We, mostly Heidi, decided early on to use a midwife for birth instead of an doctor.  Partly because right before Heidi became pregnant, her insurance changed and she needed to switch doctors, and partly because we had caught a story here and there about using a midwife for birth instead of a traditional doctor.

The term first conjured images of medieval times to my mind.  Then I read up and became less ignorant about the subject.  My understanding is basically you approach birth with the thought that the body will take care of itself whereas with a doctor, you approach it more from the idea that birth needs constant maintenance and intervention.

Using a midwife has been very pleasant so far.  A team of midwifes work out of the hosptial, OHSU (wikipedia).  We don’t see the same one each time, but they are very pleasant and during the visit I’m constantly surprised at how genuinely interested they seem to be in the experience of being pregnant.  Asking Heidi tons of questions and spending quite a bit of time during the appointment with you in contrast to a doctor’s visit where they rush in and rush out.

That’s been my experience so far anyway.

To this point, I’ve imagined in my mind the actual birth.  Heidi would be on the hospital bed, feet in the stirrups, doctor hovering over screaming push.  When I came to think on it, I mentioned to Heidi that this seems silly, didn’t cavewomen like squat or something and let gravity help?

Then we watched this movie, the Business of Being Born, just this last week based on the recommendation of some friends. (Netflix)

And I got to see babies being born this time for real and not in a movie.

Here’s some interesting things I saw:

• So it looks like midwives prefer you to give birth standing/squatting, sometimes in water.
• There’s a cocktail of hormones that get released at birth bonding the mother and infant – a biological process.
• Doctor-based intervention usually starts with shot to induce labor (PIT – something), then a shot to numb the pain (the spinal one), which relaxes the woman so they give more of the first shot to re-induce labor, then back to the  shot to numb the pain and back and forth and on and on into a vicious cycle…  which leads to…
• 1 in 3 babies, in the U.S. today are caesarian section births.
• Physician convenience is a leading cause of caesarian section – a large number of babies are born at 4PM (“it’s getting late time to go home”) and 10PM (“it’s getting late, I need to go to bed”).
• Hooking up to an intravenous, IV, allows easier administration of the shots mentioned above.  In a typical hospital pregnancy you are hooked up first thing thereby making it less of an obstacle when later proposed.

It’s worth a watch even from a historical perspective just to see how births in the US have evolved over the past 100 years.

Update (2010.08.18): Just heard from the midwife today at Heidi's appointment that The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists published an article back on 2010.07.21 that states:

The cesarean delivery rate in the US increased dramatically over the past four decades, from 5% in 1970 to over 31% in 2007. 

So from 1 in 20 to 1 in 3 over 40 years.  Link to the article.

After finding out that we are having a boy, I was very happy.  I know that healthy baby > baby gender, and we certainly went through all the genetic counseling and screening to ensure that our child is healthy.  I also understand that all that is based on percentages, nothing is guaranteed and something can still go wrong and that I am doing little to nothing as far a ‘work’ is concerned.  Heidi is doing all the ‘work’ at this point and her body is going through some amazing changes in such a short time period.

But I can’t help but feel like Tom Hanks in Cast Away when he built his fire.

Its not often I get the chance to pound my chest and act like a caveman.

Heidi is now 19 weeks pregnant, or 5 months, or half-way, depending on how you look at it.  Today was the ultrasound to determine sex.  I’ve looked at other people’s pictures of these in the past and wondered, “what am I looking at here… it looks like old static television.”  I like this shot though because there is no doubt about the arrow pointing at the penis.

My Dad and his wife Mary flew out this past weekend to visit for a couple of days.  We went out to the airport to pick them up.  Here’s a dark picture.

And here’s one with a flash.

Wow.  White-out.  This leads me to believe I have a shitty camera (PowerShot SD1000).  I thought it was great at the time I bought it but perhaps it is time for a new one.  Heidi and I were trying to play with it while waiting for them to get off the plane.

Self portraits are hard when you are trying to hold the camera and not look like it’s too close or see your arm holding the camera.  Every shot to me looks like I have double chin because of trying to hold my head up.  Maybe I do.

We spent time just hanging out.  Since they only had a couple days, we didn’t want to drive all over showing them sites like we did back when they first visited Portland for our wedding in September 2007.  So we watched movies (good ones like Open Range and bad ones like Pandorum), had fires in the fireplace, watched the winter Olympics and just hung out.  I did a bunch of cooking too (Cinnamon French Toast and Bacon, Sausages and Eggs, Steaks and Dungeness Crab).  The old man got a kick out of New Seasons, especially the butcher shop/meat counter and almost fell over when someone approached us twice and asked us if we needed help since that’s not common in stores back east.  We also went to HUB for beer and pizza – well root beer since the old man doesn’t drink beer.

It was great to see my Dad again and have a room in the house for them to stay.  I took them back to the airport using the bus and train.  A good way to see Portland in just a couple days I think.

Comcast announced back in December that it was launching a data usage meter and mentioned it on their blog.

While I’m thankful that they created the tool, I think the entire download cap is a little dubious.  More and more content is being made available over the web, movies, streaming live TV, downloading and installing games etc. and suddenly we are capped at 250GB per month.  We could wax and wane about how 250GB lets you download x number of movies but like anything, over time, setting that maximum has set a precedent from which we will always be measured. As more content gets converted to higher definition, larger file sizes are created and suddenly 250GB will not be enough.  Then Comcast can say, “well we will increase it to 500GB, that’s a 100% increase!”, and so there’s that precedent coming up.

If I use my bandwidth test from November, and I was to download something at my max bandwidth of 16 Mb/s, then in just 36 hours, I would use up all my bandwidth for the month.  [Math: 16 megabits per second = 0.001953125 gigabytes per second; 250 GB / 0.001953125 gigabytes per second = 128,000 seconds which translates to 35.55 hours].

Anyway, the tool is available from your users and settings tab.

And my current data usage meter.

Note that I’m already up to 45GB and I have yet to even stream a movie through Netflix or Amazon.  I think a majority of bits came from buying a few games off of Steam, some of which have large (5-8GB) installs.