Labor playlists

Now that I have a hesitant okay from the head OB at my practice to attempt a VBAC--negotiating over my body!  The irony isn't lost on me--I'm on to phase two, which is preparing and planning.

The first thing I have to keep in mind is that I have no clue how this labor will go:  I don't know what's in store and I don't know how my crazy heart will respond.  Two years ago this mattered tremendously to me.  Today:  not so much.  Grace of God, 100%.

I do know for sure that I plan to be a mostly compliant patient once I step onto hostile hospital grounds.  I will do monitoring, I will accept their interventions, etc, if only to keep from being anesthetized should some emergency occur.  I'm hoping to negotiate the terms further if all goes as it should.  Besides:  I'm only planning on being there when we're down to the very end.

The other thing I know for sure is that all the interventions (epidural, heart monitoring) they want will be distracting, to say the least.  I can already hear the loud BEEP BEEP BEEP of the heart monitor.  I've spent the last three years trying to stop paying attention to my heartbeat from one instant to the next.  When I'm laboring, working hard to stay out of the way with any fears or anxieties, my heart rate is the last thing I want to focus on!  Why it has to be so loud, and on top of the noise from fetal monitoring . . .

So it's my ipod that will save me.  And as I'm typing, I just realized that I can get some podcasts of chaplets and the rosary.  Prayers are always a good thing in labor.  Music, though, is what I hope will take my mind off every silly beat of my heart.

My husband's so hip he's got thousands of songs I've never heard of on his ipod, so I can't just hit shuffle.  I hate it when I hit a string of 250 songs that I have to skip because they're wrong:  can you imagine?  Spending five transition contractions hitting the "Next" button?  Not relaxing.

I guess it means I have another project for the next several weeks:  designing several appropriate playlists.  I'll brainstorm, play with genius and search our enormous library (who likes that many songs anyway?  He even has songs that he doesn't like, because he likes to be reminded of how terrible they are!).

It's a great task to have for a girl who was pretty sure a c-peat was inevitable!