Nesting

According to Dom I'm displaying nesting tendencies. By this, he means that I have turned into a fiendish de-junker who is throwing away all of his prized possessions. The way I see it, I'm making necessary changes to what is not the most child-friendly place. It started with getting rid of the vertical blind in the lounge with its numerous child-strangling cords, plus re-upholstering the sofa with washable fabric. But now we're onto the big stuff: the furniture.

When we moved in, everything fitted in oh so perfectly, but trying to free up one of the bedrooms to make a nursery has proved a major challenge, namely because all of the existing contents must go! So this week I had a removals firm come in to move a load of heavy furniture around, including the computer cabinet, which is now in the dining area. (Look out for a new and improved view when you Skype us!).

Of course, the computer desk is now sitting where the piano once lived, so that had to be moved under the stairs....which meant that everything under the stairs had to come out and Dom's new music mixer gizmo would no longer fit back under there. After a stony impasse ("why is your piano so important?" blah blah blah), Dom hit on the idea of moving the music system into the bomb room. And in order to fit it into the bomb room? Yes, the racking which provides all our storage had to be dismantled and reassembled to squeeze everything into a smaller space.

The end result is not bad at all. In fact with the bomb room door closed Dom can play his music quite loud and you can't hear it from the nursery. So it looks like Dom has gained the indoor equivalent of a garden shed - a place where husbands retreat to when they can't take it any longer. Hopefully this clears the way for me to go out and buy the small freezer I've had my eye on. Dom thinks I'm going completely OTT with my plan to build up six weeks worth of frozen meals in stock postpartum, but I would rather not take the chance. Anyway, the way I see it he should just be grateful I'm happy with a freezer and I've ditched the idea of a car and a live in maid for now...

Bump Watch: 21 Weeks

21 weeks in and the bump is definitely taking shape. I'd like to say that someone offered me a seat on the MRT but this being Singapore and all, sadly not. (I swear a one-legged, blind, pregnant woman with a zimmer frame could get on the train here and everyone would remain rooted to their seats in the usual "I'm asleep, no really I am!" pose). Thanks to Suze for her suggestion though: "When I was pregnant I just went up to people and asked them if I could have a seat. They usually leapt up as though they had sat on a drawing pin!"

On Friday we had the 20 week scan and at last the baby is starting to look less like a little tadpole and more like a human being. Aside from the usual 2D scans, the hospital's whizzy scanner could also take a 3D shot, as you can see from the close-up of the head below. The baby appears to be scratching its head. Maybe it just didn't like being poked and prodded with the ultrasound machine.


Commonly in Singapore, parents want to know the sex of the baby. I have no doubt that the main driver for this is the Singaporean love of shopping and the rush to buy all things blue or pink. Well we want the element of surprise. I figure that after going through labour it will be nice to have something to look forward to - a bit like opening a Christmas present I suppose. Luckily the baby co-operated perfectly during the scan, revealing all the right bits for the sonographer to measure the main organs, but keeping its legs firmly crossed!

A thorough check and measurement of the baby's brain, heart, kidneys, stomach and various other bits showed that everything is looking okay. Better still, my placenta is no longer low-lying and even the fibroids are behaving themselves. That's not to say they have gone away but at least the big ones are out of the way at the top of the womb. (My biggest fear was having big fibroids blocking the way resulting in a C-section but the doc says that it doesn't look like this will be necessary).

The next scan is at 32 weeks. Meanwhile I have finally reached the stage in the pregnancy where I can sign up to "the package". It's quite common in Singapore to be able to sign up for a package of say 10 manicures or $300 worth of leg waxing, but this is a new one on me! For $700 I now get all my scans and checks included up until delivery (which the way I'm going is definitely a good deal!). And yes, that's right - delivery is extra....around $2,500-$6,000 depending on luxury of rooms and level of intervention. I have already spent $1000 on hospital appointments up to this point, so overall we could be looking at a total bill of $4-$8k - and this is one of the cheaper hospitals in Singapore. All I can say is it's a good job we've got medical insurance...

Hypnobirthing: Mind Over Matter?

What do you think of when you hear the word "hypnosis"? For me it conjures up images of Kenny Craig, Little Britain's hopeless hypnotist, chanting "Look into my eyes....look into my eyes...not around the eyes". When it comes to hypnosis, I'm about as cynical as they get. But when faced with the options for giving birth - none of which are frankly that appealing - it's amazing how you can suddenly change your mindset. Given a choice between a needle in my spine, hour upon hour of screaming agony or being slit open like a haggis, you know what? I'm ready to give hypnosis a try. So off we went to our first hypnobirthing class, with Dom under strict instructions to keep an open mind - and under no circumstances to suggest that it was "a load of old bollocks".

Hypnobirthing is the brainchild of Marie Mongan, who developed her own self-hypnosis techniques for childbirth at a time in the 1950's when standard protocol was to slap an ether mask on the mother and drag the baby out using forceps. Yet apparently childbirth never used to be like this. Back in 3000BC childbirth was considered to be a celebratory event rather than an ordeal. Midwifery bloomed under Hippocrates - and Aristotle emphasized the importance of relaxation and the power of the mind during childbirth.

By the end of the second century AD, however, an uprising against women shifted the goalposts of science and religion, and pregnancy - once viewed as a miracle - was now seen as the product of a carnal sin. Female healers were executed en-masse and with the abolition of midwifery, giving birth suddenly became a lonely and painful ordeal. In a further twist in the 1800s, Queen Victoria's insistence on being given chloroform when she birthed shifted the emphasis to the hospital, heralding the era of medicalized births.

So it's not difficult to understand why today's average birth experience reads more like a medical encyclopaedia than a natural event. I saw this dreadful programme on channel 70 which epitomised the medical approach. Woman comes to hospital to give birth. She is checked to see how far her labour has progressed. "Oh dear, you're only 2 centimetres dilated" tuts the midwife. "And how are the PAINS?" she practically spells out the word, as if the mother-to-be is deaf. Without waiting for the answer the midwife concludes that it would be best to crack on with a pitocin drip to "speed things up - oh, and maybe we'll just break your waters as well dear". By this stage the poor patient is writhing around in agony and is then subjected to an epidural. Several hours, a lot of pushing and a face full of exploded capillaries later, the baby still hasn't emerged, so it's deemed that a C-section is the only way forward.

Hypnobirthing takes the approach that your body is designed to give birth, as long as your mind doesn't get in the way. When you fear pain, you tense up, whereas in order to give birth you actually need to relax, open up (quite literally!) and let the muscles do their thing. Hypnobirthing uses a combination of visualisation, relaxation and breathing techniques to achieve this. The most startling revelation of all was that you don't even need to push to get the baby out. Nope, apparently all that purple-faced pushing to football terrace style chants from the nurses is totally unnecessary. As our hypnobirthing coach, Di, explained "What you see on TV is not real birth - it's Hollywood".

We watched two videos of actual hypnobirths at our first class and you would simply not believe these women were giving birth. They could have been asleep for all I could tell, until POP - suddenly out came a little head. What really struck me the most was the peace and quiet. You could hear a pin drop. It was a welcome relief from all the wailing and gnashing I had seen on channel 70 and I left the class with a renewed sense of hope about the birth. The medics with their battery of drugs and tools may mock, but hold off with the giant salad tongs please - maybe the best medicine is the mind.

For more information on hypnobirthing classes in Singapore, and hypnobirthing generally:

http://www.parentlink.com.sg/pregnant_singapore_birth_doula/11hypnobirth/landing_hypno.htm

www.hypnobirthing.com

Kenny Craig: Hopeless Hypnotherapist in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE6qnlne-7o