1513 Decision Street

It's friggin' cold out and there's snow on the ground. Not a lot of snow but just enough to be annoying. I need to go to the grocery store, to the gym and I really want to check out the new brunch spot around the corner - Green Eggs. I also really feel like going to see a movie.  It's already 1:30pm and doing all of them won't leave much time for anything else today. I feel pathetic agonizing over petty decisions when we haven't yet decided where our baby will be born.

We went to the Birth Center in Wilmington last week and I left having come to a single conclusion.

Delaware is weird.

The Wilmington Birth Center was in some Victorian twin like you'd see in West Philly or Germantown. In fact, the neighborhood reminded me a lot of Germantown or Mt. Airy. It was half a block from a hospital with a maternity ward. Except, they only take you there in cases of emergency. If there are no major complications and the labor is just failing to progress or it's going to be a breach birth they take you to Christiana Hospital which is a good 15 minutes away.

The Wilmington Birth Center also had a much different vibe than the Bryn Mawr Birth Center. Wilmington was very hippie. The orientation there had maybe 10 couples and most of them already had kids. It seemed like most of the people at the orientation had moved there from other parts of the country. Apparently, a home-birth without an attending physician is illegal in Delaware so a lot of people at the orientation didn't really need to be sold on the idea of midwifes. They were just at the Birth Center because doing it at home in Delaware is too difficult.

When we went to Bryn Mawr there were closer to 30 couples, it seemed like everyone was around our age, this was their first child, and most people were local. A lot of people at the Bryn Mawr orientation really didn't want to deliver at a hospital but weren't entirely sold on the Birth Center and had a lot of questions about safety and that sort of thing - like a half an hour worth of Q & A.  In Wilmington I think there were 3 or 4 questions the whole night (again, probably because most of the people there had already been through it before.)  BTW - If you haven't seen Ricki Lake's documentary 'The Business of Being Born' you should definitely check it out.  

So, in case you haven't figured it out yet, Wilmington is out.  There will be a lot of appointments between now and the big day and even though Bryn Mawr is a little bit longer of a drive (50 minutes vs. 35 to Wilmington) but it's also a block from the train station. I'm sure the rush hour train ride is much quicker than a rush hour car ride.

But right now the home birth option is at the top of the list. We still need the particulars on insurance and emergency transport. We live within 2 miles of 5 hospitals with 3 trauma centers and 3 NICUs so all of those bases are covered.  It's the logistics and under what circumstances that we need to clear up.

Decisions.