Preparing for arrival.

There comes a point where you have to just believe that baby is coming, if for nothing else but logistics. (It's also rather nice, pyschologically.) And at this point – after a "perfect" anatomy scan and continued reassurance a month later – we are choosing to believe that it is. Which means that we also need to deal with those logistics.

It seems that one is supposed to sign up for birth preparation classes early ... like a couple months earlier than we just did. Nevertheless, we were lucky enough to find a space at the hospital we prefer, the one we'll likely choose for the birth, in the one class that both begins after my return to Switzerland and ends before the due date. Whew.

Thanks to Josey's awesome recounting of her awesome experience with the Hypnobabies self-hypnosis childbirth program, I'm going to prepare with the home study course. A strange choice, perhaps, for the girl who used to be infamous at junior high slumber parties for her capacity to put into a trance all the other non-slumbering partiers although she was unhypnotizable herself, but I'm willing to give the mind-over-matter aspect of it a shot. It's more appealing than huffing my way through a Lamaze class, in any case. Our ultimate goal is the best of both worlds: a natural childbirth in a hospital setting. I'm finding this book on just that topic another good companion in our attempts to reach that goal.

And the stuff; oh, the stuff. After time spent abroad and, especially, in light of my sister's generosity in handing down a year's worth of goodies, baby now has everything we think it will need, which is to say: not much. Or so we hope, based both on our lifestyle and on our general philosphies, that all it will need is exactly that: not much. More later on what we chose and why, for those who are interested.