First Midwife Visit

Today I had my first visit with the midwife, and so far I am very pleased. The clinic was bright and decorated with art of either Pregnancy or Mother/Child themes. The midwife had a very positive natural childbirth attitude, and all of my questions were answered the way I wanted them to be, such as they don't require a heparin lock, and fetal monitoring is only done for the first 15 minutes when you arrive at the hospital (if you agree to it.) After that they do check the baby with the Doppler, but not nearly as often as it was when Joseph was born. This was quite a relief because with Joseph my doctor was clearly angry with me when I refused the heparin lock, and the fetal monitoring was extremely disruptive to my labor. I told the midwife a few things about the birth experience, and she also thought that my doctor had done some things that were alarmist and unnecessary. After the birth I had a bit more bleeding than normal, and my doctor panicked. One nurse actually dropped some of the tools because she was barking orders and making everyone nervous. She also ordered two bags of pitocin, the second of which they stopped pretty soon after starting it, because it wasn't necessary. The weirdest thing of all is that when I had my check up she didn't do a physical examination, and said that I could come back next for my yearly check up which was six months later.
Well, I am happy that this time around I will have a midwife instead. Next week I will have an ultrasound to make sure that I am not pregnant with twins and also to make sure of the due date. I already felt the baby move the first time two weeks ago (I was 10 weeks pregnant then,) and then again, moving a lot, a week later.) This made the midwife want to check the due date, but also since I am showing a lot already she also wants to check to see if it could be twins ( I hereditarily have a high chance of twins, on both my father's and mother's side.)

Whenever I don't blog much for a while I find it difficult to get started again. In truth, ever since we have gotten back from Southern California, I have had trouble feeling motivated to do anything. It could be that I am pregnant, or maybe it's just the heat. Well, today marks the end of the first trimester of this pregnancy. So far things have been so different than when I was pregnant with Joseph. Perhaps it doesn't mean anything, but this time my intuition says 'Girl.' We'll see....

Baby News

Well, now that I have told all of my family, I suppose I should mention here that I am pregnant. This is the real reason for my scant posts recently. For some reason when I am pregnant I enter my own world a bit more deeply, and tend to not have as much contact with others. Interestingly I don't really feel pregnant, other than a periodic loss of appetite, and of course my increased introversion. I am not really even more tired than usual! This pregnancy is quite different than with Joseph; that time I had a lot of anxiety, even before I knew I was pregnant at all. I have had two extremely vivid and frightening dreams in the last two weeks, but this is not as many as I had with Joseph, and I have had no daytime anxiety at all. Because I was curious, I read a bit about anxiety dreams during pregnancy and found out that they are quite normal. A psychologist did a study and found that women who have such dreams during pregnancy tend to have quicker labors. I had many anxiety dreams while pregnant with Joseph, and interestingly even the doctor was surprised at how quickly my labor was progressing.