This week in my childbirth preparation class I learned that pretty soon, we don’t want the baby to be “sunny-side up.” In other words, if he’s facing out towards the world, I could have a very painful “back labor” experience.
Said teacher informed us that Americans have the highest rate of back labor in the world. That is because we sit leaning back so much. The head and butt are the heaviest baby parts, and so, when Mama is a few degrees short of supine, the little one swings round to the back and faces out.
At 33 weeks, you’re telling me I have to stop lounging???
Okay. For a day, I honestly tried. But it so isn’t happening.
This morning, I asked my yoga teacher about it. She said she’d heard of this idea, but that in her experience, it isn’t true. More just one of those tidbits that gets passed along, like The Sushi Fear.
(By the by, I keep seeing people — even famous nutritionist people in big fancy newspapers — citing toxoplasmosis as a risk factor in eating sushi, and yet, scientifically, that doesn’t match up with anything else I’ve read on the parasite. And because of my scare, I have read a lot.)
In the meantime, I’m trying to understand why some people vaccinate their children and some don’t and still others do but spread them out over a longer period of time. I went to a “brown bag lunch” with one of the pediatricians I interviewed, but all she said was that I need to read up on it and decide for myself. (I was hoping for a more definitive answer.) Although she did go through the list of vaccines and say something about how useful each one is — except for Polio, which has been eradicated in this country, but could be trouble if you travel (or one of those other foreign infected types travels here?).
She suggested I consult the Berkeley Parents Network on the subject.
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