In case anyone was wondering about the progress I thought I'd blog for a minute while my darling girlfriend finishes making the breast pads she started this afternoon. Home made reusable breast pads from old tshirts and older washers that my mum guv us.
Obviously kt180 is off work now and her whole world has changed. The house is becoming more babyfied every day. There are two changing stations -upstairs and down, and the biggest washing machine you ever saw in the biggest and nicest laundry you ever dreamed of. kt's parents have been round a bit, sewing covers for the change mats, washing windows, painting bits of wall, fixing things, drinking wine, and I even managed to get my old lady round one afternoon this week to get in on some of the action. We sat and folded a mountainous pile of onesies and tiny singlets.
kt is large as a tub and her skin is so stretched across her belly that it aches and stings and reddens and if I forget to send a text message on her behalf and she finds out she stands in the kitchen and yells and yells and yells.
She is 36 and a half weeks pregnant. If she went into labour now, the birth centre would accept her. The baby is head down, has been for some time now, and engaged. Meaning his head is right on the cervix, ready to go go go. It's all a bit bloody amazing and scary and full on and every time I make an entry in my diary now I wonder if I'll have to cancel it at the time.
We went to a lovely, practical birth class at the hospital earlier and I think i mentioned it before and how we met the nice lesbians who were a few weeks ahead of us. They have not had their baby yet. They have stayed a little in contact with us and have burned us a copy of a meditation cd that is really calming and empowering and has put us in a pretty groovy headspace generally for the birth. I do honestly believe it will be ok. Hard, but good.
On Monday night we paid a woman $180 to pinch my girlfriend. We went to another birth method class, wanting a calm birth-type hippy experience to put in the "tool bag" and the woman pinched her, hard, several times on the inner thigh for, like, a minute and a half, and then two minutes at a time, telling her to "meet the pain with your breath, breathe all the way in, in, in, take what you need, and nowww breathe it out and downnnn, washhhhh it alllll the wayyyyy downnnnnn, dowwnnnnnn, keeep going, it's stilllll there, washhhhhh it downnnnnn, ok it's passing and it's gone.' kt was so frikken angry, that woman is lucky she did not get screamed at and head butted. It was a total rort, looking back on it, but at the time you just sort of went along with it, thinking about how big of a deal the birth of your first baby was going to be and how you needed this heads up and any damn help you could possibly get.
But it was a big fat rort and we paid $180 to look at a very interesting book with good birth canal images and get kt well and truly pinched.
I am secretly very nervous about coping with watching her in pain because I have this nerve thing in my bum cheeks which goes psycho buzzy like electric pulses whenever I see her in pain or think about someone cutting open a vein or getting a needle or something painful. And I might just totally freak out and not be able to be with the fact that she is really, really hurting. That is a bit of a fear, but also I have been known to be very brave in the past so praps I will be again.
