Meet Melman

**As with all other Hypnobabies posts, proceed at your own risk.**

Melman is my birth ball. He's purple and smiley and will hopefully help me with pre-birth exercises as well during Lumpy's actual birth. After Melman has fulfilled his birthing duties - I can bring him over to Jen's house to do a good ab workout.

Last night in Hypnobabies we discussed the beginning of Lumpy's birthing time (it's not called labor in Hypnobabies). It was a relatively PG rated class - with only a brief mentioning of the mucus plug and bloody show. Here are some of the highlights:

• What to do in the early stages of birthing (prior to going to the hospital). Hypnobabies recommends that you have a task to do - like make cookies for the nurses, address Lumpy's birth announcements, work - I bet you can guess what I've selected for my task.
  
• Timing of the birthing waves (in Hypnobabies, they're not called contractions) and when we should go to the hospital. They recommend 4-1-1; birthing waves are 4 minutes apart, lasting 1 minute and have been occuring for 1 hour.
• What to expect when we get to the hospital. Thankfully, a lot of this was covered during our hospital tour last week.
• Creating the ideal birth environment (a lot of this will come later, when I write my birth plan).
  
• Ideal Lumpy positioning - I'm supposed to talk to Lumpy and say, "Head down, facing back, chin to chest!" This is not very stimulating mother/baby conversation, so I'll make sure to say other things to Lumpy too.
  
• How to use Melman!
  

One of my tasks this week is to write the first draft of our birthing plan. I also plan to share it with Dr. Elephant at my appointment on Thursday.