baby stuff

last week i had completed some of the coding work but there are many areas that remain unclear. the weekend was hectic to say the least. on saturday we had our first parental class. well, i am not sure why they call it parental classes as they taught us nothing about parenting. it was more like a class aimed at preparing women for delivery.

they showed us things that will come in handy from week 36 onwards. the positions pregnant women should adopt that would assist the baby getting into the optimum position. the bloodcurdling part - the labour itself - was shown to us as a *movie*. there was a bit of scare-mongering with the midwives telling us that it is an average of 12 hours in labour if it is our first child. how painful is it really ? well, the midwife explains colourfully: "open your mouth as wide as you possibly can until you can feel it stretch and clip at the sides - amplify that 100 times and there you know how labour feels"

what the heck ? i thought midwives are supposed to ease the pain by telling women that it is just 1 day in their lives and it is just those 2 or 3 hours of stage 2 that women need to overcome. to be fair, we all discussed merits and demerits of some of the pain killer options women have at their disposal. we had a total of 14 people attending the course, 7 pairs exactly. i would have expected women to ask most of the questions while in reality it turned out i was the one who was posing most of the questions. how embarrassing ?

we have to buy some shower curtains - to make sure there is no mess when monica's water breaks. i need to keep an emergency pack in my car all the time - toiletries, change of clothes and such. we went to babies'r'us on sunday. we have a catalogue in our possesion now. monica and i are going through it to decide what to buy. we are thinking about converting the smallest room in our house to a baby room. a cot, pram, car seat, clothing, decorations, plush toys etc. are some of the things we need to buy in the next few weeks. well, nothing more to write. we have at least 2 classes scheduled every week between now and december.

8 more weeks really .. counting down impatiently.