A Challenge

During the last 20 minutes of our childbirth class last night, we worked on a relaxation technique that involves deep breathing and massage.

I triple dog dare you guys to lie down on the floor with a dozen pillows around your body while listening to the sounds of soothing music and my instructor guiding the men through how to give a buttocks massage, then have your derriere awkardly massaged for the first time in your life in a room of people you don't know very well at all, then lift your head up from your pillow to see all the men concentrating really hard on massaging their wives butts. I dare you to do these things and not laugh. I was able to stifle it pretty well in my pillow so I don't think the whole class knows that I'm not mature enough to handle the seriousness of labor. But oh my goodness. I am not. It is all so very very funny.

Now This Is Happening

There's so much to do. So naturally, I'm sitting down to blog about it.

This past week I went to a used bookstore and found a few of the books you all recommended, then ordered the rest on Amazon. I made some good headway on a couple of them this week at work. I was initially expecting to spend much of my free time trying to keep up with all my reading, but then I remembered that I work with the most wonderful supervisors in the world, and as long as we don't have any customers and there's nothing else for me to be doing, which is very often the case, I can read all day and they don't mind a bit. It really is very helpful that I can read at work, since it frees up my days off to work on all my other baby projects. At work, as a courtesy to everyone around me, I've been making a concerted effort to cover pictures of anything alarming, like babies crowning, with post-it notes. Don't want to scare off all the customers.

Tonight I'm attending an open house for Nine Months and Beyond, a doula service in Nashville. They call this event a MaterniTEA Party, and the idea is that you can meet and interview doulas on their Baby Ejection Squad, or whatever they call it. (Probably not that.) Meanwhile, Daniel is currently on his way to Athens, GA to get a tattoo to commemorate Leland's upcoming birth, which means that I'll most likely end up choosing a doula on my own. I hope he likes my choice. And I hope he loves his tattoo. Here's the design:

Juuuust kidding. More on the tattoo later.

This morning I was lying in bed thinking about all the things I need to do in the next three months, and it occurred to me that I wasn't sure when to pack a hospital bag. So I checked it out on my phone. And wouldn't you know, there's a whole website dedicated to the packing of hospital bags. Of course there is. Here's what it said:

"We recommend that you pack your hospital bag by the end of your second trimester. Although this may seem early, it's better to be safe than sorry and you never know if you'll go early."

Guess what today is? The last day of my second trimester. I'm taking a trip to Target and packing today. Who knows what could happen if I didn't have it packed by tomorrow! I'm so glad I found out before it was too late!

Tomorrow marks the first day of my final trimester, as well as the first day of our birth class. Then on Monday I have my monthly (soon to become biweekly) prenatal appointment and Daniel and I are going to our pastor's house to talk to him and his wife about this whole Becoming Parents thing.

Today it feels like I looked up and all at once we have actual concrete things that we can do to prepare to welcome this child into our lives. It's very exciting, because up until now it's just felt like a lot of waiting around. I'm aware that it's common to get impatient toward the end of the third trimester once you can't breathe anymore and you're running to the bathroom every five minutes and you've completed all the major preparations. For now, though, I just feel elated that I can do things. I can start packing for the hospital, setting up the nursery, writing a birth plan and doing stupid looking pretend-pushing exercises with a room full of giant pregnant women and their husbands, (all of whom have a far away look, as though trying to recall how, exactly, they got roped into this class,) and all of those things are perfectly appropriate for this stage of pregnancy. It really is time to start getting ready to have a baby. It's almost time to have our baby!