By Jordan Alam

We are following along with Jordan Alam as she prepares to sit for the Lamaze exam and starts teaching childbirth classes. This series Journey to LCCE and Teaching Lamaze Classes can help educators following a similar path to find community in others who are doing the same thing. Jordan is taking the LCCE exam on Friday and I wanted to check in on how she is feeling as the big day looms. Join me in wishing Jordan and all the others sitting for the exam, good luck as they take the exam and share your best Lamaze exam tips with them and in the comments section as they work to obtain the LCCE credentials. We will check in again with Jordan on the other side. - Sharon Muza, Community Manager, Science & Sensibility.

It's the week before the exam and I have just come from a birth. Exhausted, I crawled into bed and focused on recovery for a few days, which included barely peeking into my books and study outline. I was grateful to have done a good chunk of studying last month, but as the days approach, I start to focus on the things I feel weakest on - will I remember what sterile water papules are used for? Will that even be a question on the exam?

Having come to birth work first as a doula, there is no substitute for in-person learning. Attending births has made understanding the stages and phases of labor much more intuitive, it's remembering the details on paper that are a challenge. For that, I've been able to thankfully observe a full childbirth preparation series through a community organization, Parent Trust, offering classes in the Seattle metro area.

Watching an instructor go through the curriculum using live quizzes about infant feeding and group activities about newborn care cements the knowledge for me in a way that reading a textbook doesn't. My instructor has also been generous in throwing a student question to me, which keeps me on my toes and has me thinking about how I would approach the same topic when I'm up at the front. Though the LCCE exam is one important component of the process, I am already thinking ahead to how I would translate some of the concepts into more familiar and easy-to-understand activities for a class.

I have spent long hours also reviewing my Passion for Birth booklet and reading over Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn; I've also used the Cochrane database and March of Dimes heavily as I fill out the worksheets in the Lamaze study guide. The topics I feel most confident on remain the same: general pregnancy care, labor and birth (the physical processes, support and comfort measures, aftercare), and routine interventions. I also feel strong on the teaching methodologies and philosophy of Lamaze. The pieces that I will be reviewing up to the final day are complicated pregnancies, prenatal screenings, and some aspects of newborn care. The small details in those topic areas are what often get me turned around, so I will have to pay attention to which memory devices (such as the 5 S's) I can use to get through it.

My exam is coming up this week and while I will be studying up to the last day, I am feeling ready to sit for it. I'll update you again when I'm on the other side!

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