Alder's Tone

...surely these will assist in making it all plain sailing! Not quite, but they have certainly been extremely useful so far all be it my head has quite literally span each time I have left the class (I have had 2 Dads 2 Be classes now). Lets start at the beginning - Monday 15th January 2007 (incidentally my last day of being 32..sigh) - and I headed to St Johns hospital. As I sat in the car park I envisioned myself being one of potentially two or three blokes who had signed up - wrong, 12 other blank faces were sitting in the room when I arrived - all sheet white and terrified. The first class was all about labor - there were slides and captions on the different stages. My favourite part was watching a guy Brian go into a spin when he realised just how many contractions his wife may have while he drove to the hospital! Then came an excercise where we split into groups of four - my group were led to a white board headed up "Ways to support your partner during labor"
We had 10 minutes to put down as much as we could come up with starting nowwww. Maybe it was the slides we had just seen and the realisation we had a LOT of supporting to do, perhaps it was that it was the first time we had really thought about it, or perhaps we just did not want to say anything silly however we simply stood and stared. Time passed and the canvas remained blank. Finally Sam, who was six foot both ways finally said “Massage”. That was it, one word, then “Aye I read it once in some book, give them a massage”. Cool we thought, get it down. It opened the flood gates and soon we had “Feed the cats” and “bring grapes” – I felt we had all the angles covered. Michelle approached us and some how managed to keep a straight face “That’s great lads, now try to think of other things, you know physical support, mental support, that sort of thing” and she turned and walked over to the next group. A few minutes later and it was time up. We started off by going through our list with the rest of the class. “So guys, how are you going to support your partners during labour, let the rest of the class know” Michele asked. Here was our moment. “Ok guys here’s our list”

Massage
Bring Grapes
Feed the Cats
Physical Support
Mental Support

I thank you. The rest of the class nodded in agreement, Michele said a silent prayer for our partners.

Thankfully I knew that Sarah would never see the list and that I would have a proper think nearer the time!

The second class was a little more calm - again we went over the support side with my personal lowlight being when Michele made 12 grown men stand up and demostrate some positions for labor with the person on their left. The curtains were NOT drawn and nurses could see in as they walked past. It was like sadistic and very scary twister. The we headed for the maternity ward and watched a 1 day old baby being bathed - fascinating. The dad looked in shock, total shock. 2 classes it had taken the mid-wife to encourage us and make us grow in confidence, in a split second it was shattered. Then as we watched young Libby being bathed you could see the fear turning to excitement again...

All in all a couple of very useful classes for someone as naive as me - 2 more to go!