Prepared Parent Bundle

Babies don’t come out holding a buyer’s guide! So let us help you prepare for birth and beyond with our Prepared Parent Bundle. These essential workshops will help you prepare for the unknown of labor and birth and equip you with the knowledge and confidence to care for your newborn. You will feel empowered and ready to thrive in early parenthood.

This bundle includes:

Childbirth Education (Note: Choose between Childbirth Express and Childbirth Preparation below)!
Infant Safety & CPR
Newborn Care & Lactation

Childbirth Education

Upcoming Dates (Childbirth Express): January 25 | March 22 | May 17

Upcoming Dates (Childbirth Preparation): January 12 | February 23 | March 30 | May 4

This Childbirth Education class will help you prepare for what to expect during labor, at the hospital, and how to confidently participate in your care and express your desires to your support team. Our goal is to help you determine which options are right for you – we offer unbiased, evidence-based information on the reality of birthing in NYC.

Choose between two formats below:

Childbirth Express: This accelerated class is packed full of important information to help you feel prepared for labor and birth. It’s perfect for those who have limited time but want to learn the essential elements of birth, or for those who have previously given birth and are looking for a refresher.
Childbirth Preparation: In this comprehensive course, we’ll cover the same information that would take weeks to cover in larger groups in a one-day format .

Infant Safety & CPR

Upcoming Dates: January 19 | February 16 | March 23 | April 27

This Infant Safety & CPR workshop is for expectant parents or parents of babies up to 1 year of age. This class is a lively combination of lecture and demonstration and will cover infant CPR protocols and techniques, plus relief of choking for ages 0-12 months, car seat safety and first aid. There will be for questions, answers and discussion. Give yourself an advantage when creating a safe environment for your family: prepare for emergencies in our CPR and Safety classes.

Our instructors pride themselves in teaching the most up to date protocols in the field of CPR of both the American Heart Association The American Red Cross.

Note: This is not a CPR certification course.

This class helps parents and caregivers care for and protect infants and children. You’ll learn:

Basic infant (0-12 months) and child (1 year through puberty) CPR.
Techniques to help your infant or child in a choking emergency.
Basic first aid to keep your child out of the emergency room.
Key measures you can take to make traveling in a car safer for your infant and child.

*Please note: This workshop is NOT a CPR certification course.

Newborn Care & Lactation INTENSIVE

Upcoming Dates: January 18 | February 22 | March 29 | May 3

Our Newborn Care & Lactation Fundamentals class helps expecting families become familiar with the basics of infant care & body feeding in the early days and weeks after birth to start with confidence!

Topics covered will include:

Understanding normal infant behavior, communication, appearance and sleep patterns
Understanding common newborn procedures in the hospital
Understanding the basics of soothing, diapering, umbilical cord care, bathing, and assessment of your baby
Newborn warning signs and when to call the pediatrician
Bottlefeeding best practices, tips and techniques, burping, bottle cleaning, etc. and how to know if the baby is getting enough
How to get breastfeeding/chestfeeding off to the best start
How to help your infant latch-on and correct positioning
How to know if the baby is getting enough milk
How to avoid common lactation problems and when to call a lactation consultant

After purchasing your bundle, we will email you within 1 business day to enroll you in the dates of your choice.

Details (including times) are available on each individual workshop’s page.

Please note our cancellation policies here. We reserve the right to move any in-person workshops online if necessary.

Option 1: Includes Childbirth Express

$729 PER TWO ATTENDEES

IN STUDIO

Option 2: Includes Childbirth Preparation

$854 PER TWO ATTENDEES

IN STUDIO

MEET THE INSTRUCTORS

Please note: Many of our instructors are active birth workers and therefore subject to change. In the event your scheduled teacher is called in to a birth, a substitute will be sent in their place.

Emma Kvaale

Emma is a Labor & Delivery nurse at NYU Langone in Manhattan. After working with new parents, she realized how much more empowering birth could be if couples had childbirth education. This began her interest in teaching new parents at City Births.

Emma received her bachelor’s degree in Exercise Science & Dance at Elon University. She then received a Bachelor’s of Science in Nursing at New York University. She worked in orthopedic surgery and cardiac medicine prior to becoming a Labor & Delivery nurse in 2020. Emma is certified in Electronic Fetal Monitoring, Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support, and Neonatal Resuscitation. She is also currently studying for her breastfeeding certification.

Lisa Cirigliano

Lisa is a Certified Nurse Midwife. She graduated from the University of Phoenix with a bachelor’s in nursing, and then went on to receive her master’s in Nursing & Midwifery from Stony Brook University School of Nursing.

Prior to becoming a midwife, Lisa worked as a certified RNC-OB labor and delivery nurse, lactation counselor, as well as a birthing center nurse at Mount Sinai West.

Lisa is a CNM at Weill Cornell and delivers at Alexandra Cohen’s Hospital for Women & Newborns. She deeply believes in the power of a woman’s body and its innate ability to give birth. She supports and respects the normal physiological processes of labor and birth using evidence-based practices to enhance best outcomes for mother and infant. Lisa resides in Long Island with her 3 children and 3 dogs. She enjoys reading, spending days at the beach, and skiing with her family.

Ceridwen Morris

Ceridwen Morris is a childbirth educator, doula, and writer who has taught and supported thousands of expectant parents for the last 20 years.

She is co-author of the pregnancy guide “From the Hips” (Random House, 2007), served on the board of the Childbirth Education Association for 5 years, and has taught at City Births, Real Birth, Tribeca Pediatrics, Prenatal Yoga Center, and NYC Birth Prep. Born in London, raised in the UK, Washington, DC, and Australia, she has lived in NYC since 2000.

Jayne Freeman

Jayne Freeman is a CEA/MNY certified childbirth educator, breastfeeding counselor and postpartum doula specializing in mood disorder prevention. After the birth of her two daughters, Jayne started a public access show about birth and parenting, titled “Mamarama.” It aired for over a decade on Comcast Cable and made her a local celebrity in her hometown of Jersey City.

Eventually, she turned her hobby into a profession and has been working full-time in the birth world for over 12 years. Jayne has taught for several pediatric practices, worked with pregnant teenagers, volunteered at the Jersey City clinic, and gave Snooki & J-Woww their childbirth class on MTV. She is also a passionate advocate, successfully petitioning the PATH train to create signage and announcements for pregnant passengers and creating a dedicated lactation room for her former employer, The Princeton Review.

More recently Jayne’s area of focus has been on postpartum mood disorders and she is working on advanced certifications for perinatal mental health. Her current mission is to shift our feeding paradigm to one of choice and inclusion. Every month she teaches a class on infant formula for us at City Births. Jayne also writes a regular column for the Jersey City Times where she highlights the challenges of new parenting.

Website: Mamarama.tv

Instagram: Mamarama_jc

Vanessa Anton

has worked with families as a doula, a childbirth educator, and as a parenting educator for more 15 years. After completing her medical training in the emergency care field, she embarked on making CPR more accessible to families and started Common Sense CPR 10 years ago. Vanessa is a certified Childbirth Educator, Certified Doula, Board Certified Holistic Health Practitioner, E.M.T., American Heart Association B.L.S. Instructor, American Red Cross Instructor and Child Passenger Safety Technician.

Geoff Gohacki

has been a professional chef and teacher for over 15 years and first became interested in emergency response after preforming first aid on one of his students. Geoff has two young boys who like to live on the wild side. Because of this, Geoff has focused on child safety and responding to emergencies involving children. A student before a teacher, Geoff is constantly researching and learning the newest techniques in CPR, AED, First Aid and Child Passenger Safety. Geoff is an American Heart Association BLS Instructor and an American Red Cross certified instructor of CPR, AED, and First Aid. He is also a nationally certified Child Passenger Safety Technician.

Robin is Lactation Counselor certified through the Healthy Children Project, an educational program prominent in the field of evidence based breastfeeding research and practice. She’s a Lamaze Certified Childbirth Educator and teaches childbirth education, breastfeeding and newborn care classes at NYU Langone Medical Center, Tribeca Pediatrics, Birth Day Presence/Boober, as well as privately and online (virtual classes). Robin has had the pleasure of participating on the Pregnancy, Health, and Wellness panel and as a “Meet The Experts” speaker at the New York Baby Show for the past 2 years. She is honored to serve as an Educator Director on Lamaze International’s Board of Directors and co-lead educator training seminars for NYC Lamaze. She has also served on the Board of Directors with Chocolate Milk Cafe National.

Stephanie Heintzeler

Stephanie is a German-educated midwife and acupuncturist, as well as a US-certified birth and postpartum doula and lactation consultant (IBCLC). She was born in New York City but raised in Germany, where she found her enthusiasm for midwifery already when she was 12 years old (thanks to her “not-so-little-anymore” brother who was born then. She became a midwife at the midwifery school Black Forest in 2000 and worked in Frankfurt for several years as well as in Munich from 2008-2012.

Stephanie cares for women with all kinds of births- whether her clients choose a hospital birth, birthing center or home birth; she wants them to follow their own intuition about which birth place feels best. Stephanie has seen it all- breech births, many successful VBACs (Vaginal Birth after Cesarean), planned and unplanned c-sections, vaginal twin births and LGBTQ-families.