Home Birth Preperation: where’s my brain?

I feel like I’m on another planet these days.  My to-do list is so long, I’m having difficulty staying present.

It’s not just the house.  I mean, yes, the house adds to the list, but there’s so much more on my mind (despite my watching HGTV almost nonstop for the past week).  I’ve spent so little time actually thinking about this next baby and preparing both physically and mentally, that here we are, a month before my due date, and I am just deciding whether I want to have another water birth.  I really hadn’t thought at all about getting a hold of a birth pool for my home birth until the home visit with my midwife, yesterday.

Then there’s the issue of all the postpartum supplies, which I’ve known for some time, I want to have on hand before the arrival of this baby.  I want to have all the soothing and healing supplies I’ll need for birth recovery so Hubby’s not running to the store every 5 minutes again.  With that in mind, I want to put together a list of all those items, which I’ll post next week.

As for childbirth training, I haven’t done anything aside from the doula training I took in October.  At least I did that, I guess.  It’s just that in preparing for Little Man, Hubby and I took Bradley Method classes where we studied the stages of labor and practiced multiple positions we could use during labor in a 6 week class that ended around this point in my pregnancy.  I’m sure a lot of that will come back to me and thankfully I’ll have an amazing Doula this time, but I still feel I should spend some time refreshing my memory and going through those exercises again.  I just ordered another birth ball.  We have one already, but I want to have one upstairs and one downstairs so I don’t have to go too far during a contraction if I want to use it.  I’ll post a list of more birth supplies I plan to have on hand later this week.

Am I alone here?  I always here about the “nesting” in the final month of pregnancy, but I currently only feel I need to focus on preparing myself more than the home.  Maybe it’s that I know having a perfectly ordered home and nursery last time didn’t matter as much as not having all the postpartum supplies?

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