This week Claire and I attended our last antenatal class before the birth of our first child!

The fifth session was a more of a hands on session than a lecture like the last four have been. Everyone in the class had to learn how to wrap a baby in a wrap a number of different ways and also change a nappy. Wrapping up the toy baby was pretty funny, specifically watching different people in the class essentially tie their baby in a knot – there was quite a bit of laughter.

At this stage we’re meant to know everything that we need to know about having a baby, though for me personally it doesn’t feel like it. I wouldn’t say that I’m completely calm about the whole experience, though I’m not stressed out either. My thinking at this point is that plenty of people before us have had children and survived – statistically speaking that puts us in pretty good shape.

Starting a family is going to be an enormous learning experience and at this point in time, I know I don’t know it all. Not having it all mapped out in your head is part of the experience I think though, changes in priorities and different views and opinions about things. We’ll learn as we go along, making mistakes and hopefully learning how to make less of them in the future.

One piece of information that Alex (the midwife that instructs the Gold Coast antenatal classes we attended) pointed out is that while babies are tiny and helpless, they are also surprisingly resilient – lucky because there’ll be plenty of on the fly learning going on I think!

Continuing on in a series of short posts about my learning’s from our antenatal classes, Claire and I attended our second last session tonight. This evening started out with a stroll through the Gold Coast Pindara Private Hospital, followed up by our normal discussion session.

The walk through Pindara Private was useful, as I hadn’t seen the inside of it before. Our instructor Alex had warned us previously that it is quite easy to get lost, however that it was much better than a couple of the hospitals in Brisbane. Given how much of a maze the Brisbane hospitals are, I wasn’t holding by breath to be honest but I was pleasantly surprised. In defense of the Brisbane hospitals, I do think that Pindara Private is significantly smaller – so that has to help in detangling the mess! While we walked around, we got to have a look at one of the four birth suites which was good – didn’t have any idea what that was going to be like. Alex directed us to look into one of the others, only to hear one of the other nurses telling us to wait in a slightly urgent manner – turns out that it hadn’t been cleaned yet. Fortunately for the people that strolled in there, ‘not cleaned’ didn’t mean that it was fresh out of use – just that beds and the like hadn’t been sorted.

Once we’d finished our 50c tour of Pindara Private hospital, we went back downstairs to our normal meeting room to continue our learning. The primary topics for this evening were post natal depression and breast feeding. There was a lot of information covered in the post natal depression and a lot of good questions from the class as well. While I think every expecting parent has heard about post natal depression, I was shocked that current statistics suggest 1 in 6 women fall victim to it and even more shocked to find out that it also effects males, though to a lesser degree (1 in 11 are the numbers emerging). While a lot of the information covered for post natal depression was fairly high level, it appears that acknowledging that it exists, keeping an open eye for any of the signs and lots of communication seem to be a pretty solid starting point.

Breast feeding is another one of those amazing things that the female body is capable of in my opinion. I find it incredible to think that the female body automatically adjusts how much milk to produce based on the demand and it also changes the nutritional make up as well. An interesting fact that I had absolutely no idea about – an infants stomach is only the size of a marble and continues to expand as the mothers’ breast milk comes in and by approximately 10 days after birth has expanded to the size of a golf ball.

While Alex didn’t say that she was going to attempt to schedule the anesthetist again, I was hoping that he/she might be able to pop in for a little while to discuss that in more depth. It wasn’t to be this evening and we ran over time as it was – maybe one of them will be able to make it to our last session.

The third of our five antenatal classes were on tonight, which largely covered the different types of medical interventions, what the typical trigger points for each of them are and preventative measures to avoid them if possible.

We got to inspect a couple of the different instruments that the doctors use, such as the vacuum and forceps. The vacuum was pretty interesting, the majority of the doctors at Pindara Private use one made by a company named Kiwi, which is made of plastic and disposable while two use a metal one which looks quite similar to a metal bath plug. While I’d heard of forceps many times before, I’d never seen them first hand — they were described to us as really expensive salad tongs and that was pretty accurate. After seeing them and how they are used, I can now also see why people prefer not to have them used.

We also watched an elective caesarean section, I’d seen different parts of them before but this was end to end. It really is a very clinical exercise, which makes a lot of sense since it is major stomach surgery. Neither Claire or I really want to have to go down that path if we can avoid it – everything we’ve read and learned from different sources says its not all that kind to the body. Of course, as per the you’re there to have a baby not a birth statement from the antenatal class #2 – if a caesarean is what it takes, then we’re all for it.

I think a lot of the other class members were also a little disappointed that the anesthetist couldn’t make it tonight. He was booked in for 7PM, however Alex (the instructor) didn’t get notified of a cancellation – so I’d assume something important cropped up.

Next week we’re going to take a tour of the Pindara Private Hospital, which will be good – with a bit of luck I’ll remember my way around the inside of it and not get lost!