You Are Getting Very Sleepy (except that you're not because there's a human clawing its way out of your body)

I'm afraid of giving birth.

Like for real so afraid.

And it doesn't help that every single show that Matt and I watch, it seems, has featured some woman giving birth this season. After watching one of these episodes a while ago, I felt a little shellshocked, and just started crying, blubbering, "I don't want to do that."

It also doesn't help that every woman who sees that I'm knocked up deems it necessary to tell me all about her birth experience. I mean, I get the whole shared experience thing, but can't we wait and talk about it in the summer? Let's remember that I'm the wuss who won't even look when I get a shot, the one who was in tears while getting a tattoo the size of a quarter.

A while back, Ann suggested that I look into Hypnobirthing, explaining that it's basically a mind-over-matter type of deal where you convince yourself that the labor is not that bad. As far as I know, there's no clucking like chickens or anything as it's not actual hypnosis, but she said a few of her friends did it and loved it and had fast, easy labors and whatnot. So I got the book, and lately I've been trying to buy into Hypnobirthing, but I'm struggling a little bit with the goofiness of it. I'm very much a mind over matter kind of gal (I can cure my hiccups by just thinking about them!), and I think that if I can buy into the method, then I'll have a much more pleasant birth experience. Not that I think it's going to be completely pain-free or anything, but maybe better. Cassie had said that hypnobirthing lost her when it started suggesting that she visualize pretty rainbows, and I felt myself becoming more cynical when I read that I would think of my uterus as "blue satin ribbons." But I'm trying. I really am.

Can I wrap my blue satin ribbon uterus around the base of a cake?

I had my hypnobirthing book with me at my last doctor's appointment, and tried to put it away before he saw what I was reading, but ol' doc asked to see it, and then proceeded to sit and read it for like five minutes, stopping only to shoot annoyed glances and read me select passages from the book.  At one point he just shook his head and said, "That's bullshit."

And here's the thing.  My doctor and I have a little bit of an antagonistic relationship, but he's really been growing on me.  He's really bananas about me not getting too fat, which is annoying but ultimately a good thing**.  So when he does something like call me a cow, I do something like tell him about peanut butter bacon cookies.  And when he says something about how I should never leave the baby alone with a dog, I say something about how we have been planning to have Mitch just be our babysitter.

So I think I've figured out now that the key to my accepting and embracing hypnobirthing is to do it for two reasons: 1.) to annoy my doctor, and 2.) to have a more tolerable birth experience.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll be visualizing blue satin ribbons and rainbows.





*Except for Top Chef, because that would be just plain gross.  Ew!  What if they had a quickfire where they had to make a dish out of placenta for some crazy mothers?


**I actually appreciate that he's such a pain in the ass about me not gaining too much weight, because if he was all delicate and sweet and "you're beautiful no matter what blah blah" I would probably have gained like 95 pounds by now.