The well researched natural pregnancy...

Okay, yes admittedly many of our posts are going to be about pregnancy from now until the baby comes. If you aren't interested in pregnancy, no problem....Stop back say near Thanksgiving when I should have some pictures of my trip to Tokyo up, and we'll discuss the depressing thought of staying home at Christmas this year (no Mexico beaches for us this Xmas).

So... back to pregnancy:

Overall, pregnancy is going well. My hormones are a little out of whack and my patience with others is very thin right now. My belly is growing inch by inch. So far, its a blissfully uneventful, low risk pregnancy. I am eating well, and continuing to exercise as much as possible.

As we get more and more questions, advice and birth stories coming at us, we feel its important to say that this was a very, very, well -- maybe over-researched -- pregnancy and it will be an equally well researched birth. Well, what can I say --We prefer to use evidence and data as our best decision making tools. Its who we are. But here's the other thing -- we are like the last of a million friends to have a baby. I think that makes a big difference in everything. Bottom line is that we've waited, purposely, to have kids, until we were really ready to take it on. And, over the years, as I have listened to the grizzly birth and childrearing stories of friends and family, I realized that the one thing a lot of people don't do, is educate themselves about the birth process ahead of time...and my feeling is that the birth is a pretty important part that you need to think about and plan for.

So that's where we are at right now. We've gotten past the first trimester and now we are beginning to plan and think about and learn all about natural childbirth. For our prenatal care and birth planning, we are using a very special and exclusive group of Certified Professional Midwives (CPMs) located here in the city of brotherly love. After scouring the city and suburbs and learning about all the options, we feel really great about the practice of midwives that we have chosen to use. Our prenatal visits so far have been about an hour and a half in length each time -- which gives us a chance to go over everything and get to know one another, and our baby, better. We're very lucky that the same women we see at each visit will be the ones delivering our baby -- no substitutes as is common with many places today!

Some of you may already know that using CPM midwives for our primary means of maternity care means we won't be having an ultrasound (there is no medical need for one) so we wont be finding out the sex of the baby until they arrive. Finding out the sex is just not an option when you don't have an ultrasound, which is fine with us...We have no reasons to believe this baby will be anything other than a healthy youngster, and so we look forward to meeting the baby, counting fingers and toes and finding out the gender in February. As for names, we've got some favorites, but we'll probably abstain from naming him or her until we've gotten to know them a bit better during their first week of life.