Changing plans

There are a lot of things I like about the Hospital in Bethlehem. Its calm. Its clean. The staff are friendly and the nurse recognizes me and they speak English really well. The price is right too. But in the past several weeks Shawn and I have been thinking about delivering closer to our apartment. We'll have to pay quite a bit more (thankfully still not a US price), but we've found a few advantages. For example, most of the Jerusalem hospitals have midwives (in Israel, midwives deliver the babies and Doctors are only called in for complications) that are supportive of natural birth. However, if a c-section becomes necessary, surgery is right there and done well. Another reason is that Shawn could travel back home at night easier while I am recovering. Husband visiting hours in all of these hospitals are only until 9 or 10pm. If we deliver at Mt. Scopus, Shawn could walk the two blocks to the Student Village and then be back in the morning on foot.

Peace of mind about distance on that day is the other reason. I'll probably have a long labor with this being a first birth, but its still seems like a nice long ride to Bethlehem even by Taxi. That sounds less and less like any fun. I don't imagine there will be any checkpoint problems in the next several weeks. But if there were? We'd be headed to Mt Scopus anyway. So instead of stressing about it, we're planning a Jerusalem birth. We attended one delivery floor tour last month and we plan on touring two more hospitals and preregistering at a couple of them.

In addition, we interviewed a Doula (labor support)! Our childbirth educator put us in touch with some (affordable or even volunteer) trained women to interview. I am really excited about the possibly of having a Doula help us on that day. The woman we interviewed this week is from North America. She is fluent in Hebrew and will be invaluable with the language barrier as most of the Jerusalem nurses don't speak English well.

In the meantime, I am trying to cook more with hopes to freeze meals and doing lots of washing and cleaning!