Learning to let go....

Status: 31 weeks, 4 days

On Saturday we took our first Intuitive Birth class with Laura from Baby Steps. We are taking this class privately because my work schedule did not permit us to take one of their regularly scheduled classes. The bonus to this is that it is very much tailored to us, and we only have to go to 4 classes instead of 6!

This week we covered nutrition & exercise, reframing birth concepts, and the beginning of labor. Our homework for the next two weeks (until we have another class) is to practice the exercises (mostly for stretching and relief of back pain), keep a food diary for a week (to monitor protein intake), practice relaxation scripts, and think about how we want to go through this experience.

I know we are taking a lot of classes, and poor Joel is probably overwhelmed, but I think that hearing a lot of the same things over and over is helping both of us to relax. Although I learned about the process of birth in nursing school, learning about giving birth yourself is a completely different thing. It takes a lot of practice to learn to trust yourself and your body and to know that you are capable of doing something that seems impossible. I really like that all of the classes we have taken so far seem to be very middle-ground. They don't preach natural or medicated births, they simply show you how to use all your resources and to make the experience of giving birth a beautiful one for your family.