23series

23series
Originally uploaded by b-craft.

Well well well, 23 weeks and counting.. almost 6 months... Wow! Things are going really well at this point. Caesar is sitting on the bed watching the ceiling fan and I'm blogging away while Dave cooks dinner -- what a lucky girl I am.

My big news is that Dave and I went to our first childbirth/parenting class last night. We weren't going to go, but a friend highly recommended this particular class so we went. It was a little touchy-feely but it was really nice. The class focuses on natural childbirth and it was a little weird that there was only one other woman (besides me) who was planning to deliver in the hospital (not a home or water birth). Nonetheless, the lady who leads the class is definately not against hospitals and feels that there is definately a time and place for medicine. It really calmed my nerves a lot to hear that most people are totally capable of having a natural birth. I'm not set on drug-free at all, but I like knowing that it I don't have to be SuperWoman to do it and that drugs will help but that my body will know what to do. I definitely left feeling good about things.

So here's the long story about what we did:
We missed the first class (this was the second one) So we went early and the lady who runs the class (a midwife named Stacey) had us do some paperwork and write down what we wanted from the class and stuff and then showed us a little slide of a home birth (the focus is definately on trusting taht your body to know what to do). She talked a lot about how contractions are in one part of your body and if you can try to relax the rest of your body while you're having them, it is more manageable in the long haul bc your whole body doesn't get so exhausted. (No idea how true that is, but it sounds reasonable.) We saw the baby's head born (rest of baby still in mommy) and what it looked like coming out -- DH and I were both a little freaked out because it was TOTALLY PURPLE! but aparently that is normal because when it's sqeezed through, the blood tends to go into the head, but not drain out (because there is so much pressure in the birth canal.) The next slide it was totally pink -- that was neat to see because I think if I saw my purple baby without knowing it was ok, I'd think it was dead.

So then all the other people came and aparently their homework for last time was to talk to their mothers and find out their birth stories. So they went around the room and told their stories which ran the gammut of being strapped to a table (!) and delivering in the hallway. Stacey explained why they would have been advised to do certain things (like smoke = used to be they promoted smoking and low weight gain so people would have small babies) and why they use different drugs, etc.

After that we divided into girls and boys and as groups made a list of the fears surrounding birth and then talked about it as a big group. It was
nice to talk about it in the open and know that other women are afraid of, oh, say, pooping. We then talked about different types of pain (emotional physical etc.) and talked about what we do to deal with that (cry drugs excercise etc) and how labor would relate to childbirth.

At the very end we did a 5 minute free-writing excercise where we started with "On the day of my baby's birth...." DH and I exchanged ours and we both feel really good about it and that was encouraging. I mean, I'm scared of stuff, but I feel like it will probably be ok...

Anyhow, you're all probably bored to death hearing about pregnancy.

In other news, our new couch will arrive this weekend Woohoo!!