Me and my partner are expecting our first baby soon. Until now, we passed a couple of very important goalposts.
We didn’t get a miscarriage the first three months.
Everything looks fine, and the baby is growing well.
We progressed out of the moment that the baby actually has functioning lungs.
While the realization that there is plenty that can go wrong later, reaching these goals still feels like a small morsel of hope added, and they all feel significant, especially the first time.
There is just one thing this baby won’t do.
It won’t.turn.over.
34 weeks of cooing and talking and hoping, but the result is still the same: you can’t negotiate with babies.
After this period our doula (vroedvrouw) gave us a tip to check out the website “https://spinningbabies.com”
. For those of you who don’t know this: spinningbabies has a set of exercises that should promote the turning of the baby.
The big issue here is that it’s pretty hard to prove a reason why a baby turns. We can’t directly ask this (I tried), and the research on this still feels pretty spotty1.
Either way: the exercises aren’t easy, but they do provide us with some quality time together. And don’t get me wrong, I still dislike these exercises, but at the same time it doesn’t feel like it would have any adverse effects. It’s one of these things where the ‘feeling’ of getting it right also seems to matter.
In the end, it becomes another thing to do something together, and make some contact with the baby.