A CS Geek's Reflections on Childbirth
11 days after the fact, I figured I'd jot down some quick thoughts and lessons-learned from the birth of our first child. These are probably not shocking or revelatory, and I'll admit now that I'm doing it partly to process things in public. And because a few people have mentioned that they're headed down this path and asked if I'd learned anything. 1. Make a plan, and plan to be flexible when you deviate from it. Rationale: If you don't do the planning for the kind of birth you want to have, you probably won't have it. There are ways to stack the statistical deck in your favor, but there are still a lot of factors outside your control. As a successful, driven professional used to being able to exercise a high degree of control over everything in their life, this may be hard to accept. Sorry - accept it. As a friend recently pointed out, the WHO estimated that the "optimal" national c-section rate was around 10-15% While the US'