33 week check-up (Wednesday, May 2)

Weight: 175 pounds (same as last visit -- thank heavens); Vitals: 120/80

Michael and I saw Dr. Holden today. The Bean's heartbeat sounded good, and Dr. Holden said that we are on target and progressing normally. He indicated we'll have one more sonogram -- on or near the due date, and will start seeing him weekly around 36 weeks. Next visit, I'll be tested for Group B Strep (http://www.babycenter.com/refcap/pregnancy/prenatalhealth/1647.html). We will also meet two other doctors in the practice who share on-call responsibilities.

We went to our first Birth Preparation class tonight, taught by Fern Drillings, the woman who also instructed us in the Baby CPR class. There are about 15 couples in the class, all due this summer. One other woman and I are the two scheduled to deliver the soonest.
There is couple in the class expecting twins, and one couple that looks a lot younger than the rest of us -- in their early or mid-twenties -- and both women look great. No extra weight anywhere except their bellies.

I used to fantasize that it would be great to have twins so that we'd have two kids at the same time and could get all the vaginal deliveries/pain out of the way at once. Now that I've been through the drill with this single pregnancy, including digesting all the probabilities of potential problems for singletons, twins and multiples, I realized a singleton is plenty. There's a lot more to stress about with two in the oven at the same time... What if you only felt one move, and not the other, or the nurse could only find one baby's heartbeat and not the other's at an exam? etc.

There were some weird questions by some of the fathers in the class tonight:
+ Do I HAVE to hold my wife's hand during the delivery? (He was afraid his wife would break his hand by squeezing too hard during her labor. Fern's answer: You'll do whatever she tells you to do.)
+ Is there a sheet or barrier that shields her lower half during delivery? (He doesn't want to see the blood and stuff around the delivery... Fern's answer: No barrier, no sheet. It's all there and you'll be seeing it all, so if you can't handle the blood and stuff, ask for a chair and sit 'upstream' near your wife's shoulders, or leave the room.)

The winner of the weirdest question award goes to a father in Emma & Alan's birth class. Emma told me that when she and Alan went to Birth classes in San Francisco to prepare for Senan's arrival, one of the fathers in their class asked if he could breast feed the baby himself too, acknowledging he wouldn't be providing any milk, but wanting the bonding opportunity (!)...