CNM and homeschooling

[Hbmt15]

I'm working towards NP school and I have always loved women's health and wanted to be a midwife but I have 3 children that I am planning on homeschooling. My husband farms and will be home with them but isn't confident in teaching. Should I do FNP instead to have a more family friendly schedule? It wouldn't make me as happy career wise but I'm not sure midwifery will leave enough time for my family.

[Violet Appleseed]

I would like to know the answer to this question too! I'm a home school mama myself and my life circumstances have changed recently so I'm looking to start working to support my kiddos. I've been homeschooling for four years, but have also been passionate about midwifery and women's health (and holistic health) since being in school. I was originally planning to study midwifery after graduating with my BA, but decided to put it off until my kids were older. Now they are a bit older, but not as old as I was planning for them to be before I began working as a midwife. Home school takes a lot of energy, but there are a lot of different styles that you can do with varying degrees of time commitment.

I'm hoping that this is manageable, but I am also thinking of getting my RN first and working in L&D while the kids are still little (before high school) and then moving on to midwifery after that. I figure by then they will be either sick of being at home and want to go to high school (I hear this happens a lot) or that they will be independent enough to handle me spending more time working (like I won't have to ask multiple times for them to do their math or whatever).

From what I know about nurse midwifery, if you are part of a group of nurse midwives, you can choose to just work part time if that works for everyone else in your group. It sounds like the scheduling (at least around here) is up to the midwives more so than the hospital. The other thing is that here you can do out of hospital birth as a CNM as well, so you could have a private practice doing home birth or birth center births and limit the number of births you do a month to what you find to be a manageable schedule. The downside to this is that you will be on call and have to be flexible with home school, but if dad is around to fill in on taking kids to lessons or the home school co-op (or anything else that your kids are doing that can't be flexible) I think it will be doable. I think the key to homeschooling and working is getting creative and coordinating other help.

With all that said, I'm really just speculating and being hopeful. I would love to hear from practicing nurse midwives around here what their take on it would be.