First Lamaze Class

Kayla and I attended our first lamaze class last week. It was a neat experience I must say. Our instructor has been teaching these educational classes for over 30 years. I really reccomend you men to go. There was a few women there that were either alone or brought there sister. If you are planning on being an active participant in your childs life, does it not make sense to learn everything you can to help him/her enter this world? There were six other couples at the class, each with there own story. For this post I will describe how this first class went.

We started the class with an introductory about ourselves (name, age, gender of baby, etc...). After this we moved on to the meat of the class. Our teacher held a large circular sign up that said "pain" on it. Then she proceeded to add pizza shape sections onto the board as she described that each of these pieces (medication, breathing, comfort etc...) are your tools to reducing the amount of pain mommy will experience during birth. When she finished there was just one section about 1/8th of the original circle that now said pain. She described how much of a role the "supporter" (me) plays during the actual child birth. No matter what she stressed that it is important to do everything within our realm of control to ensure this expirence will be a pleasent one for both mommy and me.

Obviously some women want to have medication (epidural) and some may wish not too. Chosing against this will only increase the pain another 1/8th of the chart. Now this is a general chart that does nothing more than describe how these "tools" can help you during birth. I must say it was a very effective approach for me as a visual learner. Though she should have added a chart that demonstrated how much pain discomfort her damn uncomfortable chairs were causing me.

The rest of the class we talked about the basics of breathing, fears associated with child birth and basic warning signs of labor. Also, she described the differences of true labor vs. false labor, and how they can mimick one another.

Since I have more than likely bored you to death I will save the rest for my Wednesday post. I will highlight these differences and shed some light on the beginning stages of labor.