Back to the Hospital Again

I guess that post sounds a little daunting, considering our last hospital visit, but luckily this one was actually scheduled!

We had our first visit with the midwife at the hospital today. This was basically just an introductory meeting so they could get some family history from Julia and to fill out some paperwork. They also checked her blood pressure (all good), listened to the baby's heartbeat (this bit is always pretty cool), and got Jules to give a urine sample (slightly less cool).

Julia will have another midwife visit at 30 weeks, but I don't think she'll see a midwife again until delivery time. When I say 'a midwife', this means that we'll be getting a different midwife every time we visit. Apparently there's a birthing unit available where you get the same midwife throughout your pregnancy (along with some other perks) but we didn't find out about this until it was too late. You usually have to register for the birthing unit as soon as you find out you're pregnant. Even then, there's only a one-in-four chance that you'll actually be able to use it due to it's popularity. The problem with this is that we only found out a) after we announced to friends up here that Julia was pregnant (which is about 13 weeks too late) and then b) this morning at the first midwife visit. We'd have been interested in trying to register for this, but unfortunately that's not really possible now. I guess if Julia's GP had mentioned that this was available when we first found out she was pregnant we could have at least had a one in four chance.

Oh well...

Baby List - Take 2

Since I posted my 'baby list' there has been some very constructive feedback. Some very obvious omissions (train sets + lego should really have been there from the start) and some less interesting (but possibly more useful) feedback from Margie (another friend from work) about bottles & feeding.

We visitied a baby shop up in Strathpine called 'Bubs'. At least, I think that's what it was called. That was a bit of an eye opener! I learnt a very important lesson that day: new mums don't instinctively know everything about babies. I eventually worked that out after asking Julia 'what does this do' to every 2nd or 3rd thing (some stuff actually had descriptions on the boxes which meant I didn't have to ask quite so many questions). Her superior knowledge pretty much comes from being interested in having a baby for such a long time, I guess. Still, she's doing better than me!

Anyway, I think I'll leave it at that for now. There may not be much here for the next couple of weeks, as we're heading off to Fiji on Sunday for 8 days (woo-hoo!). I might try and get to an Internet Cafe at some stage if I can, though. I'm interested to see if I can send photos from my camera straight to this blog, so stay tuned!

//Daniel//