Week 37 starts tomorrow (Wednesday). We're almost there. Just like everyone says, these last couple months have been just a lot of waiting.

I don't know where that baby is scrunched up, but Melissa is half the size of a lot of pregnant women we've seen. I pity her poor smushed guts :-) She still gets around quite well, she just doesn't get up from a chair as fast as she used to :-) It's a good thing it's winter, or else she'd be out mowing the lawn during the day. heh.

Tonight we finished a private birth class (three nights, 6-9 each night). The instructor, Sheila, was great. She was very knowledgeable in natural childbirth, as well as all the other options available to us. We switched to her after dropping the hospital birth class at the suggestion of our midwife. The hospital birth class tends to spend a lot more time on medical intervention and less time on things you can do to hopefully eliminate or reduce the possibility of c-sections and similar. Sheila did a lot of work with signs of labor, coping strategies, labor positions, techniques, breathing, etc. I definitely recommend her to anyone else in the area looking for a birth class, especially if you were able to ditch the OB and go with a midwife.

The other two hospital classes, breastfeeding and newborn care, were just ok. Part of our problem there was that we had read too much prior to the classes, so the classes tended to be a bit of a rehash. The breastfeeding class was mainly just an expensive seat in front of a video. If you haven't done much reading on the subjects, I do recommend them. If you've gone through a couple books and have a good midwife, however, you may want to look for more in-depth classes elsewhere.