Birthdays and Brainwashing

We've been on holiday from work since 19 January. Poor D has to go back tomorrow on his birthday. He's not happy. He's got too used to spending every waking minute with his enormous wife. We were supposed to be getting the house in order while we've been off, and while we've done a bit of this, it's been a pretty lazy time. We've been lying in and lounging around. The bathroom is still not finished and the place is still a tip. But D has cleared out the attic. And then refilled it with different crap. And the poor soul has had to retire one of his mountain bikes as it's going to be too expensive to maintain it. He is still in mourning.

I had a lovely Lostie birthday in that I received the BEST gift from @andalone (THANK YOU!!!!!) which happened to arrive that day. It was a Dharma baby-gro and a t-shirt for me (which I'm scared I'll never fit into). And then later in the afternoon, I received my prize for coming 2nd in the Kharma Initiative raffle which was two posters (one being the Not Penny's Boat print from the second Lost poster event) and a 'Hurley and the Numbers' gelaskin cover for my Ipod Touch which was the giveaway item at the Damon, Carlton and a Polar Bear reveals. I now have 3 of those items. One from the Glasgow reveal and the other from the Chicago reveal. V. happy.
Also on my birthday, Dad and D went to Mamas and Papas to pick up our travel system, cheap(ish) buggy and cot bed. Today D put the cot bed up - it's lovely. I'm glad we didn't go for a real cheapy. The baby's room is small and we have real storage issues in this boxy little house. But people manage with less.
The one bit of useful tidying I have done is to sort out my Lost posters. Some have gone in the attic to be framed another day when there's more cash. The others I have set aside to take to the framers on Friday, the last of my days off from work. I'll get four done and the rest will just have to wait sadly. At least until some kind person takes us to Ikea where I might be able to pick up a frame for them.

Hypnobirthing has continued and we are still enjoying it. In class 2 we learned the principles of glove anesthesia where you numb your hand and then apply your hand to any part of your body you want to numb. I managed the hand but wasn't able to transfer it. If you perfect this, you can use it at the dentist instead of an injection.

We also learned that I can practise birth breathing while going to the loo for a number 2! If you can breathe out a bowel movement without pushing, you can do the same with a baby. Just lovely.
In class 3, D learned gentle touch massage which he can do for a while when I'm in labour (although he'll get sore arms if he does it too long). In the hypnosis session at the end of the class, I feel that I went under very quickly. We were in the deep recesses of our minds looking through a book of our lives so we could erase and rip up any pages which contained fear that might get in the way of our best possible birth experience. Most of my fears are not borne of any past experiences or stories I've heard - I've just made them up for myself. So I found it difficult to find relevant pages in my book. But I pulled out a few. I need to think of ways to visualise my fears so I can do this more effectively the next time I 'go through the book'. Do I sound sufficiently sucked in yet?

The technique to get you to go deep inside yourself seems to be to get you to count down, and use language like 'down' and 'deeper' until you are in a hypnotic state. When I was being counted down, I felt myself on an escalator, and then eventually on a rope pulley system (like in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves after Robin shows Marion the riches in the tree house and then they get down by rope, rather than by ladder). When I got to the bottom (or when the counting from 10-1 had finished), there was a huge lilac, gleaming diamond floating in the air in front of me. This wasn't something I was being prompted to see. It was the most vivid thing I've seen under hypnosis. The hypnotherapist made no mention of it and was telling me to go find a room down a corridor (the one with the book) . I tucked the jewel under my arm as it seemed too important to leave behind. I have no idea what it means. Perhaps it is the source of life, death and rebirth?
Eventually we were asked to visualise our new family once baby has arrived. I saw me and D and a baby. When the hypnosis was over, we were asked if we saw the sex of our baby. I hadn't thought about it while I was under, but I immediately replied 'yes' without hesitation. But I'd borrowed the image of the baby I imagined from a dream I'd had and that dream, I'm sure, was influenced by a picture of a newborn boy I'd seen at work the previous week.

On Friday, I spent a lot of time practising the hypnosis. D has also been given hypnosis scripts to read to me so that I can associate the sound of his voice with being relaxed.

So, as you can tell, it's pretty much occupying my thoughts at the moment.

And that's the way it needs to be if it's to work. I'm also getting more keen on the idea of a home birth. However, it is remarkable how sinister some people think hypnosis is and how foolhardy they think a home birth is. They think it is hippy dippy nonsense. These people are the ignorant ones but sometimes it's difficult to hold your ground. Especially when these people have given birth themselves and think that makes them experts on birth in general. It makes them experts in the birth of their own children and not a lot else. Granted, I'm not even an expert in that yet but I'm more expert in self hypnosis than they are. So there, see!

This week, according to the iPhone app of pregnancy wisdom, the baby is the size of a... cucumber. Que??

Today I am 10 stone and 6.5 pounds. YIKES!