As per the norm, I wanted to do a bit of research. To narrow down the search and make the task a bit less daunting I started with seeing what/who was in our area and looked at the classes recommended by hospitals and businesses (maternity stores, cloth diapering services, midwives etc) in our area. Then I focused on answering 4 main questions
- What does the class cover that's important to me? - partner involvement, newborn care (what the heck do i do now that i've got the baby!), pain management, labor, prenatal/postnatal care, developing a birth plan, and breast feeding
- What is the instructor's views on natural birth, intervention, etc? - We're using a midwife and hope to go natural but that doesn't mean we're looking for someone who is refuses to acknowledge the need sometimes for intervention and drug usage. We wanted someone who wasn't caught up in the how but that the end result of helping us to have the type of birth WE wanted regardless of their views.
- How long and how big is the class? - There's a lot to learn. Even though with our event schedule this summer a one weekend 2 day intensive class might have been tempting, i wanted there to be enough time for us to digest the information we'd learned and make sure we actually remember it when the time comes to use it! As for size, i'm selfish. I have a lot of questions and the smaller the size the more likely the class is geared towards what I want to learn.
- How much? - Cost is always something to consider, we didn't mind paying but wanted to make sure we got our money's worth.
In the end we decided on going with Jo Garrett, a birth doula and child educator in Chapel Hill. She offers a 12 week course that meets for 2 hours once a week. Class size varies but is never more than 4 couples at a time. Lucky for us, we were the only couple to register this session and are getting essentially a private class! Although the method she learned was Brio, her technique is to use what she believes is the best of all the different methods out there.
So far the classes have been great. I must admit i thought the first few sessions would be covering things that i'd already learned from all of my books regarding nutrition and exercise. But Jo proved me wrong and showed us (me) that there was so much more to learn, such as relaxation exercises to help release that awful lower back pain to understanding how your baby sits in your uterus and how you can get it into the optimal fetal position which can really affect how your labor goes.
With the finish line approaching N and I are definitely beginning to feel the weight of our responsibility and how fundamentally our lives are going to change. These classes bring us one step closer to getting a handle on our fears and come to the realization that we can do this.
