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Tea with Meek+Nique Podcast ShownotesEpisode 7: Our Journey into Motherhood A podcast hosted by two firey, highly-melanated mamas, sipping tea and exploring topics of motherhood, marriage, kids, career, and everything in between!-----00:40 - Welcome back! We’re excited for this next episode, but first, what tea are we sipping on today? Meek is still going strong with the ginger tea while Nique has jasmine green tea today. Wherever you are, pour yourself some tea, slow down, and sip with us. 2:32 - Let’s choose a topic from the Tea Topic Jar! Today, we’re going to talk about our birth stories. Share about your birthing experiences, and what you learned that can help the community. We’ve got so many babies and so many stories! 3:05 - Nique starts with her story of her first child, Layla, who Nique had when she was 17 years old. Being 17 with a baby, Nique describes feeling clueless and unprepared - “I feel like I was an experiment!” Nique learned lessons with Layla’s birth that helped shape and improve her birthing experiences later in her life. 5:50 - Meek’s first baby was also a girl, Elle Marie. Welcoming her daughter had a funny start, as Meek had to text a friend while she was on the toilet to figure out she was in labor. Thankfully, she had a super fast labor and delivery with baby Elle! 9:04 - Nique refers to her epidural experience during Layla’s delivery, which influenced her decision to have drug-free births moving forward. For her second baby, her son Kadeem, Nique worked with a midwife who she loved and made her birthing experience fantastic, using music and exercises to help with labor and delivery.  12:43 - For Meka’s second birth and first son, Maverick, her pregnancy, labor and delivery was so different than her first baby. Everything took so much longer with Maverick, to the point where the doctors said that Meek would need a C section. She describes her C section as a really weird experience, and the healing process is long, painful, and inconvenient. 20:04 - Nique’s third birth to welcome daughter Zia was a water birth! She chose an OB / midwife team to help her through her delivery and had an amazing experience. The nurses helping during the birth helped all of her delivery dreams come true while keeping her and baby Zia safe.  23:15 - Meka’s third baby, Jagger, is her most challenging child. He was born premature at 31 weeks, so her birthing story with him was very different. The hospital’s plan was to keep her on bed rest until Jagger was delivered, however long that took.... which was only a day after she was admitted to the hospital. After he was born, Jagger stayed in the NICU for about a month, and leaving him at the hospital was the strangest thing, but Meek found a rhythm that worked for them. 28:17 - For Meka’s last baby’s birth, Axel, her husband was deployed, so her support team was made up of her sister, her mother-in-law, and of course, Nique. Meek recalls how helpful Nique was and how she advocated for all of Meek’s needs during her labor.  30:05 - After going through so many birth experiences, Meek and Nique’s advice to mamas-to-be and in-the-future mothers: Advocate for yourself and know your rights. Take medical advice into consideration, but know what is right for you, your body, and your baby. Also, have a birthing team who can support and advocate for you, because having babies is tiring! 31:40 - We want to hear your birth stories too! Send us a message of your experiences, trials, tribulations, what you went through while you were delivering - we want this to be a community of knowledge and sharing. 32:02 - To wrap up, it’s Drive Tracks! Nique throws it back to one of her birth tracks, Coldplay’s Us Against the World. The lyrics are beautiful and reminds her that she’s got it, even when life is chaos. Meek is feeling the old Kanye recently, and throws in some appreciation for Kanye’s Sunday services! -----Make sure to follow Tea with Meek & Nique and our fabulous hosts on social media!  Meka’s blog is Hanging with the Harrells and her Instagram is @hwthblog (Meek’s instagram almost at 10k followers - let’s get her there!).  Nique can be found at White Coat Wifey and followed on Instagram at @whitecoatwifey! Make sure to follow the show at @teawithmeekandnique on Insta to see behind-the-scenes and more content, say hello to your fearless hosts at meekandnique.com, and tune in for the next episode!