As you might have noticed, we have had a pretty busy month in our practice! Our June babies all decided to arrive in the space of ten days, instead of spreading out according to their due dates – if you know babies, you know they aren’t very good at sticking to those due dates. 😉

So, while we were busy, running all around to catch all of these babies and doing postpartum and lactation visits, along with our usual prenatal schedule, who do you think was doing all of the office support work? That’s right, you guessed it:

We were.

Yes, the truth of the matter is that small practitioners like us often don’t have an office staff to do all of the “extra” work that comes along with healthcare, such as ordering labs and ultrasounds, answering emails (dear God, the emails!), returning calls, scheduling visits, filing birth certificates, evaluating and uploading those labs and ultrasounds, bookkeeping, billing, taxes, insurance claims, consults, keeping up with COVID protocols… and the list goes on.

Luckily, there are two of us (along with our indispensable birth assistant, Julia!), and we spread the load as evenly as we can, but the fact remains: there is a lot more to midwifery care than just pregnancy, birth, and babies. There are about a million details that need to be paid attention to on a daily basis – coupled with lack of sleep, and you wonder why we have wrinkles!

And you can just forget about leisure time in weeks like these – that is right out. If we can get food that didn’t come from a restaurant in our bodies and a little bit of exercise squeezed in, we are doing pretty well.

So, dear friends: when you notice that we didn’t return your Facebook message or text, and it’s been three days, or forgot to respond to your invite to your Zoom party, or return your call, just remember that we are probably buried in the paperwork that is necessary to keep giving good care to our clients. Thank goodness we love what we do!

And now, without further ado………

I have some paperwork to do.