I think I'll just accept the fact that I'm a slacker, especially when it comes to recording my life online.
Josh and I started pre-natal classes, I just call them 'baby classes', about two weeks ago. We had our second class last night which was actually quite the eye-opener, in the sense that the person taking the class (Rhea Dempsey) pulls no punches. She's been a birth educator and attendant for about 30 years and has attended about 1000 births. When you think about the fact that one birth alone can exceed a persons regular shift of 8 hours, along with the intensity of the 'shift' that labour is...that's a loonnnng time hanging out amongst all that oxytocin and other hormones...
She's part of the natural birth coalition which means that she, along with others, are trying to claim back birth for women. Australia has an extremeley high rate of birth intervention and birth is now no longer a natural event but a very medicalised event. She basically mapped for us the pathways to intervention for a woman, starting from the moment she enters the hospital and where the weak spots exist that let the intervention happen (lack of experienced support people in the labouring woman's inner circle to stand up for her and encourage her to continue to labour naturally etc).
It gave me a lot of food for thought because I thought I had it set up and took for granted that my birthing environment will 100% support me in giving birth naturally, when really in this day and age, unless you have a home birth...having a natural birth these days is damn near impossible.
Another eye opener was when she told us that there will be a few points during the labour, guaranteed, where the woman will 'lose it' and start begging for the drugs. No matter how determined she was for a natural birth before that, she'll hit a period, let's call this 'shit's all coming undone' period, a couple of times during the labour. Usually, this is where, when she starts climbing up her partner yelling for the epidural, her partner thinks she's coming undone/somethings really wrong/let's speed this up so I can go back to bed' and calls for the staff to hook up the drugs.
Anyway, I need to make sure my mum and Josh's mum and dad are on the same page as Josh and I and think about various coping mechanisms for the pain that I can employ (stomping feet, vocalising, bath, etc etc).
Gave work my leaving date yesterday; August 3rd. 3 and a half weeks before I'm officially due. Work thinks I'm cutting it fine but we need the money.
Oh and great news! We have been apartment hunting for the past 3 or so months and been struggling to find anything that fit our budget and was decent (read: where the landlord would not have to pay US to live in the joint). We finally went and looked at a 2 bedroom apartment literally across the road from the beach in Altona that suited us down to the ground. Josh just called me and told me we got it! Yay! Melbourne is seriously harsh at the moment with the renters market, we keep hearing stories of people bidding for rentals as if they were at an auction, it's that competative and desperate! So, we're lucky to get this one, good score! Altona is a little further out west then I'd like (I'm an inner city girl) but reality is that there will be 3 of us soon and we can't afford inner city anymore (nor do we wanna pay the stupendous amounts landlords are asking for them...we want to buy our own house soon).
One down, one to go. Meaning, now Josh has to score a great job. I've been telling him that we'll find an apartment and he'll find a great job at around the same time. A bit of that 'when it rains, it pours' occurance that happens a lot. So, c'mon great job, your turn....!
