Parenting 101

Last night Chad and I attended our very first parenting class at the hospital and I think we may be traumatized. The classes are provided by the obstetrics department and are taught by one of the delivery nurses. Just a really neat thing to be available to us new parents.

The class last night covered the early stages of labor, how to measure contractions and when we really need to go to the hospital. Then the nurse said that we were going to watch a video that will cover the early stages of labor and then the delivery itself. Chad and I were both immediately fear stricken. It turns out, that we both purposely missed that day in high school when the birthing video was shown. No getting out of it this time- drat. The video starts out pretty innocently, just shows some couples hanging out at home or in the hospital getting through the early contractions. One couple even said they went hiking during this early stage of labor. Huh? Hiking? Really? Makes me question how this couple defines the word "hiking", but that is neither here nor there. One guy in the video said that a great way to calm down women during labor and birth was to be about 3 inches away from their face, coaching them through the contractions and birth. Chad looked over at me and I shook my head no. Good thing Chad is a smart guy because he knows if he took this joker's advice and got right up in my face during this process, he might receive injuries from which he may never recover. Chad was there to calm me down when I had to get half of my body's blood drawn at one of my doctor's appointment and he was great at getting me through that. He was calm and cracked jokes, which took my mind off of what was going on, so I know that Chad will be a great support person during the birth of our child.

The video moves to the second stage of labor and starts getting pretty serious, these women are clearly in a lot of pain and not having fun at all. I know the video wanted to show what the average labor and birth was like, but come on! Couldn't they have shown the quickest and easiest labor ever? At least it would give me something to be hopeful for or it would allow me to be naive in thinking every birth was easy peasy.

Well, the video moved on from the labor stage to the actual birthing stage. Chad and I are both pretty wimpy when it comes to things like this. I more so than Chad and I was pretty nervous to actually watch this. Chad starts giggling, which makes me want to laugh. I had to turn my eyes away from the video because I was either going to start to laugh in denial or pass out. I was trying very hard not to laugh because I didn't want the nurse to be thinking "these guys are going to be responsible for a child?", but then Chad just let out a "What?! No!". I looked back at the screen and could not believe what was going on and couldn't help but think "What?! NO!!!!!!!". This is how I felt at that moment:



The video of course came to a happy ending. The moms were thrilled with the birth of their child. The dads were relieved with the birth of their child. And the babies were as cute as can be. All was well in in the birthing world.

After the video ended and the lights came back on, the nurse asked if any of the class participants had any questions. Silence. I think we were all stunned to think that what we had just watched was about to happen to us. The nurse assured us that our babies will look pretty much what the babies looked like in the video. I for one was really hoping that our baby would come out looking pink, clean and wearing a cute little blue hat- that's what happens in the movies afterall...

On a different note, the paint in the nursery will be finished this weekend and we get our new carpet for the upstairs on Monday, so we can finally start putting the nursery together. Pictures to come soon!