Holy carp! Week 29!
That pretty much sums it up. Fortunately, after cramming so much knowledge into our tiny skulls, I feel reasonably well educated on the fundamentals. Between the two of us, Geralyn and I have read a small, independent bookstore’s worth of material on pregnancy and childbirth. So much so that I keep having daydreams about winning the International Scrabble Championship with words like vernix, colostrum, or perineum.
That said, Geralyn and I still don’t feel totally prepared, so we decided to go ahead and seek sage wisdom from another person, preferably a mother. We attended our first baby education class Thursday night. It was held in a poorly ventilated but brightly lit classroom in the Sharp Mary Birch Hospital. The training was entitled “Baby Care Basics”, so I expected us to graduate as perfect parents.
Before the class started we were issued dusty baby facsimiles from a huge bin. It was slightly unnerving to walk into a class on baby care and see them stuffed into bins like those big plastic balls at Wal-Mart. I named mine “Winifred” and found a spider in her clothes during the “dress your baby” exercise.
Let me sum up the evening with this: I now know more about poop than I thought possible. The teacher described the entire poop spectrum for us quite vividly. Now, I thought that was fine. That was the line, and although it was uncomfortable to walk up to the line, it was tolerable.
Then she put the movie in and the line zipped past me and over the horizon to my back.
Poop was everywhere and in every color of the rainbow. Oodles of offal. Droves of dung. Copious crap. Did you know that you can classify the stuff by color, consistency and odor? For a minute I thought they were talking about appraising diamonds. And you’d think there were precious gems buried in there the way the people in this video were handling the stuff.
The movie also featured frontal nudity, though the breastfeeding kind of put a damper on that.
Anyway, here’s the new picture of Geralyn:
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