Friday, August 25

Parenting 101

Last night the good wife and I went to our first parenthood class at the Wesley. As you would have guessed from previous posts we were not sure what to expect. But surprisingly it was fairly innocuous. The midwife that took our class seemed disturbingly normal! What....no diatribe about the wonders of natural birth over C-section?......no ranting about breast is best????
She seemed to be quite sensible in her approach to the whole process. About the only thing that she said that some might think was a little old fashioned was how "when dad gets home from work he might like to bath the baby for some bonding time" What if the dad has been home looking after bub and the wife has been at work all day? Well a guy can dream can't he. I always wanted to be a kept man! Anyway, the midwife found a 1 day old baby floating around and showed us how to bath it, without causing any permanent damage. Which surprising didn't seem too hard. I think this baby was a ring in as it was extremely well behaved and made it look like a breeze. (maybe it is a professional baby). After bath time we went down to the basement and talked about C-sections in emergencies, cord blood storage, SIDS and the essential check list for the nursery etc. For the two of us the funniest part was watching the husbands get all grossed out about the thought of possibly having to be in an operating theatre if their wife needed an unplanned C-section. One guy was adamant that he would pass out. What wimps!!!

Well we survived that first class. Bring on part 2 I say. Apparently this one includes more on breast feeding and the midwife said I even get to play with boobies!!! Woo Hoo! (I am not sure who's boobies) And we need to bring a doll. I suggested to Mel we take the giant teddy which should be quite funny to see Mel pretend to feed it.

PS at one stage we were handed a fake baby and asked to guess the weight. Mel was the closest out of everyone. Mel said 3.8kg. Others had said 11kg, 10kg etc. My guess was a carton of beer! But sadly I was wrong.

6 comments:

Paul In London said...

Hey Ben I thought "breast is best" is your mantra (albeit for different reasons)

And 3.8kg was Melinda's guess?

Dr Ben Cook said...

Mmmm.....boobies!

melinda said...

Its elementary my dear Pauly.
I said to Mr B prior to the handling of fake baby, "..I believe it to weigh 3.8kg..."
He seemed flabbergasted by my seemingly wild guess. Wild guess indeed! We were at an antenatal class, preparing for coping with newborns. Why would they give us a 6kg newborn. (unless it was an educational lesson in control one's diabetes - or face the consequences). The average newborn weight is around 3.5 - 3.8kg or so. Thus....

TA DAAAAAAA

(insert smug congratulatory pat on back here)

Paul In London said...

Oh you're just too clever by 'alf sister!

And some people thought it was 10kg?? What did they think they were giving birth to?

melinda said...

a MONSTER!!!!

Although the heaviest baby in the world DID weigh 10.8kg at birth, and promptly died 11 hours later. This all happened in 1879, thus I guess they didn't have diabetic management options available then. Insulin wasn't discovered in 1920 or so, and they were kind of in the dark about sticking drips into babies and giving them glucose.....

Let's just go with the "I'm giving birth to a MONSTER theory"

MWAH

Paul In London said...

That sounds like it could be a song...

"I'm giving birth to a Monster"

Something all expectant mothers could sing along to...