Bradley Class 10: the Heisenberg Principle

The act of being observed changed our instructor's normal behavior. I can't tell if Jan was being evaluated or just observed, but there was a person taking notes on the class. Jan was not her normal self during class Tuesday night. She tried hard to adhere to the book, something she normally doesn't do, then made a point of telling us all the things that would happen during class at the beginning of class, which is also strange.

Class was an extended dance mix of Stage 2 labor techniques. First we went over the vocabulary in the book, which we'd covered already. Then relaxation, which I didn't like because it was about imaging warmth while I was already hot in a hot room. Pregnancy makes me hot.

Then we watched a movie on breastfeeding, which had decent step-by-step information on how to get a kid to latch on even if it was not the most professional video I've ever seen (it reminded me a bit of Wayne's World). Then we went back to the workbook, which had a series of questions like, "How can you differentiate among an overwhelming urge to push, some feeling to push, and wishful thinking that you need to push?" These questions seem pretty straightforward to me, but those were for the guys. (Yes, because they really need to know and won't be able to ask. Right.) We also had to go around and report on what exercise we've been doing to get ready for birth, which was a little more pushy than I expect from Jan.

The most striking bit of class was the "dress rehearsal" for labor, which meant we went from station to station assuming different positions and practicing relaxing when Jan rang a bell. Assuming positions sounds better than it was. Positions were things like straddling the back of a chair, squatting, and sitting on a birthing stool. The observer asked Mistah C and I during this if this was our first child, because "you seem so confident." We said it was our first and that it was just "blind...courage?" I was thinking stupidity, but stupidity wasn't the word I wanted. I still don't know what the word would be. I don't know what there is to be afraid of or how we were expressing confidence in a way that someone would feel the need to comment on it. Maybe it was our cue to wax rhapsodic about the classes.

Other rants: I've been reading Morgan Spurlock's Don't Eat This Book, the follow-up to the fabulous Supersize Me, and it's spilled over into making my reading skills even more critical. Example: The Times had an article this week about how some/many researchers are beginning to say that breastfeeding is so much better than formula-feeding that is it a disservice to tell parents that formula's an equivalent alternative to breast milk. There's research saying kids who are breast fed have lower instances of infectious diseases in childhood and lower chances of developing certain cancers and autoimmune diseases (like diabetes and asthma), among other things like being smarter and not obese.

This is making some people defensive. One of the experts quoted in this piece is from Cato Research, basically saying correlation does not equal causality; as such, the link between breastfeeding and lower incidence of disease is in dispute.

How does this relate to Morgan Spurlock? Well, Morgan takes a bunch of "independent research institutes" to task in Don't Eat This Book for being funded by large corporations and making statements that just happen to defend what those large corporations do and decrying scientists as food Nazis. So I Googled Cato Research and found out what kind of work Cato advertises that they do. I don't know about you, but I don't think an organization boasting about getting pharmaceutical products approved with minimized, shortened, and abbreviated testing has my best interests at heart. I'm sure they potentially make more off my formula-feeding than they would off my breast feeding.

Boy, I better be able to breastfeed now.