Touring the hospital

So, before we get to the fun, here's a quick status update:

Annette has been feeling pretty good. She never really had any morning sickness.

We are at 17 weeks now, and according to the all-knowing iPhone, she should be able to feel the baby moving sometime between 16-20 weeks. Nothing yet, though.

Annette has met with the midwife once and the delivering doctor once. Next appointment is on Feb 24th, when we should find out the sex of the baby.

Now for the fun...yesterday we went to the hospital to take a tour of their birthing facilities. Immediately, we knew we were in trouble. As we walked to the lobby for the tour, we saw a woman from the Relief Society Presidency of our ward with her son and daughter in law. This would not have been a problem except that no one from our ward knew Annette was pregnant. Oops! Suddenly our secret was out. Less than 24 hours later just before church, the Bishop came up and said, "did I hear that you were expecting?" You've got to love the LDS gossip networks!

As we took the tour, we went into the delivery room. The room was very nice--large with flat screen TV, jetted tub, long bench for the husband to pretend to sleep on, etc. Pretty good ambience for a hospital room. When the nurse asked for questions, a pregnant woman we'll refer to as hippie #1 asks, "can you have candles in the room?" Um, are you kidding me? You are in a hospital--why would you want candles? What about this idea seems even remotely smart.

The nurse politely pointed out the sprinkler heads in the ceiling and said, "these like to go off in the presence of open flames or heat. Unless you and your baby want to be wet, no candles."

The tour continued, with hippie #1 and her sister, superhippie #2 asking more and more bizarre questions.

Finally, as the tour ended, we settled down in the lobby for a quick Q&A question with the nurse. You can guess who had TONS of questions. Superhippie (a mother of 2) and her sister Hippie busted out all of the following:
"Do you allow natural childbirth?"
"Does the staff try to push drugs onto the mother if it is against her wishes?"
"Is marijuana permitted in the delivery room? (okay, I made that one up)"
Several other entertaining and silly questions, all before the bombshell dropped:
"We plan on using a midwife named "xxx" who advocates hypnosis-delivery. Will that be okay?" WAIT A SECOND...did she just say hypno-delivery? I'll be the first to admit that I'm not the most into alternative medicine, but what the crap is hypno-delivery? Are there really people who are delusional enough to convince themselves that delivery is not painful?

I've had over 24 hours to mull this over, and I'm still incredulous. You are unwilling to do an epidural, that has been medically shown to be safe and help ease delivery pains, but are willing to try to self-delude yourself?

I'm still baffled. But, then again, I'm a man.

Annette's turn:
In case anyone is wondering, my attitude is "DRUGS DRUGS DRUGS." If anyone asks, I'd like two epiderals please. I heartily concur with my sweet husband on the above. I also gathered that you have to spend lots of money, do lots of homework and go to lots of hypno classes prior to the delivery. As if! My favorite part was super-hippie's husband asking if he could have the epideral instead of his wife. I love the hippies in Oregon.