I'm Baaaaaaaack!

Did you miss me?  Or did you even know that I was gone?  Our phone was cut off for two days, which means that our internet service was out as well.  It seems that during some construction (destruction?) down the street, some idiot backhoed the phone lines.  You see, this is why it pays to have those little marker thingies that say "phone line here."

Bad news lately--our midwife has recently come under scrutiny for helping out at births, so she is uncomfortable being the attendant at our birth.  If things don't ease up for her before March, we will have some decisions to make.  My first choice is to have a planned unattended childbirth at home.  I don't have a lot of faith in the medical system here and feel like there is much less risk for me at home than there would be in the hospital.  Also under consideration is "importing" a midwife from the US or UK/EU.  We have not really looked into this, but I know of two "traveling midwives" who have been or are willing to travel to Turkiye.  The last option to be considered is trying to have a natural birth in the hospital with a doctor who was trained outside of Turkiye, who has a clue what a natural birth is.  This means that I would be bucking the system, having to fight for what I want (and don't want), which I'm just not all that willing to do.  I don't want to have to be a MamaBear in LaborLand.  We have 20 weeks before this baby is due to make a personal appearance, so we have some cushion time.

The fun thing is that we started our childbirth education classes tonight.  It will be nine classes covering everything and then some.  I am looking forward to practicing some coping techniques, since I didn't get any of that the first time around and suffered miserably because of it.  We have three other couples in our class, all of them mixed--Turkish & Something.  I am the only one in the entire class (including the instructors!) who has actually had a baby before.  Kind of a weird thing, but it's interesting.  We didn't cover much tonight, just a brief history of childbirth, some simple breathing exercises, common pregnancy symptoms, etc.  I can't say that I really learned anything that I didn't already know, but it's nice to be part of the group and be able to share what's going on with other couples.  It's especially nice that they are all foreigners married to Turks, so we have a common bond with that as well as the pregnancy stuff.  We all share pretty much the same concerns and goals--avoiding surgical birth through education and empowerment, so it's not like anyone has to be converted into the natural birth camp.  I don't have to worry about being the only militant natural childbirth fanatic in the room.

Three more days and I have an official teenager.  I can't believe my baby is going to be 13 years old.  Wow!  Time sure does fly.  I remember so clearly being pregnant with her and what she was like as a little person.  It's hard to accept that now she's closer to being a grown-up than a little kid.  It's so hard to know when to intervene and when to just let go.  We have all these books on how to take care of babies, but there really isn't anything for how to take care of teenagers.  Babies are so much easier--if they cry, you feed them, change them, rock them to sleep, or play with them.  I wish I could still rock my baby, but she's bigger than I am these days, which makes it kind of difficult.  When we plan to have babies we are so worried about the pain of childbirth.  Little do we know that that is the easy part, it's the adolescent years that are the hard ones!