class week 5

In class this week, our instructor invited one of her previous couples to come in and share their birth story. They brought their 3 month old daughter which was very popular with the crowd of parents to be and just talked about the whole process of their birth. It was interesting to hear about, because it didn't go perfectly but I think they were really happy with it and felt like they knew what they were doing.
We also talked about fetal monitors (which are used to monitor the baby's heart rate and the mothers contractions, but prevent you from moving around and changing positions in labor) and episiotomies (I'm not going to tell you what an episiotomy is, it will just gross you out) and what they are good for (or not). We also did some more practice contractions with ice, which I am not sure hurts me enough to be a good test of a contraction, but what are you going to do. Our homework for this week is to think about and write down our fears about labor and then think of pro-active things we can do to help keep those fears from coming true. Also to do some more practice contractions, and as always, I'm to do my pelvic tilts and kegle exercises!