Andrea’s Weblog

Frank and I started our 12 week Bradley childbirth class last Friday night. Our goal is to learn how to have a successful natural (unmedicated) birth. Given our experience with Elizabeth, we don’t want to have any interventions that might start the cascade of interventions we experienced with Elizabeth.

The Bradley method focuses on relaxation, exercise, diet and knowledge. The classes are not affiliated with a hospital which is great because we’re not interested in learning hospital policy or how to be good patients. We just want to be able to make informed decisions on how to birth McPherson #2 and learn some techniques for natural birth.

The class is going to be a lot more work than I anticipated! I have an exercise regimen (squats, kegels, tailor sitting, walking 10 minutes) and 20 minutes of relaxation practice to do every day. There are also reading assignments to keep up with and a high protein diet to follow. How I’m going to do all this, I don’t know, but I’m sensing the house won’t be very clean!