The "real" ice thing

We had our six hour birth prep marathon class on Saturday which featured what a friend who has taken the class before us referred to as the "real" ice thing when I told her about the other ice exercise we did.

We knew we were in for it when we saw her come in with two large bags of ice and two gallons of water.

This is how it went: each of the four couples* in the class got their own tub full of ice water and we spent the next 40 or so minutes with our hands in and out of the ice water, but more in that out. It was cold.

I was pretty cavalier about the first ice exercise. This one: not so much. It hurt. I no like. And I am oh so aware that spending 30 minutes with cold hands is a laughable and ridiculous proxy for labor pain.

The remaining time was filled with lots and lots of birthing info. So much, in fact, that the teacher went 45 minutes over time. So the class which was already six hours long and supposed to end at 7pm actually ended at 7:45pm. Whoops! Yes, this was a Saturday. So Eric and I did the only reasonable thing: we went home and watched Grizzly Man on Netflix. It was actually better than I thought it would be, yet still quite odd.


*We started out with 5 couples but one of them had their baby early (!!) so they don't have to do the rest of the class.