HypnoBirthing

Well I've had a few people ask me now, "What is HypnoBirthing?" so I figured I would put it all out here instead of writing it over and over again!

But before I do that, a quick update. I'm 24 weeks pregnant, which means that if our little girl decides to make her appearance super early she already has a 50% chance of survival! How amazing is that?!? Of course we're hoping that she decides to stick it out until at least week 37! I'm feeling great, lots of energy right now...2nd trimester for ya! I just finally hit my pre-pregnancy weight again this morning as well, so I'm doing great on the healthy aspect of things as well. We do have a name picked out, but we're keeping that part a surprise for now. She has been kicking like crazy. I've been able to see the kicks a few times from the outside. Brandon laid his head on my stomach the other day and got kicked pretty hard in the forehead as well. I'm loving feeling her move around inside me and I'm so thankful and excited and looking forward to meeting her in just about 3.5 months.

As for HypnoBirthing (copied this from an email I sent to someone):

Basically Hypnobirthing is almost like self-hypnosis for birth. It teaches you deep relaxation and breathing techniques for labor/delivery to avoid as many medical interventions/drugs as possible. The deeper breathing leads to more oxygen and endorphins in your body for a more pleasant experience. It doesn't promise a pain free-delivery or even an intervention-free delivery, but basically a less painful delivery and the more relaxed you are the less of a chance for interventions.

A couple of the benefits of hypnobirthing are:
~it eliminates the fear-tension-pain syndrome before, during and after birthing. Which is basically the pre-condition that we're taught that birth is supposed to be the most painful thing we'll ever experience, which isn't really true. Women have been doing it for centuries but it's only been the past 100 years or so pain has been associated with each birth instead of the occasional cases.
~It can shorten the first stage of labor by several hours because your muscles are more relaxed. The more afraid you are the more tense your muscles and the harder it is for your cervix to dilate.
~eliminates fatigue during labor so you have more energy for the actual birthing because you're more relaxed during the early stages.

I'm a strong believer in natural birth because getting pitocin to speed up labor causes your contractions to be more intense. More intense means more likely to get an epidural, which in turn can then slow down labor, which leads to more pitocin, higher epi dose, more pitocin again and eventually your contractions are so hard that it puts a lot of stress on the baby. That can lead to emergency c-sections if the doctor doesn't feel like your progressing fast enough or if the babies is in distress; which is about a 40% chance. Natural labor with no medical interventions, even if it's longer, has about a 5% chance of a c-section. Plus I plan to exclusively breast feed and babies with epidurals are a little more sluggish after birth and have a harder time latching and breast feeding.

It took Brandon and myself 3 years and 2 months to get pregnant with one miscarriage and one ectopic pregnancy. I've spent the majority of those 3 years researching not only infertility treatments but pregnancy so I feel very aware and informed about what's going on. I've looked at all the options and feel that, for me, that a natural labor/delivery is the only choice. It's not a choice for everyone, but after researching so much it's what I strongly believe in for myself and for the best birth and labor not only for me but for our daughter. We're also hoping to do a water birth to help make our babies entrance into this world as least traumatic as possible...to both of us!

Here are a few videos of hypnobirthing:4 minute news-story http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7kA3PMJwA8
Dateline did something on it too (great documentary!) 20 min total, part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llT30oHxz6gpart 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f05YQbnsUGA