Baby Classes

So my wife and I have are taking baby classes at our local hospital. We’re newbs of course, expecting our first child, along with everyone else in the class. By the way, for any couple that finds themselves in the same position, I recommend the classes. They are probably 60% fluff, but the rest is genuinely useful information.

Anyways, what has probably been most interesting to me, ist the lack of maturity of the student body, and all the different characters in the class. First, there is the super duper workout girl that obviously regrets becoming pregnant, and sees her child as a burden and impediment to her steady and aggressive work out schedule. Her constant groaning, sourpuss face, and generally depressed demeanor is shocking to me in a very sad way. We all feel bad for that poor baby already. There are others yet that surprise me, although I shouldn’t be so. There’s the very young couple that text on their phones constantly and whisper back and forth, never bothering to pay attention to what is being said. There is the poor, under-educated couple with frayed, mismanaged wardrobes, rolling their eyes and snickering at almost everything that is presented. Naturally, they've already BFF'd the couple next to them. Then there's also the super perfect couple of the decade, eagerly anticipating and savoring every bit of course material that the instructor utters. They’ve probably already set up a trust fund, and read all the baby books and set them in their perfect little bookshelves in their perfect little home. Are they really that perfect? Maybe. If so, more power to them, but I’ve been around long enough to know that many people love to “appear” perfect as part of their image. Of course we all know, perception is everything, right?

The cast and crew at the baby class provide just enough personality to keep me from falling asleep. That isn’t the part that is most interesting to me though. It is the level of maturity that really gets me. From day one, whenever anything vaguely sexual is mentioned by the instructor, the class erupts into snickers, giggles, and for some, outright laughter. The instructor mentioned conceiving a child in the backseat of a car, and the class broke out into laughter. The instructor mentioned the phrase “having sex” and class giggled uncontrollably. We are talking about a class of late twenty and early thirty-somethings, laughing at PG-13 sexual references like Bart Simpson in Mrs. Krabappel’s class. I think they’d probably need oxygen if someone farted aloud in the class. Needless to say, my wife and I shared a synchronized look of astonishment the first time the laughter was set off. We thought we missed a joke, but as it turned out, we didn’t.

Anyways, I’m probably making it sound worse than it is. Some kid next to me was nice enough and started talking about football, so that was cool. Most of the couples keep to themselves, except for the BFFs. On the first day, the instructor said the group was a place to meet new people and make new friends. I don’t see a lot of that happening so far; not for us at least. Maybe we were just unlucky this time.