30 weeks and 2 days; 68 days to go

A couple of nights ago I had a dream that while I was at school one day, babygirl stuck her hand out straight through the left side of my stomach.  It didn’t hurt, it wasn’t bloody — it was like one of those fantasy movie scenes where somone steps through a mirror or wall.  She grabbed onto my finger.  I asked one of my students to take some pictures.  We all thought it was pretty cool.

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And speaking of movies, sometimes when baby girl is kicking, I feel like I’m in a sci-fi flick, and my body has just been taken over by an alien.

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Some people know exactly the right things to say: “From the back, you don’t look any different!”  “You look beautiful.”  Other people, trying to show their enthusiasm, could do better: “Ooohhhh…getting bigger!” (Thanks for pointing that out, as if I don’t feel huge enough already.)

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“How’s the baby?”

I don’t know.  I’ll ask her when I see her and get back to you.

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We’re halfway done painting babygirl’s room.  It’s a little limey.  But I like it.  It feels brighter and cleaner than before. (Postscript: After two coats, the green walls next to the dark wood trim look like a bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream…)

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My blood test results last week indicate that I have very low iron (29 when it should be 35, though I don’t know what those numbers mean, exactly).  I’m feeling it, too.  The last week, I’ve had a couple of headaches and a lot of bone weariness.  The worst part has been the breathlessness, though.  Lecturing in class, going up and down stairs, swimming, even just prepping the walls to paint today: I lose my breath and have to stop. I’m taking my iron pills, with vitamin C to help absorption, and I’m trying to eat iron rich foods every day.  I wonder how long it will take to build my levels back up.

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Reading Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth is probably the most empowering thing I’ve done in my pregnancy.  It’s making me feel much more prepared for giving birth.

heartbeat

I couldn’t wait.

For a whole week, I had been feeling groovy.  So groovy that I thought I surely couldn’t still be pregnant.

So yesterday at church I talked to my midwife.  She said, “If you’re worried, let’s just go ahead and listen for the heartbeat.  Are you coming to the missions meeting tonight?  I can just bring my doppler and we can listen for it…”

Instead, DH and I met her at her office this afternoon.  “First, I want you to know that I’m not too worried.  We may not hear it right away.  Sometimes you have to wait five or ten minutes.  And even then, if we don’t hear it…you’re still pretty early.  We can order an ultrasound.”

I laid down. She put the doppler to my tummy.  Immediately, we heard  a heartbeat like a train choo-choo-ing towards us.

“That’s a really strong heartbeat.”  She smiled.

here’s a scary movie

(because you have to see several pregnant women naked. other than that, it’s not scary.)

The documentary “The Business of Being Born” covers some of the same ground as the book “Pushed.” While it is lighter in terms of the research and history presented, it carries a different kind of weight because of the images, the personal stories and births you get to actually watch. Woven throughout the movie are scenes of various home births accompanied by midwives. These scenes are altogether unlike the scary hospital birth melodramas we see on tv shows, where women are writhing and screaming, pinned down on beds. The women giving birth in the documentary are in pain, but they are in control, walking, changing position, moving into birthing tubs, doing whatever helps manage the pain. Watching them testifies to the fact that (for most,) giving birth is not a medical emergency, and shouldn’t be treated as such. It is a natural life process, and the woman’s body, with some guidance, knows what to do. Knows the best way to do it.

Here are a couple more interesting facts that show up in both the book “Pushed” and the documentary “The Business of Being Born”:

Giving birth laying flat on your back puts more strain on your body than almost any other position (unless someone out there wants to try giving birth while standing on her head). Standing or squatting, you have gravity to help you, and the structure of your pelvis is more open. Why do we use hospital beds? Maybe it’s a holdover from a time when doctors used to give women medicine to make them forget the birth entirely, and then tie them to the hospital bed and leave them in the corner until labor progressed enough.

The body naturally produces a special concoction of love-endorphins as the baby is born to help the mother deal with the pain, and to bond her to the baby. When a mother is on an epidural, however, the release of those endorphins is inhibited. (Could this lead to higher rates of post-partum depression?)

I prefer the book to the movie, but if you’re short on time, watch the movie. It’s a reasonable defense of midwifery and natural birth.

Pushed: The Painful Truth about Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care

This was the first book I read about pregnancy, back several months before I became pregnant. I found it by chance while surfing Amazon to check out my friends’ reading suggestions on GoodReads. I love a good piece of investigative journalistic type writing, so I gave it a shot.

While definitely a little slanted towards midwifery and natural childbirth practices, the book provides fascinating statistics about childbirth and maternity care. Did you know that there are at least 23 countries in the world with smaller incidences of mother or child death in childbirth than the USA? One thing all those countries have in common is that the primary caregivers for pregnant women are midwives.

I borrowed the book from the library, so I don’t have it any more and can’t give a proper full review. Suffice to say that the book was the scariest book I’ve read this year, and also the most interesting. Any woman who is even thinking about becoming pregnant needs to read it.