Our Thursday Evening

Brandy: Last night our doula came by the house to help us out with our birth plan and figuring out all of the details surrounding the birth. Our midwife does not do an official birth plan, but instead has us answer 10 questions about the kind of birth we want to have. She says pretty much anything we want, we can have, since we are not going to be in a hospital. So, back to the doula... What we concentrated on was creating a super short birth plan in the case we do need to go to the hospital for any reason. She said our best bet was to have a 1 page plan, with 5 or 6 requests in bullet form. She said if you go in with a list of 5 or 6 things, you are likely to get all of them. If you go in with a list of 20 things, you are going to get 5 or 6 of them, but you are not going to get to choose which items you get. I would rather pick the top 5 or 6 that are most important to me, and hopefully get all of them. So that is what we are doing... just in case. I have no expectation that I will be anywhere near a hospital, but what does it hurt to be prepared? If I go through the trouble of preparing it, I will never need it. Right?

We also had birthing class last night. Class was cancelled last week, so we had class 6 last night. We learned about interventions, medications and C-sections. We were told to go through the BRAN process if an intervention was suggested. B - What are the benefits? R - What are the risks? A - What are the alternatives? N - What if we do nothing? Then ask everyone to leave the room so you can discuss it and decide. We also talked about ways to bring on labor in more natural forms so you don't have to have the more serious interventions/ induction methods. These include power walking, spicy foods, sex (the prostoglandins and oxytocin help soften the cervix and bring on contractions) and acupressure points. To make up for the missed class last week, we have class Thursday (#7) and Friday (#8) next week. And that's it... we are done with birthing class. I can't believe that it is almost over. Time flies!