I think up until about a week ago we weren't - I didn't feel very prepared in terms of sort of equipment and sorting the house out, whereas we finally managed to sort of do that at the weekend, so I think, “Oh well, he could arrive tomorrow and we're pretty much, we're pretty much there, pretty much ready for it.” But I think something that struck me all along is, especially with the classes, there's an awful lot of focus on the birth. The birth is the big thing, it's the major thing; you know, you want to have your perfect birth or whatever. But for me that's only the beginning of it, that, you know, a longer term concern is coping with being a parent and the demands and so on that, the difficulties you have with that, and that seems to be something that is touched on much less in the classes and so on. But I suspect that's a lack of time. The teacher at the hospital said, “I'd love to be able to give loads of classes on coping post-birth, but we don't have the resources, and we don't have the, we don't have the staff to do it.” And I know that after Christmas we had five sessions, and she said, “We're being forced to cut down to four sessions. I'm going to have to pack the same amount of material into, into fewer classes.” |
