Monday, December 7, 2009

Birthing A Ping Pong Ball

Tonight I went for an ante-natal refresher class. It was more like a question and answer session rather than an actual class, except for this one exercise. And I now have the imagery that silly balloon and ping pong ball exercise burned into my brain.

The educator got us to shove a ping pong ball into a balloon. After blowing the balloon up (but not tying it off), we turned the balloon upside down so that the ball sat over the opening. Once the ball was there, we could let go and the ball would act as the plug to prevent the balloon from deflating.

Here comes the fun part...

Firstly, we squeezed the sides of the balloon to show how uterine contractions do not happen. Its ineffective.

Then, we squeezed the top of the balloon, which is what the uterus does during labour and the ping pong ball kept moving up and down the 'neck' of the balloon. The neck representing the cervix.

Then the lady says "crown your baby". So, we all squeezed the top of the balloon until the ping pong ball was about a quarter of the way out of the balloon.

Now, "puff your baby out". And there were ping pong balls flying everywhere! I'm glad there was that funny ending to the exercise because I really did not need the extra props to boost my imagination skills.

I did not like this exercise at all because it made things too easy to imagine. I was quite happy just knowing on paper what would happen...didn't need to see it. But anyway, its on my mind now and I felt like sharing it here. The more I talk about it, the more accepting I will be of it. As 'they' say, I've got to trust my body....somehow.

6 comments:

Mike said...

"shove a ping pong ball into"

I won't tell you where my mind jumped to before I got to the end of THAT sentence. I could see a bunch of pregnant women having ping pong ball shooting contests. And the winner is Amanda with a distance of 10 meters!

Cynthia said...

OK, the ping pong ball project is a new one to me. They just showed us a movie that scared the bejeezes out of me:O

Scott and Elaine said...

too hilarious!

Bilbo said...

I'll never be able to play ping-pong again...

Lifeofkaylen said...

I wonder if whoever came up with this teaching method was fully sober when it was thought up....it's pretty ridiculous to imagine someone was just doing this one day and thought of how much like a uterine contraction this is....

Tanya said...

That is classic Im not sure I would have been able to keep a straight face through that class!!