Thursday, July 26, 2007

Pregnancy & Childbirth 101: Reprieve

A last minute room change left our class with videos to watch and no working player with which to watch them. Yea! I mean, darn it, I was so wanting to see those. Tonight's class had us going over the labor and delivery portion of the pregnancy. Here's a breakdown:

Stage One
  • Early labor, 7-12 hours, intermittent contractions lasting approximately 30-60 seconds
  • Active labor, 4-5 hours, regular contractions (4-5 minutes apart) lasting approximately 60 seconds
  • Transition (also known as the badlands of delivery), 1/2-1 1/2 hours, most strenuous contractions (2-5 minutes apart) lasting approximately 90 seconds
Stage Two
  • Pushing, 1/2-2 hours, resulting in birth of the child
Stage Three
  • Contractions and pushing, 10-40 minutes, resulting in delivery of the placenta (Um, GROSS.)
I so long for the stork to deliver us a nice, clean baby wrapped cleanly in a clean blanket. (The operative word being "clean".) Speaking of clean babies, in last week's video the woman gave birth to a gray lump of a kid who was covered in goopy slime and had a misshapen head. I have noticed that it appears to be normal practice to throw this goopy mess in mom's arms and I just want to let my doctor know that I'll gladly wait until the baby 1. has the goopy slime removed and B) returns to a nice human-pink color before having him placed in my arms. Thanks.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't think Nick and I will attend classes, we'll just learn from your blog :)

Christie said...

You don't want to miss the video! Or the faux birthing props.