This week hubby and I went to our first antenatal class and it was astounding to see just how different a pregnant belly looks on different women.
Sitting in the oppressively quiet hospital lobby, I eyed the bellies of my fellow classmates (the women, not the men) trying to guess how far along they were.
Among the eight of us, there were no two alike.
One woman looked, to my eye, about four months along, another looked ready to pop, with the rest of us fitting somewhere in between.
I thought I’d be somewhere in the middle, but boy was I wrong.
There was only one girl who had further to go than I did (the one I thought was four months) and she was due only a week after me.
Most of us were at a pretty similar stage and there was probably only three or four weeks spread of all our dates.
The topic of our first lesson was the one on all of our minds – labour.
Our teacher, a midwife at the hospital, talked us through the different stages of labour, making us guess what different implements were for.
Hubby had decided the best way to handle matters was to be class clown.
When we started to talk about the mucus plug and what it looked like, he earned chuckles from the fellow dads with “oh no I’m going to my happy place now”.
We also did a tour of the labour ward and the nursery, where there was one little baby girl sleeping in a humidicrib.
She wasn’t in any danger according to our teacher, she just needed a bit of extra attention.
She was so tiny and perfect, but best of all she was a healthy size.
Seeing how small newborns are was probably the most reassuring part of the class.