Meet Lulu

Of course her name isn't Lulu, but I figure I'll give her a bit of anonymity.
When I was pregnant with Mikayla and decided I wanted a homebirth, I was getting frustrated with the midwife search until someone online who lived nearby and was in the same situation emailed me to tell me about Lulu. She'd just found her, and had scheduled a meeting with her. I called right away and scheduled a meeting too. We both hired her. She only lived around 10 minutes from my house, and all the others had lived an hour or more. Her prices were much more reasonable. Most of all, we just loved her from the moment we met her. We just knew she was "the one."
I've been concerned for the past few years because I dreaded ever having to find a new midwife in a different state. We thought there might be a chance that we'd actually live back in GA by the time I had another baby, but that just didn't work out. So for the first several weeks of this pregnancy, I talked with a few midwives that I knew of her in NC. It's not that I disliked them, but I was comparing them all to Lulu and none were as good as her. I'm sure they're all wonderful midwives - just not as good for ME, as she is. One day I was talking to Lulu on the phone, telling her about what a hard time I was having, and she suggested that I just travel to GA late in the pregnancy, stay with my parents, and have the baby there, with her. Michael agreed to it, even though it meant he'd have to stay in NC until I went into labor and then drive to GA and hope to make it in time. My mom agreed to having me stay with her. So it was all settled around the end of the first trimester. Through most of the second trimester, that was our plan and we thought it was wonderful. We worried a bit about Michael making it in time, but other than that, it was a great plan.
Then I started thinking about the upcoming school year for Aaric. I was looking at the K level curriculum, figuring out what all I'd need and trying to sort it all out. After a lot of consideration, I decided to give school a shot this year. Real school, as in, not at our kitchen table but in a building that we don't live in with teachers that aren't me. Just as I beginning to feel good about that decision, one big problem dawned on me. School starts the last week of August. I was planning to head to GA at 37 weeks, which would be September 1. This meant that Aaric would go to one week of school with me here. I couldn't take him home with me. I feel like if we're gonna do this school thing, we need to give him the best chance to succeed, and missing a bunch of school at the start of the year, for his first year EVER would make it harder to adjust to it. So then I thought through leaving him here. Michael has to leave for PT in the mornings a bit before 6. The time when he makes it back home varies. Then he gets off work around 5 most days. So that meant we'd have to find a sitter for Aaric from 6 until when school started, and then he'd go to the after-school program until Michael picked him up shortly after 5. That's 11 hours a day away from home. This kid is used to being at home 24/7 with me. That seemed like an awfully harsh adjustment too - especially since he'd know that Mikayla and I were in GA with all the family.
Clearly, me going to GA wasn't going to work if he was going to school. But I didn't like any of my options in NC, either. The night I realized this problem, I probably paced the kitchen half the night, trying to figure out what to do. I felt like I was having to choose between my sons. I could homeschool Aaric another year or I could just go to GA anyway - either way, I feared I would be screwing him up in some way. Or I could give birth in NC, but knowing that I wasn't happy with any of my midwife options, it seemed that I'd have to do a hospital birth and then I'd be putting the baby at more risk (than homebirth.) So - which kid do I put first? I finally went to sleep.
As I woke up that morning, I remembered another midwife I'd just gotten an email from a week earlier. This one sounded good and I talked with her on the phone and through email and we scheduled a meeting. That meeting got postponed and then so did the new one. We decided to broaden the search again. I got out my complete listing of every midwife in the state and narrowed it down to all the ones less than 2 hours away, and then contacted all of them that I hadn't already spoken to. I had it narrowed down to one.
Then we went to GA for a weekend. We had an appointment scheduled with Lulu, as all of this whirlwind of decisions and searching had all taken place in the 2-3 days before we left. So we told her that we couldn't come to GA to have the baby and told her how frustrated we still were with our options. Being the saint of a woman that she is, she suggested an alternative: her husband works for an airline, she could fly up to NC for free, so she would consider coming up here to us. We latched onto that idea as our best hope, but still wanted to give this other midwife that I'd found a chance.
I started to doubt how great that plan would be, because what if she didn't make it in time!? I'd just decided that we would almost definitely not do that earlier this week. Tuesday, we met with this other midwife. When she left, Michael and I both thought about it for a bit and discussed it briefly and finally we both said that what we REALLY wanted was Lulu. We'd hoped to just fall in love with this other woman enough to overcome our desire for Lulu, but it didn't happen.
SO...
I called Lulu yesterday. The plan is definitely for her to fly up here. There are a total of 16 flights per day into this area. The earliest is at 7am, the latest at 10pm. So there's a chance she won't make it. But we're hoping for the best.
So there you have it. At 31.5 weeks, my birth plan is finally in place and we're sticking with it. Its official. We've got Lulu on board!