HI! I'M SANDIE!

(Nice to meet you!)

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to work with moms and babies.

I was the kid putting pillows under her shirt, pretending to be pregnant, because the idea of a woman growing and birthing a baby was just so magical.

And, honestly, it still is!

I started my career in birthing as a doula and now work as an LDRP (Labor, Delivery, Recovery, and Postpartum) nurse and a nurse educator in labor and delivery. I'm also an NRP (Neonatal Resuscitation Program) instructor.

I love my job. I love supporting mamas as they bring their little ones Earthside. Every day at work, I get to see miracles of little humans joining families. It is literally the best job ever. 

One of the harder parts of my job, though, is when a mama doesn’t have enough information to make informed decisions about something in her birth. It’s her birth team’s job to educate her, and I definitely try my best, but sometimes there is a time limit on a decision that needs to be made, or the mama is exhausted or in pain so she isn’t in a great position to learn. There is also a lot of misinformation on the internet that impact people’s decisions around their births. It can be hard to do as much education as I would like to do in the hospital while a woman is laboring.

Being forced to make decisions in situations they don't fully understand can lead to those mamas feeling like victims of their birth, rather than empowered decision-makers for themselves and their babies.

That’s how Welcome Earthside was born. All the information in my resources is evidence-based and from my experience as a nurse on what I wish people knew to make the best informed decisions for their births. It’s knowledge I was glad I had when I was giving birth.