Week 37: Ante-natal starts
Today's the day the ante-natal classes started. We already knew in advance what the topics would be - weeks 1 & 2 for labour, week 3 for feeding and week 4 for bringing baby home. So this was part 1 of 2 on labour. And our survey said...
What did we expect?
We expected the class to be dumbed-down to the lowest common denominator of chav. With a mixed class I was expecting exactly what was forewarned in Fatherhood: The Truth. More questions than expectations, really, like "who will be the rampant dad not getting any", and "who will be the E-class", and "who will be the petrified teenager"? I fit all three, apart from my teenage years were long since resigned to last century. Breathing exercises, bring them on. Drugs? I'll have half a kee of smack, please.
I don't expect many answers from the individual classes, but I do expect that they will generate more questions than we currently have, some of which will be answered over the next few weeks as we go, some of which won't. For those that aren't we can follow up during the classes and later once we forgotten.
What did we learn?
- Smack is not provided for pain relief, not even for the dads. Bastards.
- This isn't a dream, it's for real. Shit.
- The TV dramas go from waters breaking to being in hospital on the bed pushing. They miss out the 19+ hours of early stage labour in the middle.
- What our midwife's opinions on the various pain relief options are
- That the tour of the hospital consists of watching a video on a 14" portable from 20 feet away.
- That the car parking charges are an incentive for you to not go in too early
- 37 weeks is considered full term. That's 7 days away {gulp}
What was informative?
- The procedure for ejecting me from hospital if I bring in my own smack.
- Knowing when to go in, when to cross over into the "panic zone"
- How to breath. Still sounds strange, but that's all we MUST come away with.
What was a waste of time?
- Trying to second-guess what the class was going to be like.
- Nothing else really, all was pretty useful.
What was missing?
- A chauffeur driven limo from the class to the office.
- Other dads. I was the only one there until 5 minutes in.
I have no idea why I put this last question in now, I won't know what's missing until after the main event, only then will we know what we wanted to know now but didn't know we wanted to know it because we hadn't been through it, and by that time we'll know what we didn't know we wanted to know in the first place.
