Would you pick your due date?

When you meet my daughters, one of the first things they will tell you is, "We're super-special sisters. We have the same birthday, July 12!" (Though I'm sure any minute now my 5-year-old will realize we've sold her on this "super-special" line so she won't complain about having to share a birthday party with a 3-year-old). The follow-up question to me is always, "Did you plan it that way?"

Nope, I did not. But as soon as I realized that Molly's due date was a week after Bellamy's second birthday, I had a pretty strong feeling the gods of irony would send me into labor early just to have a good laugh.

I recently read in the NY Times that, with the increasing rate of planned C-sections, scheduled inductions (and, presumably, more sophisticated birth control and fertility treatments), more and more women are choosing their kids' birthdays. That means you can skip over, say, Friday the 13th (unlucky), Christmas (who wants to get lost in the celebratory shuffle?), or even an older sister's birthday. Weirdest thing in this article was the fact that the single busiest day of the year for births has moved from mid-September to the last week of December. Why? So parents can get the tax write-off for the entire previous year. I kid you not.

Scary stories

Hey there. Thanks to everyone who logged on and responded last week! As several of you pointed out, maybe the reason we all feel such an elevated level of risk when it comes to childbirth is that we are constantly bombarded with scary stories about what can go wrong. We've all stayed up late flipping through "What to Expect" and panicking because the baby hasn't kicked in the last three minutes or because we accidentally slept on our back during the night. And it's almost a ritual of pregnancy to be assailed by stories about other people's miscarriages or emergency C-sections. As Kathleen posted, we live in a "fear-based society." Of course, bad things happen. But so do healthy, normal, complication-free births. In fact, the majority of births are fairly drama-free (except, of course, to the mom, for whom it is always an emotional epic worthy of a Celine Dion anthem). Maybe it's our voyeuristic nature or our taste for scary campfire tales, but those code-red stories get a lot more play in the collective conversation than the happy-ending ones.

I remember when I was pregnant, I was told by at least three different people to be careful walking on the ice, because if I tripped, I could LOSE THE BABY! And my first thought was, if it is so easy to miscarry that way, then why would we have the need for medical abortion? Then, of course, I would cross the street and walk three blocks out of my way to avoid a patch of ice, just in case...

Did you get annoyed by everyone's cautionary childbirth tales, or do you think it is important to be aware of all the possible complications? Is there a happy balance? What is the craziest thing anyone said to you when you were pregnant?