gettin' an edgamacation

we had our first week of baby classes this week. first was a four-week course on labor & delivery. i am pretty sure everyone has the same experience while in their first childbirth class. everyone files in, and as soon as they do, the women all check each other out to see how fat, swollen, or tired they look compared to the rest of the women in class. you go around the room to introduce yourself and your partner, and then they play the video.

if you've never been to one of these before, i won't ruin the big surprises for you. but the video is probably the sickest and most hilarious thing i have ever seen in my entire life. i know that each class doesn't have the exact version of the video, but from what i hear they are all basically the same. think of 4 to 5 80s couples, all giving birth "naturally." i now have some definite ideas about what to include in my "birth plan" (what you and your dr. agree on before you give birth):

1. i will not deliver my baby while naked. every woman in the video delivered butt ass naked, with the only scrap of clothing being a pair of socks here and there. no freaking way.
2. give me pain meds at the first possible moment. the sounds coming out of the women in the video were out of this world. i never thought a human being could make noises like those. there is no way i am ready or willing to go through any more contractions than absolutely necessary. you can stick the epidural in my eye - just give it to me whenever i ask for it.
3. jim, sweetheart, i love you, but get out of my face when i ask you to. one of the husbands in the video had his face no farther than one inch from his wife's the entire time she was going through contractions. he would count 1-2-3 on his fingers and with each count i swore she was going to turn her head around exorcist style and bite each of his chubby fingers off.
4. do not ask me if i want to watch it with a mirror, or feel the baby's head with my hands as it is happening. the answer is going to be no. if i can't watch it happen to someone else, i can pretty much guarantee i won't be able to do so when it is happening to me.
5. no flash photography and/or video. i don't even need to explain this one.

i am sure there are more, but i can't think of them now. i probably blocked them out. most of the husbands did, that's for sure. most of the time jim and i both had our mouths wide open or were laughing hysterically. i guess it is just one of those rites of passage we all go through.

the other class we took was baby care. i was most looking forward to this one, but it was a complete waste of time. we knew right away that it was going to be a bad one when the female instructor (who jim aptly noted was built like the michelin man) told us she wouldn't validate parking until the class was over. shit. the course was full of personal anecdotes of caring for the michelin children and baby talk. i thought jim was going to slit his wrists. but i guess we accomplished one good thing: jim changed his first diaper! on a doll, of course, but a diaper. good thing, because we came home and read one of our books, which stated that a newborn baby goes through 10-12 diapers a day. they suggest buying roughly 500 diapers for the first 6 weeks. that is a shitload of diapers.

literally, i guess.