The above picture is my daughter as a newborn with her namesake, Grammie Ruth, who passed away December 2012 and was an inspiration for Sweet Nellie.
What's in a name?
"Why Sweet Nellie?" I have been asked. Last year, when I was talking to my (now late) grandmother about my dreams to be working in childbirth, she told me a story about an aunt of her's here in Vermont in the 1920s. She was not a midwife, but she traveled around the community helping her family and neighbors birth babies and stayed with them to help following the birth. Sometimes the travel was so difficult she stayed for a month or more! She was, well, a DOULA! Her name was Nellie. And by the sounds of it, she was pretty sweet.
