The First Lamaze Class

Big baby milestone today – we had our first Lamaze class. The first thing I learned was that it’s really important to eat before class – it starts at 7 and I foolishly drove there straight from work without grabbing anything to eat.

The class has about ten couples in it, and it felt a little weird sitting in a room filled with people, all of whom were going to have babies around the same time as our own. Our instructor, a former nurse, gave an overview of the course, and then broke us up into four teams, two of women, two of men. We were then instructed to come up with lists of the five things we liked and five things we disliked about pregnancy.

Laughing jags, preparing for the baby and feeling the baby kick we a few of the items on our “good” list – questions about weight gain (not actual weight gain itself mind you), memory loss, and umm, lack of sex. Not that anyone in our group mentioned that, no sir – it was the other group.

At break time, we had another nice group bounding exercise as we encountered the Scourge of the Snack Machine in the maternity floor. The soda/juice/water machine had a bottle of water stuck in it and within minutes the class was speculating as to bottles released from which rows might knock it free.

The session closed out with “passive relaxation” exercises, which involved everyone in the class laying on the floor (with our pillows and blankets of course) in the dark listening to peaceful music and being guided through some visualizations by a voice on tape. Very peaceful – some compared it to nap time in preschool – but after a day of work, and with the clock closing on 9 p.m. it was almost a little too peaceful. I think a good half of the class was tempted by sleep after that session, but the temptation was driven away a few minutes later when we emerged into the incredible cold outside – the freezing temperatures and chilling wind was more than enough to invigorate us.

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