The ‘mumabuba way’ is a philosophy that acknowledges and celebrates your uniqueness and individuality.  The birth of a baby is also the birth of a mother, and the experiences we have in our journey to motherhood can have a profound and long-lasting affect on us as individuals, on our babies and on our families as a whole. 

I believe that investing in the best support available during this essential time is an investment in the future of your family that you will continue to benefit from and will pass to your next generation. That’s why I created mumabuba as a Centre of Excellence, to provide you and your baby with the best complementary support there is to help you achieve a positive birth and parenting experience.

My goal is to provide tailored complementary support for you, your partner and your baby through every stage of your journey. I am part of your circle of support to help you prepare for, embrace and enjoy the journey to motherhood.

I work exclusively with women during fertility, pregnancy and birth, their partners and babies – I don’t do anything else, if it’s not pregnancy, birth or breastfeeding related, then I don’t do it!  This means I can dedicate 100% of my effort to making sure you get the best possible care and support available, and you can be confident that you are being looked after by someone with all the best specialist skills and experience to help. And because I support all stages of pregnancy from fertility through to postnatal and also support your baby and breastfeeding, I can provide you with a level of continuity of care that you will not find anywhere else. You might think of me as a one-stop-shop for all of your pregnancy and baby needs!

I understand that your journey to motherhood is unique, so I make sure that all the support I offer is tailored to you as an individual and as your needs change. I call on my skills and experience across multiple therapy modalities, including maternity reflexology, bodywork, craniosacral therapy, acupressure (Shiatsu), massage, yoga and prenatal & perinatal somatic sciences.

I have also developed a range of unique educational classes and courses that can be provided as private or group sessions. These classes and courses provide you with information, knowledge, new skills and techniques that will help guide you through your pregnancy journey in a positive and naturally nurturing way.

This philosophy puts you at the centre of everything I do. When you visit mumabuba for the first time, I invest lots of time getting to know you so that I can understand where you are in your journey, and what support you need to make that journey as wonderful as possible. And this flexibility continues with every visit – making sure that every time you visit I adapt the support to meet your needs.

You will see that everything I do is a little different. For example, you won’t find a massage couch in my consult room, climbing up onto a narrow, uncomfortable couch isn’t easy when you are pregnant. Instead, I use a purpose made floor mattress and lots of comfy cushions so that you feel completely safe, supported and comfortable, and as an added bonus, you can have your baby laying next to you, or even breastfeeding, while you receive a wonderful combination of bodywork, reflexology and Shiatsu.

That’s just one example of the mumabuba way.

I used complementary therapies at different stages of my pregnancies from fertility to motherhood. Having experienced the many benefits first hand, I decided to specialise in providing pregnancy related treatments myself.

I used to work in a high-stress job and in 2001 decided to have a career change and do something completely different as my husband and I wanted to start a family.  I enjoy working with my hands and working with people so I decided to study for a qualification in massage, not really having any idea where it would lead me.

I was under the care of an endocrinologist for Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) and it was looking like I would need medical fertility treatment to get pregnant. I wanted to try everything possible to conceive naturally before going down this route, so I started having weekly reflexology treatments as I had been told it was really good for fertility. I received weekly reflexology for 5 months and my periods went from every 7 weeks to every 5 and I fell pregnant a month before I was due to start the medical fertility treatment, which was fantastic!

This experience opened my eyes to the wonderful positive impact that complementary therapies can have on fertility but I was disappointed to be told I could no longer receive treatments whilst pregnant.  My pregnancy was great, but my first birth experience was traumatic and I struggled postnatally and with breastfeeding.  I am convinced that if I had received ongoing complementary support through my pregnancy I could have had a more positive birth and parenting experience.
I did some investigating and found that most of the reservations about the use of complementary therapies through pregnancy were due to a lack of specialist training, despite there being lots of research to show complementary therapies can have a positive impact on birth outcomes.
So I decided to focus on developing all of the skills necessary to provide complementary health treatments for women during every stage of their pregnancy.

In the UK the qualification system is a little different from here. For example, in Australia remedial massage encompasses a few weeks training in reflexology, aromatherapy and pregnancy, whereas in the UK each modality is a whole qualification on its own, so I set out to find the very best pregnancy training available. Following a diploma in pregnancy massage (which incorporates shiatsu) and a certificate in maternity reflexology, in 2004 I set up my own company providing specialist complementary therapies from fertility to early motherhood.

I trained my husband to provide me with reflexology and massage treatments for my 2nd and 3rd pregnancies, and as a result, we both felt empowered to make our own decisions about the birth experience. My 2nd birth was in the UK, at home in a birthing pool, with the midwife arriving 3 minutes before my daughter was born, supported by my husband while my eldest daughter slept upstairs. I had no intervention and birthed my 2nd daughter and held her in the warm pool chest to chest and breastfeeding while I birthed the placenta. My son was born in Australia in 2016, again at home in a birthing pool, only this time the midwife didn’t make it until 45 minutes after he was born! I was surrounded by my husband, two daughters and my mum, with my grandad in the background. They all got to experience the wonderful moment that my son was born, an experience that will remain with us all forever.

I have not stopped training and adding to my skills, because I love what I do and I am passionate about helping other women to have a positive birth and parenting experience.

Although I had a wonderfully positive pregnancy, I had a traumatic birth and terrible breastfeeding experience with my first daughter. She had quite a bad tongue tie which wasn’t diagnosed until day 3, and by this time I had open, bleeding cuts. I was also diagnosed with deep breast thrush, which despite several courses of treatment did not resolve (I now know that it wasn’t thrush, which is why the treatment did nothing except kill off all my good bacteria at a time when I needed them most). I was given poor advice and inconsistent advice and as a result, I was put under a lot of pressure to give up as it was just ‘not worth it’. I was determined to make sure my daughter benefited from my breast milk, so I continued to express full time for nearly 8 months.

I felt like a failure and it affected my early bonding experience with my daughter, something that I will always regret. I wanted to see something positive come from my experience, and so I started training as a breastfeeding counsellor for the Association of Breastfeeding Mothers in the UK.

My breastfeeding experience with my 2nd daughter was better, but still not without significant challenges, I breastfed for 16 months, enduring discomfort and pain throughout that time. Nobody was able to help me resolve the issues, even though I was by this time a part of the UK breastfeeding support network. When I moved to Australia in 2009 I joined the Australian Breastfeeding Association and became a counsellor, and later took on several other regional roles for the Association.

I am passionate about breastfeeding, and I know it is the natural and right way to feed a baby. I am upset that for both of my daughters the feeding was an almost entirely negative experience. My memories of the first year of both my daughters’ lives are of pain and failure. Even after all these years I am still frustrated that there was not a more consistent, focused network of support and quality advice based on up-to-date research. People were well-meaning, but I felt that because my latch looked right, there wasn’t anything else that anyone could do to help, I felt like my case was out of the norm and too difficult or complicated to deal with. 

I am not the sort of person that finds comfort in people telling me I am doing well to try and boost my morale, or that it wasn’t my fault. What I needed was help in finding a way that would allow me to feed my baby the way that it should be, and not to be in pain. There were times when I would resent having to feed, because for me feeding meant pain, the sort of pain that makes you rigid, clench your teeth or want to cry out loud, and I would have to deal with that pain multiple times, every single day. Throughout, I continued with the feeding because I still had a bit of hope that something would click and it would be ok. Sadly that never happened for me with my daughters.

After that experience, I have resolved to learn as much about breastfeeding as possible so that I could help other mums in ways that I wanted to be helped, so I decided to put my experience to good use and studied to take the IBCLC exam and become a Lactation Consultant.

I now know what the issues were that caused me so many problems, and the frustrating thing is that with the right advice and support from a Lactation Consultant, I know they could have been resolved.

In 2016 I was blessed with a baby boy, and although still not perfect, I was able to overcome many of the breastfeeding challenges I had experienced with my daughters, and breastfed him for just over 3 years. 

Life is full of challenges, and whilst I was able to overcome many of the feeding issues I had experienced before, I was given a new set of challenges when my son had severe food intolerances which were affecting his ability to absorb nutrients, fascial restrictions and central nervous system activation. Yet another learning experience!

Having experienced the challenges myself, I understand the emotional and physical drain that a bad breastfeeding experience can have. As well as the extensive formal training and examination process needed to become an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant, I also continue to read extensively on the latest research, and as a result have learned about areas of lactation that are not part of the IBCLC training, such as the effects of Thoracic Outlet Syndrome, Breastfeeding Aversion, food intolerances, the physical impact of birth on our babies and birth psychology. In addition, I combine this knowledge with various complementary therapies including specialist paediatric training which means I can take a holistic approach to supporting you and your baby. It’s quite a different approach compared to most professionals that support breastfeeding.  I have supported hundreds of mothers to overcome the many challenges that breastfeeding can pose and remain dedicated to helping mums achieve a positive breastfeeding experience.

I never felt that I had finished my motherhood journey with my two daughters, I had a strong feeling that I was meant to have a son. When my youngest daughter was 14 months old we emigrated to Australia. It took us nearly another 7 years before we felt we were in a position to try for a 3rd baby. We had bought some land and were building our new home, a home that we planned to birth our baby in. I fell pregnant just 2 months after we started trying. After thinking I would never have another baby finally everything was falling into place and we were very excited. Unfortunately that excitement didn’t last very long.

I was 6 weeks pregnant when I got the call to say our builder went into liquidation, at this time the house was only 1/3 built, we were devastated.  I waited 9 years for another baby, planned to birth in our home and within a flash that was no longer going to be possible.

At 16 weeks, I received a call from my midwife to say I would no longer be able to have a home birth through Midwifery Group Practice (MGP) as they changed the age criteria.  There came my second blow, not only was I unable to birth in my own home I now had to go to hospital.  The fear was immense, I couldn’t do it and I walked away from the MGP without really having a plan.

Luckily, I had worked with a local midwife through the Australian Collage of Midwives who has said she was thinking about going private. I called her to see if she would take me on as her first client and she agreed, so at 24 weeks I regained maternity care.

Physically I had an amazing pregnancy (despite now being classified as geriatric!) but emotionally it was a huge roller coaster.  Everything I had hoped for slipped away.  Ok now I could at least birth in our rental but the space was small, my mum and grandad were coming out from the UK so we would have 8 people in a tiny unit.  This was not how we planned it.

The whole pregnancy was fraught with legal and insurance battles to get our house finished.  We lost a lot of money in the process and we finally moved into our new home 3 months after my little guy was born.

I made the best of birthing in our rental and my little guy arrived after a 2 hour 20 min labour with hubby, my girls and mum present – my midwife didn’t make it till 40 mins after he was born to hubbies delight as he got to play midwife!

Because of my experience with my two daughters I expected to have some initial breastfeeding problems and I was expressing and finger feeding by the time he had his tongue tie revised on day 5.  My son was losing weight (beyond what is normal for newborns) and continued to lose weight into his 2nd week. A trip to the maternity hospital to check for any underlying medical conditions which might be causing the weight loss was extremely stressful.  I had people telling me it was my milk supply and giving me ill-informed suggestions for topping him up and then telling me I was risking his life by going home instead of staying in so the nurses could monitor his feeds – nurses that had a fragment of the lactation training both myself and my midwife had (she is also an IBCLC).

It was so hard being the mother emotionally connected and trying to also wear my IBCLC hat at the same time.  By 6 weeks he had gone from the 85th percentile to 5th and was looking really ill, it was breaking my heart, I honestly thought he was going to die.

I received a lot of negative comments saying that the lack of dairy and grains in my diet was causing him to lose weight and essentially killing him which was horrible.   But the lack of dairy and grains in my diet was actually keeping him alive, his weight loss improved when I removed foods which said ‘may contain dairy and gluten’ from my diet, something that I was told was impossible and even crazy, no way foods that said ‘may contain traces’ which then transfers into breastmilk could cause a baby to be failure to thrive, but it did. As soon as I removed those foods from my diet, my son’s health improved and he started regaining his weight, and was soon back up to 50th percentile, which is pretty much where he stayed.

I knew I would have breastfeeding problems, but I never expected this.  All those newborn cuddles were overshadowed by the fear of losing him. I lost precious bonding time and my son’s earliest experiences after his birth were filled with pain and discomfort. My pregnancy was hugely stressful and now this. I wanted to know why, could there be a link?

I reviewed my embryology training and made the connection that at 6 weeks the primitive gut starts developing, and this was at the same time our builder went into liquidation.  For the whole time his gut was developing I was under significant stress, and so he was flooded with cortisol, the stress hormone, this caused epigenetic changes making his gut hypersensitive.

I had worked out what was wrong with him (when nobody else could), both my own and my son’s central nervous systems were so triggered, I was a mess and he just cried and cried in pain as his small intestines were bleeding.

He is still very sensitive to foods, but you would never by looking at him now that he was as sick as he was.

My research led me into the world of pre and perinatal somatic sciences which opened up a whole new level of understanding of how our babies experience their time in-utero and their birth. It’s like looking at things through a new lens, and provides fantastic insights into how birth imprints impact the way that we all feel about and interact with the world around us.

I have continued to study the field of pre and perinatal somatic sciences, and now fully integrate this into the way that I support women and babies. The combination of pre and perinatal somatic sciences and the different complementary therapy modalities I practice means that I can provide a truly unique and holistic model of support.