Things are still chugging along on the having a baby front. Every week has some baby related preparatory item. On Sunday Sarah and I drove back from Marshfield for a hospital tour of Beth Israel. We had been encouraged from our natural childbirth class to prepare important questions for this tour like – “Do you have enough wireless external fetal monitors that you can walk around with for everyone to have one?”, “Can you bring your own mood lighting?”, and “Is it possible to hook-up your DVD player to the television?”. So I was prepared to pepper the tour guide with plenty of questions but I only managed to get two of these asked and answered.

The tour began with a detailed explanation of the hospital security policies put into place to ensure that nobody steals your baby. I hadn’t thought about people wanting to steal our baby until we went to the tour. The delivery and postpartum ward is set-up with access bracelets for mothers, babies, and fathers to match-up the baby with the parent. Only two guests of the mother are allowed in the delivery area. The hospital has a system for checking the baby in and out of a nursery and you are supposed to never give your baby to anyone who doesn’t have a special blue color on their electronic photo ID tag. The babies are always transported by secure armed bassinet with special brakes to slow them down. If someone appears to be moving too fast with a bassinet in the hallway their fate is likely to be no better than a Brazilian man running from British police two weeks after a terrorist attack in London.

So I felt both secure in the hospital’s protection schemes but now had the added anxiety that with all of this work to have a baby that the baby thieves were already plotting the crime of the 21st century. Didn’t someone steal Lindberg’s baby? I guess kidnapping is unlikely but someone may want to steal my daughter into slavery or train her in some Al Quaida training camp in Saudi Arabia to hate the United States, become a sex slave in Bangkok, or maybe a rich infertile man crazed for white babies would pay a bounty hunter to feverishly steal babies until he found the perfect Valentine’s day gift for his Dalmatian puppy fur clad wife.

Among the tips for not being considered a potential freakish baby predator in the postpartum ward was to make sure that men wear clothing while walking the halls. They also recommended bringing lots of pocket change for the soda machine. This was probably to bribe the guards with caffeinated soda. Caffeinated beverages in the maternity ward are like cigarettes in prison and the only way to get them is with pocket change.

For the tour we were a battalion of pregnant women and accompanying support personnel taking three elevators to arrive at our floor to see what the rooms look like. The rooms themselves were very small compared to the ones that I had seen on the video of Newton Wellesley. They also didn’t have the shower built into the room because they hadn’t wanted to give-up the picture window views of Boston. So you have to walk to the showers in the center of the ward to take those calming, pain soothing hot showers and baths. We were informed that each room rapidly converts into a full operating room so I looked around for the panel where the surgery stuff popped out from behind the pictures of new parent support groups. I confirmed that the television could be connected to the DVD player and the battalion of pregnant women looked scornfully at me at my interest in Hollywood entertainment at such a solemn time. The tour guide let us know that the television goes off during transition unless the mother specifically requests it. Last October with those 14 inning Red Sox Yankees playoff games plenty of mothers, fathers, and Obstetricians cranking out newborns were watching David Ortiz hit walk off homeruns and A-Rod cheat.

The tour guide also explained how to operate the very complex electric bed which I promptly forgot. After the tour of the delivery hotel room we the phalanx of big bellies wandered traveled down the three elevators into the recovery ward. They move the new mothers away from the laboring mothers to a separate set of rooms so that they don’t have to hear the hysterical screaming and pain of childbirth while they are enjoying breast feeding and cooing over their newborn with countless relatives, one of whom, probably that quirky uncle Vladimir that nobody knows, might be a spy for a Russian baby trafficking cartel.

The recovery ward tour started with the tour of the nursery. This is a room behind glass where you can check-in your baby when you are sick of it’s whining. The newborns sleep in there and people other than the nursery staff can’t go in there. There were two newborns in the nursery, one with a full head of hair, and another that looked like a real newborn. It reminded me of the chicken hatching at the science museum. The tour guide entered the room with us watching behind the glass like we were looking into a fish tank. She picked-up one of the babies to show all of the new mothers that “yes, if you leave your newborn in the nursery it will be used as a demo baby for the pregnant women and men to see what a newborn baby looks like.”

The room for recovery was a little more comfortable with a fold down chair for me to sleep in. They also recommend telling your family that a 20 minute visit is the right amount of time since people tend to linger for long periods of time with their grand children or nieces.

So we are now at about 8 weeks away from the due date. Sarah is getting uncomfortable with the size of the baby in her belly causing ligament pain in her legs so I expect it will feel like a long 8 weeks for her.