I'm baaaa-aack--for now

I have had a lot of things to say, but I have not had a lot of computer time lately. In fact, I'm not sure I want to maintain this blog. I've been having mixed feelings about it for a while...and I guess they're still mixed, so here I am. My first concern is time. I am so busy I'm just not sure I have the time to maintain it, and would maybe prefer good old-fashioned email. My second concern is that sticking information up on a virtual board for everyone to peruse is not a natural way of communicating. It seems sort of like a science fair--you stick your information up on a board and people wander around and look at it. They can ask questions or make comments if they want, and then they move on. Not very personal.

I have been concerned by the decline of communication with some of my oldest friends as people's "socializing" becomes more and more internet-based. I think facebook is a much bigger culprit than blogger, and I absolutely, positively will not ever open a facebook page, but I wonder if blogger isn't maybe a little bit of the same thing. Of course, everyone reading this also has a blog, so I'm sure you will all disagree...but I can't help but wonder a little bit.

Facebook really worries me. Here is a personal example of what I see happening. A good friend of mine and former roommate took the time to get together the email addresses of everyone who lived in our last apartment at BYU, and then sent them in an email to each one of us. I was really excited to receive it and immediately wrote an email to each one of them. These were some really good friends, and those of you who have been in a college roommate situation know that you form really strong bonds with your roomies. The only one who responded to me, and with whom I have been periodically communicating since, was the only other one who doesn't have a facebook page. I imagine the rest of them "hooked up" on facebook. They wander around the exhibition, look at each other's pages, make comments, ask questions, and move on. I don't mean to be disparaging. I know that EVERYONE does it and it must seem a quick, convenient way to keep up with people with whom one would otherwise lose contact. But haven't you really lost contact already, if that is the only contact you have? If you don't even have time to RESPOND to emails sent to you by old friends that you haven't heard from in a long time, isn't something missing?

I'm a little worried that blogger is a bit of the same thing--to a much lesser extent. It doesn't seem to disrupt people's lives and be as addictive as facebook is, for some reason. Why facebook? Why not myspace, or my yearbook, or any of the other "social" networking sites that have been created? What is it about facebook? So...the jury is out on whether I will maintain this blog.

BUT...on a happier note, I wanted to share some news with those of you who do read this blog. Jacob and I are expecting number 3 in early February. We don't know what it is and we don't plan to find out. In fact, I would rather not have any ultrasounds at all, except perhaps one near the end to discover the location of the placenta so I know if I have placenta previa or not. I want to go natural, but if I had to deal with something like placenta previa, I wouldn't hesitate to schedule a c-section. I'm not that crazy, and I certainly wouldn't ever risk my child's life for the sake of some ideal of the perfect birth experience.

The jury is still out as well on how and where I will have the baby. It is my dream to have a home water birth, and a friend of mine who just had her eighth (and I'm pretty sure she is at least a year or two younger than I am--wowzers!) has had them all at home with a midwife and had absolutely no problems with any of them. She gave me the names and numbers of a couple of midwives that she knows and says they even take some insurance plans. Family insurance kicks in next month through my husband's work. But therein lies the dilemma; as most of you know, he works at the local hospital as a nurse. They all know I'm pregnant, and they can't wait to see the new baby born there. Our family doctor assured Jacob that they would take good care of me. It's a very small hospital, and it is probably not often that they see the staff have babies, so it is pretty exciting for them. I suspect that my birth experience this time, as the wife of one of the nurses who works in the unit (the hospital is so small that med-surg and ob are together in the same wing), would be entirely different from what it has been in the past--to an extent. I would still have to have an IV the whole time and have to have a fetal monitor strapped on at least ten minutes out of every hour because that is hospital policy. I think that is plain stupid. In fact, it was during all the getting in and out of bed to have the monitor strapped on when I was in labor with Peter that his cord prolapsed.

I'm considering talking to the doctor and telling him how I want the birth experience to go, and if we can make that work at this hospital then I will have it there. Otherwise I will have it at home. He would probably be shocked and think that was weird, and tell me all about the statistics that say an otherwise healthy baby is three times more likely to die in a home birth than a hospital birth, blah, blah, blah. But those statistics are skewed. What they don't tell you is that they include all home births--including unassisted births, people who had no prenatal care all, and things like teenagers who hid their pregnancies then had their babies secretly in the bathroom and threw them in the trash. Well, duh, healthy babies are going to die under those circumstances, and I think it is very irresponsible to not be completely honest about the statistics. The truth is that if you only include midwife-assisted homebirths where the mother received adequate prenatal care and the homebirth is planned, the statistics for the mother and the baby are much better than at a hospital.

Sorry I don't have any pictures to post. I know that is much more interesting, but our old computer crashed with our pictures on it and we have to see if we can somehow get all our info off the hard drive.