24th and appeared to doing really well. She was discharged from the hospital two days post birth. The following morning Lauren experienced heaviness in her chest and difficulty breathing. The new fam headed back to emerge (thank goodness) and it was confirmed that her accending aorta was dissecting (very bad and what she had been monitored for).

Lauren is currently in surgery at Vancouver General Hospital where she is undergoing a procedure where they will hopefully spare her valve and replace a section of her aorta with an artificial tube. This will be a 6-12 hour procedure and she will require multiple blood transfusions throughout. This is scary and a lot... But will hopefully go smoothly. Please pray.

Now - if you know Lauren and Josue, you know two people who give generously, love fiercely and support others without a second thought. This procedure is a huge setback when it comes to acclimatizing to life as a new family as Lauren will be hospitalized for an extended period of time and unable breastfeed or lift anything. Josue will be juggling supporting her, caring for Alma and managing life things. Emotionally, physically, mentally... This will be tough. They need support. They are surrounded by family and friends but a huge way we can shroud them in love is to take some financial strain off of these two marvellous individuals. Please consider donating - I have not set a limit to this fund as anything is appreciated (limit may be set later).

Monetary donations will go towards:

Formula (Lauren can no longer breastfeed)
Ordering food
Groceries
Hospital Parking
Transport
Living expenses
Survival expenses that I haven’t thought of

I will be updating this page as I receive more information - please share like it’s hot - share, share, share.

Much love,

Logan”

http://gofundme.com/support-the-quezada-family

Click here to support Support the Quezada Family organized by Logan Bristow Enns Logan Bristow Enns Support the Quezada Family Hey people,As some of you know and as none of you know - Lauren was being monitored for a heart condition prior

Alerting Bloom Families!
There have been two recent advisories on drugs in Canada- one for mothers taking the heartburn treatment RANITIDINE, and another for babies with colic/gas taking GRIPE WATER.

If you or your baby are using either of these, please read the pertinent article below.

1) RANITIDINE: 4 companies that manufacture this drug are ceasing distribution of sales of the drug due to potential for an impurity to be found in the drug (NDMA), and long term exposure (over a lifetime) linked to risk of cancer. The companies ceasing sales are: Apotex Inc., Pro Doc Limitée, Sanis Health Inc., and Sivem Pharmaceuticals ULC. If you have been using this drug made by one of the aforementioned companies and need to continue to do so to decrease heartburn and have a healthy pregnancy, please discontinue that brand and switch to another manufacturing company (such as Zantac by Sanofi).

https://healthycanadians.gc.ca/recall-alert-rappel-avis/hc-sc/2019/71029a-eng.php?fbclid=IwAR09njPowgqotP8zQk8wNNKmJNJhDojXVl6sZXubQXKWcxFCyv4No_TSv7U

2) GRIPE WATER - there has been a total recall due to microbial contamination. Please see the recall notice below.
Gripe Water re-call: http://healthycanadians.gc.ca/recall-alert-rappel-avis/hc-sc/2019/71043a-eng.php

http://healthycanadians.gc.ca/recall-alert-rappel-avis/hc-sc/2019/71043a-eng.php

If you have any questions deciding the right brand choices for these drugs, please speak to your local pharmacist.

RW Consumer Products Ltd. voluntarily recalls all lots of "Gripe Water – Alcohol And Preservative Free" because of microbial contamination - Recalls and safety alerts OTTAWA – Health Canada is advising Canadians that RW Consumer Products Ltd. is recalling all lots of the product “Gripe Water – Alcohol And Preservative Free” (Natural Product Number [NPN] 80080669), sold under various brand names, because company testing showed microbial contamination. Thes...