Testimonial for Jenna Chidester

We engaged Jenna as our birth doula in the spring and had a couple visits from her and texted her often leading up to the birth of our son in August 2017. She came over on the night I went into labor and coached me through it at home until my water broke, then went with us to the hospital and stayed with us there until about 2 hours after I delivered. She also visited us a couple times in the first 2 weeks after the birth and we've kept in touch via text.

Strengths: I find Jenna to be a very warm person that I trusted and felt totally safe with, which I think is the most important thing in a relationship with a doula. She's very physically strong--I literally leaned on her all the way from arriving at the ER until I got into the bed in the labor & delivery room, because I was at a point in my labor where I didn't want to sit in a wheelchair at all. She really took care of me and my husband when I was laboring at home, to make sure that we both paced ourselves and didn't get too tired too early. She also is really knowledgeable about different labor positions to try, such that I was able to deliver my son with minimal medical interventions like I had wanted. I felt like we probably wouldn't have needed to go to as many of the classes as we did because we could just ask Jenna to guide us. Jenna is great at keeping up-to-date on the current research about labor and birth practices such that when I asked about why people would make one choice or another, she could present very fair and scientifically-grounded explanations and she never judged.

I kind of wish I had hired Jenna as a postpartum doula to help me further in the first few weeks because we were having a lot of breastfeeding challenges. On the visits she made as part of being our birth doula, she taught us various swaddles and how to babywear safely, which were great tools.

-Katherine Wu

July 09, 2018