Meet the Mom: Sarah Crossman

Chad and I in Scotland a week before we got pregnant!

(first published on NPR's Baby Project)

My name is Sarah Crossman, and I live on an island in midcoast Maine called Vinalhaven. My husband, Chad, and I moved back to this little island in January after a 16-month stay in the U.K., where Chad was getting his master's degree. We live in a tiny house next door to my father and stepmother, the same house where, 32 (and a half) years ago, I was born, and where, five years later, my sister was born. We plan to follow in this tradition with a midwife-assisted home birth, sometime around the 24th of July.

Chad and I have been married for almost five years, and we've waited to have our first child because we wanted to spend some time together as a married couple before embarking on parenthood. Now that we're back among family and friends, we feel that this is the perfect time to do it. Our stay in the U.K. confirmed that this is the place that we want to put down our roots; there's just something about this island community that we haven't found anywhere else — something that made us realize what our priorities are and how we want to live our lives.

For the first few months of pregnancy (14 weeks, to be precise), we were still living in the U.K., but had planned our return to the U.S. We'd decided to throw caution to the wind and try to conceive beginning at the end of October. Little did we know that it would happen on the first try!

Having a huge mouth, it was impossible to keep my "condition" a secret from our friends in the U.K., but we told very few people stateside until we returned with our ultrasound photo and could do it in person — though the secret-keeping nearly killed me, it was worth the effort to see my mom's face when we told her she's going to be a grandmother.

After quite a lot of talking and research, Chad and I came to the conclusion that a home birth would be the right choice for us.

My husband continues to surprise me. I never thought he'd want to live on Vinalhaven for good, and I never thought he'd be OK with a home birth. The more we talked about it, though, the more sense it made for us to stay put when labor began and let the process be as natural as possible.

I completely trust in my ability to give birth, and am excited to work with our birth team — an experienced CPM (certified professional midwife), who will make the trip over to the island once I go into labor, and a friend and midwife-in-training who will be living on the island during the last two weeks of July.

I'm so thrilled to have been chosen by NPR to represent those of us out there who choose home birth, and can't wait to meet this little person!