Remedial Birthing

We have completed our birthing class and are now allowed to have our baby. Before we "graduated", however, we attended a film night at the hospital. It was birthing for dummies. I suppose if I hadn't read a book or taken classes it might have been useful, but then there still would have been that awful woman leading the class. Her commentary between the film was so painfully annoying that I was ready to ask for an epidural to get through the rest of it. She even carried on about how ugly her granddaughter was at birth. 3 hours of my life I will never get back. I also couldn't help but notice that if you want to be in a birthing film, you have to be hefty, have a bad haircut and own a pair of overalls. I've got the bad haircut right about now, but I'll have to put on a little more weight and scare-up a heap of denim before they'll film me pushing out a baby.

Despite the overalls and the scary stretch marks in these films, I get teary-eyed when they throw that crinkly, gray baby up onto the mother's massive bosom. I have seen my share of vaginal births, including the Ricki Lake's, so you would think I that would have built up an immunity to this, but it gets me every time.

I made 36 weeks yesterday. So far i have gained about 16 pounds and my blood pressure and urine tests have all been in the good range. I hope I can keep my winning streak up for a few more weeks and carry it into that tiny delivery room.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mom Jeans

My belly has the beginnings of a swell, and I am starting to over-extert the rubber band that keeps my pants comfortably together. I have already had to break out my fat pants, so I finally decided it was time to start the search for maternity clothes. I quickly realized that unless I want to pay $200 for jeans, I might need to search a little harder or settle for those awful unisex looking things. And really how do you know what is the right size anyway? I have no idea if my ass will get huge or if the weight will (mercifully) be centralized in a cute little bump - with my luck it will be door number 1 with a large helping of lumpy bump. In any care the pregnancy hormones must be effecting my taste in clothes, because the other night I was in a cab that was stopped at a light and across the street was what must have been the Manhattan's flagship Dress Barn because it took up half of the block. Normally the phrase "flagship Dress Barn" would send me running to the nearest...
Read more

Candy-cane Stirrups

I finally worked up the courage to get my medical file. I have made an appointment to consult with a dr from Cornell, and I can't shake the feeling that I am two-timing my dr. I have this strange sense of loyalty to him. I think part of it is that seeing another dr makes me feel like I might have been wasting my time with K. Cornell is regarded as one of the top clinics in the country so I do feel a little daft for not going there first. My ob/gyn recommended K, and it was geographically far more desirable then Cornell and they take my insurance. But if we are going to be doing IVF, I don't want to play around. So back to the medical records. I made the call trying not to feel too traitor joe and the receptionists were sooo nice to me. They are not the friendliest bunch, not rude, but the type that got by in charm school with a solid C+. Since it was large, I opted to go pick it up rather than having it mailed. I stopped in and again with kindness all around. On the train I sta...
Read more

Fancy Fetus

When we last left off, I was sitting on some important news, but because I know there is at least one person out there who still reads this, I kept it to myself until I could tell her in person. So now that she knows, here is the big scoop. At my dr's appt at my 17 week check up, I talked my dr into telling me the gender despite the fact that my husband couldn't be there and my dr's insistence that people from Brooklyn always want to be surprised. He asked me if I had a preference to which I of course replied: "I just want a healthy baby", and then told me it was a girl. I then squealed: "well I really wanted a girl." He advised me not to decorate the nursery until my 20 week anatomy scan, but he was pretty certain it was a girl. Fast forward 4 weeks later for the full anatomy scan (which was creepy awesome by the way), and I was slightly nervous that the ultrasound would reveal a developmental problem, but I was really nervous that they would be lik...
Read more