DURHAM - Jennifer DeWolf's face shifted between smiles and panic as she paced the beige carpet in her family room. She wore only a pink shirt, a bra, an untied white robe and striped socks.

She stopped, then screamed.

"Dennis!"

Her husband rushed to her side. She bent over the back of a kitchen chair and urgently told him where to put his hands on her back.

Jennifer, 31, was in labor, and the baby was in a hurry.

Just an hour after her water broke, her contractions were already five minutes apart.

But the couple didn't lunge for overnight bags. Nor did they warm up their Volvo station wagon for a race to the hospital.

Instead, they called 20 friends and family members to come watch the birth of their second child.

Jennifer would be delivering the baby in a plastic bathtub set up in front of the family room fireplace.

No doctors. No epidural. No ice chips.

Jennifer was going to bring this baby into the world as our foremothers used to do it.

Naturally. At home. And with a midwife.

When Jennifer was pregnant with her first child three years ago, she found an obstetrician. But at every appointment, she had a nagging feeling he wasn't right for her. She didn't even know whether he would be the one to deliver her baby. It depended on who in his practice was on call that day.

So 26 weeks into that pregnancy, Jennifer told Dennis she wanted someone else to deliver their baby.

She found a midwife at Rex Hospital in Raleigh.

Dennis reluctantly agreed. At least she would be in a hospital if anything went wrong, he reasoned.

Even with the right support team at the hospital, Jennifer didn't like the internal exams the nurses did while she was in labor. She hated the fetal monitor they wrapped around her bulging belly, even faking contractions just so they would take it off.

She ended up hiding in the shower sitting on a birth ball, so the nurses wouldn't touch her.

In the end, she and Dennis, 32, had a healthy baby boy -- Dennis "Trey" DeWolf III.

After her hospital experience, Jennifer didn't want to go back. So, when she became pregnant with her second child, a friend told her about a midwife who delivers babies at home.

Dennis, a more by-the-book guy, wasn't sure.

Then he met Nancy Harman, a midwife and registered nurse, who has delivered nearly 1,000 babies.

"I'm drawn to confident people, and she had a firm handshake and looked me in the eye," Dennis said. "I knew if something happened, she would know what to do."

Birth day

As Jennifer was putting dinner in the oven on Dec. 14, she felt her water break.

Harman happened to be near the DeWolf family's Hope Valley Farms subdivision on her way to a meeting. When she got to the house, nestled in the middle of a cul-de-sac, Jennifer was doubled over with contractions.

Harman canceled her meeting.

She and her assistant, Chanel Carrell, quickly and quietly prepared for the living-room birth.

They set up the medical supplies they might need: oxygen, suction equipment, IV fluids, medication to stop bleeding and stitching supplies.

Dennis filled the birthing pool, the size of a hot tub, with water from a new garden hose hooked to the clothes washer's warm water spigot.

The lights were dimmed and hypnotic, New Age music played from the stereo in the kitchen.

"God made your body perfectly, and you are capable of having your baby," Harman, 58, tells her clients. "You have everything you need within you to birth well."

With all the babies she has delivered, Harman has only had to call 911 once, when a baby's heart rate dipped too low. By the time the ambulance arrived, the healthy baby had been born.

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