>>60477509
Cont.
If you just found out your expecting, it should be easy to find a practicing midwife in range of you. Would strongly recommend "Ina May's Guide to Childbirth", written by one of the single most experienced midwives alive. We paid about $7,000 for a midwife, and she attended the birth, did followup visits, and did a full set of well-woman visits during the pregnancy, checking for good positioning and ensuring we were good to go for the planned home birth.
Prenatal nutrition is important. If your wife isn't super sick the whole time, eating fat-rich, whole foods is a good idea. Eggs, red meat, small fish, liver. Prenatal vitamins are all over the place; Thorton's is higher cost, but they focus on using the most bio-available forms of the vitamins. Read "Real Food for Pregnancy".
Skip the ultrasounds, they are likely harmful to baby. The sort of life threatening problems that you might detect with sonograms are also the sort that medicine wouldn't be able to help with anyway.
Going stay-at-home mom is actually a solid financial move for a lot of couples. Consider that if she worked a 40k/year job, daycare and all the running around costs would eat most of that away. So for a small reduction in net take-home, she gets to stay home, your kid doesn't deal with the anxiety and separation of constantly having mom leave him with strangers, and it also facilitates vaccine skepticism. Additionally, the tax brackets for couples assume you both earn the the same amount. A couple where dad alone brings in 100k/year is taxed as if he and his wife were both individuals earning only 50k/y each.
