We had our "hospital tour" last night - it was actually a little class put on by two midwives from the practice with a tour of the labor and postpartum rooms afterward. I don't know exactly what I was expecting but it didn't quite meet my expectations. They did a powerpoint show talking about preparing for labor and when to call/come in. I could have done without most of that. I wanted more specifics about actual procedural things. They'd just mention something sort of offhand without much explanation - like intermittent monitoring or nitrous oxide. All but two women were first timers and they should have gone into more detail. But whatever. Though this isn't my first it's my first hospital birth so it's new to me. I'm just hoping to have spontaneous labor and to go in with only a few hours left before baby comes, so I can just get it over with without too much fuss and bother.
They did throw out this statistic about how long first time moms are likely to push - without an epidural 1-2 hours and with an epidural 2-3 hours. I have never heard that before, and I've also not heard of many women who push that long, so it kind of surprised me. I pushed for 4 hours, no epidural. One of my sisters pushed for 3 hours with an epidural for her first. But I thought we were kind of unusual...
Anyway...I don't think I'll do much in the way of a birth plan. I want to avoid the epidural, but might be more flexible on that this time. My hospital is part of the Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative so they already do immediate skin-to-skin for the first hour. The only thing I need to remember to refuse is the eye ointment for baby. I don't want that.
We haven't really made a decision on circumcision. I think we'll probably not do it though. I just don't want to cause my little newborn any pain.
I can see the pros and cons though.
Oh, and I did find out that my practice doesn't do routine cervical checks, so that's nice. They will offer it if you want one at 39 weeks, but not before, and you can still skip it then.
They recommend eating 6 dates a day starting at 36 weeks to ripen the cervix. Apparently some study in a country that eats a lot of dates (Jordan I think?) showed that women who ate 6 a day had labors lasting 400 minutes while those who didn't eat dates had labors lasting 700 minutes. Strange that the birth center I used for my first didn't mention dates at all. Dates are yucky to me though, so I'm not sure I can handle that. Blegh.
After that then we are going to pick up the final things we need like carseat and a couple other random things. Wow, I can't believe it's getting to that time!! 
Not saying it can't be.. but to straight up say that.. 
