Here you are … pregnancy starts to speed up. Almost every day you feel your baby and belly get bigger. You might have some discharge from your nipples (pre-milk stuff). Everything is fascinating. Your baby rolls around now and it feels neat. If you’re feeling good, you’re feeling good. If you or your baby has health issues then you hold some level of anxiety about the coming birth or even afterward. Step #7 28-30 weeks of pregnancy is a pretty benign time but you should still be preparing your body to give birth and learning birth and birth-coaching skills should be also in the forefront. Does it take heaps of Time to do either of these two things? Not really but it’s all a question of priority. If your baby’s birth is a high priority and you have really woken up to the reality that The Birth is your Mt. Everest … you have to do the hard work!
Characteristics Step #7
- You’ll remain in the ‘special world’ until Step #10 when you return to the ‘ordinary world’
- You need to actively be ‘preparing for this big change’
- This is the step when you ‘approach the situation’.
In Step #7 the meaning of ‘approach the situation’ is simple … The Great Activity of giving birth and doing the activity of birthing is in your sights. Remember birth is both a noun but more importantly an active verb. Becoming skilled gives you the cutting edge even though probably none of your friends or family actually took time to become skilled for their births. There is just no emphasis within the childbirth trend of today that skills are important much less essential.
Approach the situation
Our job as a charitable Trust is to wake you up to the profound need to become skilled. Sure we think Birthing Better online courses excel because the skills were developed by fathers and mothers for every type of birth. You also may be seeking and getting involved with other types of birth preparation which is terrific. If you go to a local childbirth preparation class you’ll meet heaps of other families who can become friends for life and get tons of information. However, most of these classes really lack a comprehensive set of skills that are effective in all births by both mothers/fathers. Sadly this means that many families discover that ‘once birth started everything I learned in my classes went out the window’.
Such a statement doesn’t mean childbirth classes aren’t good. They are great for developing life long friends! And for heaps of information. They are not good at getting you skilled for whatever type of birth unfolds for you, your baby and your partner.
It’s also very important to get clear about your OB/midwife’s role. They will take care of you and your baby. That is both their jobs and the skills they’ve developed through their training and education. Being taken care of is NOT the same as knowing how to cope, manage, work through, deal with, handle, stay on top of and in control of yourself as you do the ‘activity’ of giving birth. Only you ‘do’ the birth while your partner should know how to help you while your OB/midwife/staff ‘take care’ of you.
‘Prepare for birth’ means … getting ready with all the gazillion things you have to do to welcome your new baby AND it means learning how-to-do the activity of birthing your baby. You get one shot to ‘do’ the birth in an empowered manner no matter where you birth, with whom or what happens while the gazillion things can get sorted over Time. Take birth seriously and become highly skilled. During 28-30 weeks of pregnancy is just a ‘plug along’ period … enjoy it.