Parenting Classes

These are three pictures from our trip to a riverfront town to our north, about a month ago.

Yesterday we did our first parenting class in Northern Island. It was pretty interesting. Whereas in the States our parenting classes were a fee-based series that treated infant care and childbirth, here the hospital provides basically a series of large free lectures on major topics (birth process, nursing, breathing, after birth). The one yesterday was on breastfeeding and the birth process. The section on the birth process treated c-sections and natural birth, pain control and anesthesia, things that can go wrong, etc. It was fairly clinical and straight-forward, which I appreciated. I was surprised by a few things. The hospital was very pro-breastfeeding and taught things like avoiding pacifiers and bottles in the beginning. They showed us how small the babies’ tummies are to begin with and how they expand during the first ten days. They offered feeding advice. I would say in our birthing class in the States they pretty much avoided this and the nurses in the US were anti-nursing (gave Sam a pacifier when we said not to, high anxiety over how much he milk he was getting in the first day, etc.). Anyway, I think this is a very good hospital and we will be happy there. I think I could come around to having hospitals be the center for medical care, where you get scales of efficiency, instead of everything run out of little offices open 9-5 that refer you to specialists. I know every system has problems, and I may well eat my words later.

We’re back into language again. Emily hit a wall on Monday and I hit mine on Friday. I think we’re both basically doing well, but weren’t quite ready to head back into school. I only really had two weeks after the end of the semester and our cold/Sam’s class being closed killed one of those weeks. My brother once laid out the stages of parenting as: (1) complaining about how tired you are, (2) complaining about how sick you are, (3) complaining about all the activities you have to take your kids to. Right now we’re in #2, but we’re about to regress to #1. The flip side of all of this is that it’s a sunny July, we have some kid care that will let us eventually finish our work, and we could probably take a week or two at the beginning of September to get caught back up. Emily seems physically quite well, for which we are very thankful. The daily sickness has dissipated and the hugeness has not yet arrived.

That’s the news here. Oh, and it’s a boy and a girl we learned a week ago Friday. We saw the boy on the ultrasound first, so I think Emily was worried. (Although three boys could have been fun also.) It will be interesting to see the dynamics of the three. I hope big brother is up to the task.