Silly me, I totally spaced on continuing my story about the visit to the midwife last week. The dear wife has been busily researching every angle of every facet of every conceivable aspect of pregancy. What else are you going to do when all you are able to manage is lying on the couch, trying not to puke your guts out?
But I digress.
Having had a few, er, personality conflicts with our last practitioner, we found this awesome woman down in Des Moines, a good 40 minutes away. So it kind of sucks that she's so far away, but so what? She'll come to us when the littlest Pillsbury is ready to make his/her/their grand entrance.
So we get to her practice, and it's a rather non-medical looking church. We walk all the way around it, thinking that maybe there is a adjoining office building or something. Almost back to where we started, we see a little sign next to the parish house door, announcing that the women's health clinic and the AA meeting are right inside. It advises us to please hold down the doorbell until someone lets us in. We looked at each other, shrugged, and the dear wife proceeded to hold down the button.
Several doorbell-ringing minutes elapsed, during which I had visions of Ashton Kutcher jumping out from behind a bush and laughing that he "totally had me!" Then I remembered that I am not a hot, young, overexposed actor/musician/model soon to join the ranks of Debbie Gibson, Sporty Spice, and the "punk" Backstreet Boy, and I turned my attention back to the dear wife, still defiantly holding down the doorbell.
Just as I was about to offer that maybe we were early, a posse of very small children opened a door across the courtyard and stared at us. After inquiring if this was the right place, we followed the delegates of the Lollypop Guild up a flight of stairs, down a hall, and into what was clearly our destination. There being only one employee present (the midwife), she asked us to wait in the next room. We obliged, settling into an old, donated sofa while a guy on the TV tried to weasel his way out of paying child support to three separate women.
Ya gotta love daytime small claims court shows.
Anyway, after a few minutes Sheryl, the midwife, comes in and tells us the choir loft is much more conducive to talking about whose uncle has what disease and so on. Like good little ducklings, we follow her down another set of hallways. Just as my misgivings about the, um, unconventional surroundings were about to get the best of me, the three of us sit down together in the choir's pews, aside from the altar a small distance, and start talking as though we've known each other for years. Of course, the dear wife and I have, but you knew that. I meant... Oh, never mind. You're smart enough to figure it out. Moving on:
Sheryl was AWESOME. She understood where we were coming from, she alleviated our fears about home-hatching, and she seemed to honestly care about the little zygote. She's been a certified nurse-midwife (the only kind allowed to practice in Iowa) for decades, and has eight kids of her own. She even gave us her home phone and pager numbers. How cool is that?
And I even learned something: apparently they still make pagers. Who knew?
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