We had our second Lamaze class on Wednesday. Again we brought our pillows and a mat for the relaxation exercise at the end. We brought two mats with us this time so that I could lie down as well.

The class itself is pretty slow-paced. Last week, almost half of the class was spent on introductions and getting to know each other. This time, we started with about a half hour of the same kind of thing. We did one of those games where you need to fill out a chart with things like “Find someone who has run a 10K” and “Find someone who wears colorful earrings”. I guess we know the names of more of our classmates at least.

This class focused on early labor. This is the period of time before you reach 4cm dilation. The two big points that our instructor seemed to emphasize were that you should stay at home as long as possible and that there’s a wide range of what duration is considered “normal”. The reason that you want to stay home as long as possible is because there just isn’t a whole lot to do before you reach 4cms. We were told to come to the hospital after the contractions have been going on for 3-5 minutes for at least an hour. One student was a little worried that waiting that long may mean that they may not make it to the hospital in time, but in general, if the baby comes so quickly that it’s delivered at home, it hardly ever means that there are any problems. These tend to be the robust, healthy babies. It’s the babies that don’t come out for a long time that start to undergo stress.

We ended with Agnes’ favorite part of the class — the relaxation exercises. The point of these exercises is to eventually get a better understanding of how to force yourself to relax. I suppose this will be important for labor where you need to be relaxed for things to progress at a reasonable pace. There are other factors that can slow a delivery down, but being all tense seems to also be counterproductive. Agnes said that she thought I had fallen asleep during the relaxation exercise. I guess my breathing pattern does change, but I’m pretty sure I wasn’t asleep. It reminds me of when we were doing some relaxation exercises at the end of yoga with Shane and Anna and Agnes started kicking me because she thought I had fallen asleep. It was actually Shane (or was it Anna?) that had fallen asleep, and I just couldn’t relax because I was getting kicked.

I won’t be able to make it to class next week because I’ll be traveling again for work, but hopefully I won’t miss a whole lot.