Lamazed

Geoff and I had our Lamaze class this weekend--all day Saturday, half day Sunday, bootcamp style.

Getting in the car on the way there, Geoff mentioned that he didn't want anyone at Lamaze to know he's a doctor at Evanston Hospital. "What should my alternative occupation be for the day? Architect?" After rejecting several possibilities, he decided he would be "a furrier. Armand the furrier, working exclusively in cat fur and specializing in capes and rugs, but I can make you anything you want." Of course when it actually came up, he just said he was on housestaff at the hospital. The couple we were talking to probably thinks he's a janitor now, and so much the better.

We learned that Dr. Lamaze was French, but that he stole the whole thing from the Russians ("a communist plot!" Geoff whispers to me).

The class was all right, but a little anticlimactic. I think I've reached a point of saturation where everything I read or hear about having a baby consists of 90 or 95% stuff I already knew and 10 or 5% new information. I guess I learned a couple things from the class, and certainly the hospital tour was helpful. It's a little easier to picture what's about to go down now. I keep waiting for someone to impart the secret knowledge that will make this whole thing seem more plausible, but I'm beginning to suspect that there is no secret knowledge, and this is as plausible as it gets. Childbirth is just one of nature's more bizarre processes, but this is it, let's go.

Somehow in preparing for the contracting and the pushing, we got to practice things like clenching all the muscles in one leg while keeping the other one entirely relaxed. The partner's job was to pick up the relaxed leg and move it around to make sure it wasn't being flexed at all.

Also the partners had to practice giving us backrubs. I told Geoff, "Lucky for you I wore this soft shirt today, instead of that one made out of porcupines." He says, "No problem, Armand is trained in handling porcupines."