Just like Scrubs. Except not funny.

This past Tuesday evening, The Wife and I partook in one of the most heavily anticipated yet utterly useless rites of pregnancy – the tour of the hospital.

Most hospitals are exactly the same on the inside, but neither one of us had actually been in this particular hospital before. We figured it was worth the hour of our lives.

Heavily anticipated

This is where your child will make his/her first entrance into the big wide world. You want to see the delivery rooms, the hospital equipment, the waiting room situation for the family, what the nurses look like. Do they have separate labor and delivery rooms? When are visiting hours? How do we get admitted in the wee hours of the morning?

Basically, you have to make sure that your hospital’s maternity ward is actually not some kind of fly-by-night operation in the back of a taco van.

If you’re the non-delivering-person (like me), it’s also good to find out what type of fold-out concrete chair bed is available for you to sleep on. Whereas The Wife actually remembers little about the whole birth experience, I still have nightmares about the torture rack they provided for significant others at our hospital the first time around.

Utterly useless

By the time the big show starts, I’ll have forgotten everything they told us on Tuesday. In fact, I’ve already forgotten most of it.

Go in the big doors. Tell someone she’s in labor. Do what they tell me to do from that point forward. It’s not rocket science.

Plus, this hospital is somewhat on the smaller side and seems to have a disproportionately large maternity ward. I’m not sure if they’d have a bed for me if I walked in with the bubonic plague, but they can deliver every woman’s baby within a hundred-mile radius. If I get lost, I’ll eventually walk back into the land of labor and delivery.

Let’s stop to let the old folks catch up

When we had The Boy, we were the young, bright-eyed naïve parents on the hospital tour. We asked the dumb questions that the older, wiser couples snickered about. We listened attentively as the nurse detailed the exactly location of each light bulb in the room. I believe I may have even been trying to discretely take notes.

This time around, we were the old, established boring parents who already knew everything. All of the other people on the tour were having their first child and looked to be about 12-years old. We could just see in their eyes that look of barely-contained excitement, as if just being in the hospital for the tour was the first step into the magical journey that their lives would become.

(The Wife was particularly impressed with the lil’ moms-to-be who scoffed at the notion of an epidural. We both agreed that their tune may change when the time comes. Oh, to be young and so confident in your views on life again…)

This time around, it was far more mundane and far less exciting than it had been five years ago. We went, walked around, silently saw the sights and then drove home. There was no discussion of the hospital and staff until the wee hours of the morning.

Don’t get me wrong, it was still exciting to go on the tour and reach this milestone in the process. And we’re certainly not any kind of experts on childbirth. It was just startling how different it felt to be doing this for the second time as opposed to the first.

It wasn’t old hat by any stretch of the imagination, but it was familiar and comforting. I’ve found myself stressing far less about this pregnancy than when The Boy was born in general, and the hospital tour was another confirmation that this time around is definitely a little more laid back than the first.

I’m definitely okay with that. As I creep slowly towards AARP membership, it’s nice to be able to sit back and savor some the big events unfolding around me.

A harbinger?

During our tour, we walked past some grandparents at the nursery window talking about their big surprise for the evening – their grandchild was a boy, not the girl they had been told to expect.

Needless to say, The Wife has temporarily stopped buying everything pink and purple in sight until she can schedule another ultrasound.