Quinn's Blog

Starting Classes

Last night we started our first birthing class. I had no idea what to expect, Allison did all the leg work to figure out which classes were offered, and what sounded best to her. I have some opinion on all the different kinds of classes that are offered, but I fell like we need to take something that Allison felt comfortable with, not me. So the class we started was "Birthing from Within".


Birthing From Within is based upon a book of the same title. I have not had a chance to read the book, we picked up the book over the weekend and found out the class was starting the day after we signed up, so I came to class pretty unprepared. When I first walked in the door I was pretty shocked. It looked very much like a hippy ritual. They had a colorful blanket with a "mother godess" print, a wire basket full of fake peddles spilled onto the mat, a magic wand, and a bunch of other paraphernalia you'd find in the "impulse buy" section of you local new age book shop. My first thoughts were "What has Allison got me into?" There's no chairs, you all sit on the floor. I've never been in shape enough to sit on the floor for very long. I don't care what anyone says, sitting on the floor just ain't natrual. I don't think this makes me a bad person, I just don't sit on the floor well.

The teacher talked about what we were to learn in the class. Over all I have to say the ideas are strong. She talked about being in the moment. Not being in your head, or thinking about some movie/tv show, something you wanted to order off the web. But being there for the experience of the birth. Also, not to intellectualize the process too much. To allow your instincts to take over. All of this I can agree with. I've taken enough acting classes to hear the term "being in the moment" to understand what it means. Its very easy to overthink something, but to allow your creative self to come up with the necessary skills to pull off a scene, this is hard to do, and it's more important then being too heady. This made sense to me. But then she referred to the idea that primitive people were more instictual, and this was easer for them to do, becouse they haven't over evolved a huge brain like we have, so they were better. This harps back to the idea of the "brilliant savage." Which is an idea that I just don't agree with.

So I can tell right away, that there's going to be aspects of the class that I'm going to like, and aspects that I'm not going to like. What I really need to do is to go to the class with an open mind. The ideas that they teach in the class seem sound, even if the delivery of the ideas are not. I can look beyond packaging, no I mean it, I really can!!

After that she had us hold ice in a way to help us feel the pain of contractions. It was more of a symbol of the pain then the actual experience of the pain. This part was not fun, but I thought was important and interesting. She was teaching methods of pain management and coping techniques.

The other part of the class I agreed with was the idea of as a husband I'm not there to rescue Allison, or fix things. I'm there for support. This makes a lot of sense. I never did see myself as a rescuer, but I know if this idea wasn't presented to me in this way, my instincts would probably lead me in that direction and I wouldn't be aware of it. It was good to hear.

So for the most part that was my view of the first class. Allison will of course give you her review of the class. I'm going to try and read parts of the book this week so next week I'll have a better understanding of the class. And I am going to go to the class with an open mind.

No really!

Painted The Room

This is my first attempt at putting a lot of pictures on line. Its my hope that this doesn't take too long to download. I know a lot of you are on slow connections, please let me know if it takes too long.




As Allison said, we painted the room this weekend. It was hot, but it went smoothly. We still have some touch-ups to do, but we'll have to wait to this weekend to do them.

This is how we started the day. Allison was tired and it was hot.




The first stroke:




This is easy:




Half way:




Now I'm tired, can I sit down and paint:




Loading up the brush:




Room Done:




And that's our day. I hope you enjoyed it.

Comments

Thanks to my web guru Brian, you can now leave comments. That is why my blog and this baby blog has moved to .php
Feel free to comment on anything you want:)

heartbeat

A couple of weeks ago Allison and I went to the doctors office to have our kid's heartbeat checked out. I brought my camcorder to record the audio. I didn't use headphones like I should have so the audio peaks quite a bit, but it's interesting to hear none the less. The doctor had trouble finding the baby's heartbeat over Allison's. As you could imagine, Allison's heartbeat was quite loud, and you could only find the baby's heartbeat if you got right on top of him/her. The baby's heartbeat is a lot faster then Allison's. I'm posting the mp3s right here:


Allison's heartbeat

Baby's heartbeat

(If you click on them, they should open up and you should just be able to hear them. If not, right click on them and click on Save As and save them to your computer, then once they're on your computer just double click on the file and they should open up and you should be able to hear it.)

Books Books and more Books

Allison and I have been cramming for our baby. Borders had a sale on books, and Allison's Aunt Dianne sent us a big box of books (thank you, they look useful). But now we have more reading material then we could ever hope to finish before the baby comes. That's all right, because some of them are "care instructions" for after the kid is here.

So far, the book that I've been the most disappointed with is "What To Expect When Your Expecting" It's the book that everyone recommends, even the doctor. From what I can tell, that's all marketing. It is chop full of information, but so is "Gray's Anatomy". I wouldn't turn to Gray's when I have a broken arm, there's better books that delivers the information in a much more concise and a more timely manner. So far the book we've like the best, believe it or not, is "Kiss Baby & Child Care". The information is presented in a very clear manner and over all is a much better book, I highly recommend it.

Also magazines. We've discovered that American magazines are pretty worthless. They're all about "Sex While Pregnant" or "How to Look Good While Pregnant" and they all assume you were a size 8 before you got pregnant. So far the British magazines like "Pregnancy and Birth" and "Mother and Baby" have been great! They have very informative real world articles that look at the birthing process from all different angles. And they also have articles about unexpected pregnancies, something no American magazine would dream of publishing. That and I also like the way they say Nappys and Mummy:)

Last but not least I've been reading "The Expectant Father" this is a book that we got free from our health insurance. I normally wouldn't pick this book up, assuming that I could get all the information I needed from the other books. But surprisingly I found it to be quite useful to read information from a guy's perspective:). Useful enough that I picked up the next one "The New Father" (for $1.50, thanks amazon).

So all in all it's been study time for us, it looks like we're going to be tested in about 3 months.

Still More Pictures

Here are a couple pictures that I took from our last ultrasound. This First one you can clearly make out the shape of the baby's body. The head is to the right, his chest is just under it to the left.




This was the ultrasound where we were supposed to find out the sex. We really wanted to know. But we didn't do this ulrasound with our usual doctor. We had to see this different doctor in Palo Alto because he had a more high-tech ultrasound machine. (That's why the picture is in that red color) The machine was really very good, you could make out a lot of detail, but the doctor we were working with was a real jerk. He had no bedside manners what so ever. He barely ever spoke to us, he just went down his check list of things to look for and then left. The nurse stuck around a bit longer to try and help us figure out the sex but she was unable to do it.

I video taped the session, when I got back to work, I put the video on the computers at work and stepped through the frames to try and figure it out myself. We still don't know. The last thing the nurse said to us was that it was a 60% chance of being a girl. At least that's 10% better then the hart beat test.

Here's the other picture. I like it because you can clearly make out the hand and the fingers. In the video you can see 60%her make a fist. It was quite cute