Busy Baby Friday

Yesterday was a very busy day for us. We started with our first doula interview. It reminded me a lot of when we were getting married and interviewing florists, photographers, etc. You come with a list of questions  (some of which are printed from a website and some of which you just want to ask) and then try to work those questions into a casual conversation and assess your "fit" with the person at the same time. It's terribly awkward because although you're trying to have a pleasant conversation, you're also aware of the fact that you're hiring someone to spend time with you on what is likely to be a very stressful day of your life. As you can imagine, this aspect is magnified as you move from "wedding day stress" to "delivery of a baby stress."

The trouble is, the questions that you print from a website are usually very boring and awkward to ask -- like, "What was required of the training that you received in order to become certified?" Frankly, I don't particularly care. I don't ask my doctors what their particular degree programs required of them and I've never had a parent of one of my students ask me what was required of me in order to get my teaching license either. It doesn't seem like relevant information -- if DONA says that a doula is certified, I'm not particularly interested in questioning their methods, and I'm not even sure how I would do that. It's not as though I could say, "Hmmm...yeeeaah, that's not really enough for me? Isn't there a certification process where they, like, put you through doula boot camp? With 5 to 10 laboring women at once? That's really more the kind of training I'm looking for."

Other recommended questions (like, "What's your fee?" and "Can I call you if I have questions?") are easily found on most doula's websites. So what you're left with out of a list of 15 or so questions is just maybe one or two that you actually want to ask and feel comfortable asking. So then the rest of the interview is a bit awkward -- you want to make sure that they haven't come all the way out to meet you for no reason, but you also know that you're supposed to interview a doula before hiring her so it's not like you could have just hired her without having done this interview. So what do you say or do in order to decide whether you're a good match for someone when all you have is a list of standard questions? Tricky business. Perhaps it's less tricky for folks who aren't as socially-awkward.

Thankfully, we got along very well with this first doula that we interviewed. It helped that she had a lot of different services that she offers (photography, birth notes, postpartum doula care as well as birth doula care, private childbirth classes, etc). So when in doubt, we could always just say, "So I saw on your website that you offer [insert particular service], tell me more about how that works." It also helped that she was very pleasant to talk to and seemed to understand that we were newbies to all of this. We have two more scheduled for next week and then I am hoping that we can just go ahead and hire someone. I will feel so much more comfortable once this is crossed off our list.

After the interview was our ultrasound. The ultrasound was pretty fun and low-key. It didn't take as long as I'd expected -- only about half an hour instead of the 45 minutes to an hour that I'd been prepared for. Part of that may have been that we weren't asking them to inspect the genitalia or give us any information based on it. Part of it may have been that this radiology department seems to always give really fast ultrasounds (our first one back at 10.5 weeks was only about 7 minutes long). Either way, I wasn't disappointed. I felt like we got a good look at our little bambin@.

A cute little profile. 

My favorite -- a tiny foot!

We did successfully avoid seeing any sex-revealing anatomical structures. At one point I thought I'd accidentally seen something, but after a little more time with the ultrasound imagery, I decided it was actually probably the umbilical cord. At one point the technician did tell us that she would have to look at the pelvis and that we may want to look away and so we did. I hadn't thought that they would need to look at the pelvis at all, so of course now I'm wondering whether she could tell Bambin@'s sex or not. I never got a chance to ask her whether she could tell, and perhaps it's best that way. I'm just hoping that she didn't include any information about it in our file for the midwives. Our midwives said that they certainly don't need to know, and I'd prefer that it not be on any paperwork where it might accidentally get slipped to us.

Fingers crossed that everything looked happy and healthy. Of course, the technicians can't really give much qualitative information. So every piece of information that they do give ("The baby seems to be about 14 oz" or "The heartbeat is 144 bpm") is met (at least by me) with a certain degree of, "Oh good! Wait, is that good?" I know that an average fetus is about 12 oz right now, for example, but I don't know if 14 oz means that it's "too big" or whether it's still within the normal range. (Is there a bell curve in the house? I need a percentile chart, please.) I'll appreciate some interpretation at the next midwife appointment.