My Mother's Day was fabulous!!! I'm now the proud owner of a MacBook Air, YAY!!! I am too excited about that one - it weighs less than my textbooks, so it will be great to haul on my back, on my bike, to school on Tuesday! Then Phil and I got our weekly, child-free, bike ride, with Slurpees on the return. Then we got cleaned up, got our kids back, and took them to see Peter Pan on stage, put on by a local kids theater company (our friend's son was Starkey, one of the pirates).

The big girls loved it, and Piper came straight home and put on her TinkerBell costume... but it was Chloe who was completely enamoured. She sat wide eyed through the entire two hour performance. She clapped ferociously to save Tink, she boo'd at Hook with the rest of the audience, she raised her pudgy little arm to try to volunteer during one of the intr'acts. In the end, she didn't want to leave... she wanted to stay in Never Neverland.

It was awesome.

Anyone who homebirths in California owes Kate Bowland and Roxanne Cummings their thanks. They were among the earliest midwives to make midwifery legal.

The two women met in the heyday of the home birth movement in Santa Cruz when natural childbirth was a novel demand from women who had been politicized in the feminist wave of the '70s. The idea of home birth was still somewhat scandalous in established medical circles but natural childbirth philosophy was gaining support.

"It was a time of empowerment of the feminine side of feminist issues," Bowland said. "I was handling six to eight births alone a month."

The common practice was for women to give birth in sterile hospital environments apart from their partner and family members. Often women were pressured to take medication during labor and, after the birth, were immediately separated from their baby. Women wanted more control over the experience.

Midwives apprenticed each other and learned from supportive doctors and nurses but were not licensed. Their services were in growing demand, but there was increasing tension with the medical establishment and the legislature. Midwives held clandestine prenatal meetings with pregnant women and colleagues. Birth, the most natural thing in the world, made her an outlaw, Bowland said.

"Home birth was the only way women were allowed to stay with their babies," Bowland said. "Women wanted choice in parenting and breastfeeding, the choice of whether to be a mother or not. Midwifery was an act of civil disobedience."

In 1974, law enforcement rushed The Birth Center where Bowland worked and arrested her along with several colleagues. Midwifery was seen as practicing medicine without a license. Bowland was pregnant with her first son. The charges were dropped three years later - the same year the California Supreme Court ruled against her in People v. Bowland. California mandated a new nurse-midwife license and Bowland, who had a bachelor's degree in art, went back to school. She graduated as a nurse-midwife in 1983.