Getting things ready for little Molly!

After doing a lot of research and reading a book about having a natural labor in a hospital setting we decided to hire a doula.  After a lot more research we found one named Anne who can not only provide doula services for us but teaches childbirth/relaxation classes and provides the service of placental encapsulation which had just been recommended to me to help prevent postpartum depression. 

For information on doulas and why you'd want one: http://americanpregnancy.org/labornbirth/havingadoula.html
http://www.dona.org/

Anne's website: http://www.bywaterbirth.com

Hypnobabies relaxation: http://www.hypnobabies.com

So we're pretty excited!  I feel good knowing I'm doing everything in my power (because an emergency situation will throw any plan out the window) to have a safe, natural, calm birth instead of the scary, painful, medicated and highly intervened birth I had with Ethan.

I am a little skeptical about being able to get the results they claim from Hypnobabies but the logic makes sense to me...if you're scared and tense things do hurt a lot worse.  So I'm going to follow the program (we start April 7th) and do what they say and see what happens!  Even if I don't get the "ideal case scenario results" I figure I will at least be more relaxed overall so it's worth it to try.

This is the kind of results they claim to have:

• Com­fort­able labors – 70–75% Women who report that they felt mostly pres­sure or tight­en­ing sen­sa­tions. Most of these women described their labor as “pain-free”.
• Com­fort­able until tran­si­tion – 10–15% Pres­sure only until the 10–60 minute tran­si­tional period with mild to intense degrees of sen­sa­tion there­after. “Very manageable.”
• Com­fort­able until active labor – 10% with mild to intense degrees of sen­sa­tion there­after. This group can have any num­ber of things that affect their birth expe­ri­ences: pos­te­rior or mal-presentations that do not resolve, other labor com­pli­ca­tions, emo­tional issues, lack of sup­port, or they sim­ply did not do their home­work (30 – 35 min­utes a day)! Hyp­no­sis won’t help some­one who is not will­ing to do the work involved in prepar­ing for her baby’s birth.