Jefke.com

so fridays are recounting of the birthing class day, so i’ll get to it.

this week’s class was a bit less eventful on the stick ones foot in ones mouth front. which was a disappointment to me, but don’t fear there was still lots of tension and awkward moment, as i know you all love.

we arrived just on time for start of class. we saw the pikesvilles walking up the street as we come up to the house. the got to witness me bottoming out on my front spoiler of the mazda mobile turning around to park, good times.

when we got into the house, there were strangers sitting in our spot on the couch. the instructor was all smiles and told us that she had some announcements/news, but naturally she didn’t want to tell just the 2 of us…so we sat in another awkward silence while we waited for other people to arrive so that we hear the news. after a couple of minutes the instructor started breastfeeding her gigantor* son, and announced that he was over 20 pounds at 6 months old. thus putting him in to the 95th percentile in gigantorness.

while i’m an adult and have had the beauties and wonderfulness of breast , er, explained to me several times. i don’t think anyone in the was entirely comfortable with her feeding the baby, mid sentence in front of the group. i’m sure natty will say it wasn’t a big deal, but i saw all the father’s averting their eyes and shuffling their feet.

so then, mr. and mrs. christian arrived, and took their seats, the instructor took this opportunity make the announcement that the Mr. and Mrs King of Queens had actually delivered their baby last week (@33 weeks or so) and everything was ok, and such, but for the rest of the course the Queens will be played by the new couple (the strangers). Their names both start with R, so henceforth they shall be known as the R’s.

* ex manager jimmy’s term.

so now we have a new couple–they seem to be in our age range, and pretty outgoing, no noticeable personality traits were evident at that point.  more importantly, this news put the fear of god in me, as i has sorta forgotten that babies are early, and more to the point, i haven’t done shit in terms of preparing the nursery, setting up the house…all that shit…also, i don’t really know shit about the delivery–and we’re not covering that for 2 more classes….so that was nice, a little jolt of low grade panic to wake me up. excellent.

so we went in to the recap of nutrition from last class, which then prompted talk of our homework, which was to fill out this sheet with everything that the mother ate, to prove that she is protein loading, which is part of the bradley process. naturally, natasha did good job filling out her sheet, and naturally i left it on the counter at home as i took out all the extra papers from our workbook so i could read the chapter that was homework. i took some shit for that, believe me.  but it was totally my fault. mrs. pikesville won a package of bath salts for having completed the worksheet. so double shit giving came to the jefke after that.

at this point mrs. c started giving the instructor some static about the emphasis on protein in the whole method. mrs. c is scared of having a 13 pound baby.  this was the first time i have seen our instructor get defensive. i thought she was gonna level a smack down or some sort of "well you don’t have to come to the classes if you don’t like the methods".

but that didn’t happen, sadly

So Mr. R is quite a cut up–well in a sense, there was one point in the class where instructor handed out little cards and we had to listen to scenarios and then try to find cards that we have and related them to the scenario. they mostly focused on different techniques for relaxing the mother during labor, as well as some encouragement angles…now mr R had a card that said
"come on give me all you got on the next contraction and let’s get some real progress made".

he said this, oh, i dunno 7 or so times to much the great enjoyment of Mr. C–man did he love that shit. became a running joke for the rest of the evening. again i felt the instructor might lay the smack down, but she was able to reign in the group again.

so at any rate. we broke for break, and mr. c cornered me to talk about houses and such, i was totally dodging giving him any real information–and then i made a break for the dining room to get some water.

I did get some what cornered by mr. pikesville. as he was curious about my life as a technology consultant . i launched in to my say anything style, ‘well i don’t really create anything or consume anything, nor do i build anything, or use anything built– i work for a client where i can never say yes to anyone nor can i say ‘no i can’t do that’ to anyone, i create documents, but am not the author, as the team is the author, though they don’t actually write any of it, i am not a writer, but all i do is write…."

are you in the tech industry as well? i asked.

nope, he’s a mechanical engineer, he designs shit that solved problems and is then built and used or sold. people come to his company with problems–"these earmuffs don’t stay on" and they design a solution, and when it’s done, the ear muffs stay on, fucking crazy. i bet he makes bank too.

so the rest of the class was pretty boring actually, it was sort of weird that when we were leaving, everyone else seemed to stick around like there was a party after class or something. but screw it, we scooted out of that place.

so sorry there were no fireworks…but there’s always next week.