If you can't stay at home and go to school, you may be able to go to a group home until you baby is born. A social worker or your guidance counselor may be able to help you find a group home. You can go to school using the group home as a base.

Maternity homes for pregnant single women offer room and board and medical care. They can also arrange for you to continue your schooling and help you find a job if you need one. You will pay only what you can afford. Many maternity homes are free.

Some women feel safe and protected in a group home. The daily routine helps. There are chores, meals, walks, classes, and group discussions. Being with other women who are pregnant and seeing changes in their bodies also helps. They feel freer to talk about their feelings with others who are going through the same thing. Others don't enjoy life in the group home at all. They may not like the other women there or they may find their rooms lonely and yet not private enough. Some women, especially if being there wasn't their own idea, feel punished, as if they are there to hide something shameful.

Whether you choose to go to a group maternity home has to do with your own family, how much emotional, physical, and financial support they can afford to give you, and what type of community you live in and school you attend. You are the best judge of that. If you can't see yourself living at home while pregnant and going to school, or if you know the whole thing would be too much of a burden on your family, then living in a group home until after the birth might be a good idea.

     Many women get weepy during pregnancy. Being under the strain of having a baby before you are really ready may make this kind of reaction worse. If you are not married, and even if you are and have had bad feelings about how the pregnancy happened, you may feel blue a lot. Maybe you feel angry at yourself and the baby's father for not using birth control. Talk your feelings over with the baby's father, your family, and with your conselor.

If you are very young, you may get stares and snickers. You need to be proud that you are doing your best to make sure you and your baby are healthy.

     If you have not seen a clinic or doctor yet, you can ask your nearest hospital where you can get maternity care. If that hospital can't take care of you, it will send you to one that can. If youdon't know how you are going to pay for it, tell them so.

Like most fist-time mothers, you are probably very interested in how a baby gets born. It is a good idea to visit the hospital and see the labor room and delivery room before you use them yourself.

This is the time to ask questions about how your baby will be delivered, who will deliver it, and who can be with you. It will help to have someone you are comfortable with to bring you water, hold your hand, rub your back, and most important, just talk to you while you are waiting for the baby to be born.

Small pains in your lower back during the last weeks are very early signs of labor. Labor is the work your body does to get ready to go to a hospital, but you should pack now and keep things ready. You will need your toothbrush, toothpaste, comb and brush, and a robe.

Now is also the time to plan for how you are going to get to the hospital and get home. You should not plan to drive yourself; you should have someone with you for going to the hospital and coming home. Once you are in the hospital, you will be taken through a routine. Unless you filled out forms in advance, you will start by answering a lot of questions about payment and your health history. Then you will go to the labor room, get undressed, and a nurse or aide will check your blood pressure and take a small blood sample. Usually, an aide will shave the hair around your vagina. Then you may get an enema to make sure your baby won't get an infection from your having a bowel movement while the baby is being born. You may get some medicine to help you relax. You will be carefully watched during this time.

When labor changes into the final stage, you may feel very cold and shivery. That is the sign that you are ready to push your baby out. You will be put on a rolling bed and wheeled into the delivery room. This is the special room where birth takes place.

     A delivery room has lots of machines around. A big table with stirrups, like the one you have been examined on before, will be ready for you.

You will get onto the table and put your feet into the stirrups. You may get medicine to dull the pain if you want it. The skin between your vagina and anus is then numbed with a painkiller and cut to make it easier for the baby to be born. Once the baby's head comes through, the largest part of the baby will be out and you will feel great relief. The doctor helps the baby's shoulders through next. After that the baby comes out easily and the afterbirth, or placenta, follows in a few minutes. the cord is clamped and cut. Now your work in delivering the baby is over.

The small cut is sewn, and mother and baby are cleaned up and examined carefully. The baby's eyes are treated with medicine to prevent blindness. The baby's footprints will be taken and filed with the mother's fingerprints so that the baby is usually brought to you to hold for a few minutes. Then you will need to sleep.

Not every birth is as easy as this. Head first is the normal position for delivery. But sometimes a baby gets into the wrong position. If the baby can't be turned around, you may have a Caesarean delivery. In a Caesarean, a cut is made into the uterus and the baby is lifted out. The placenta is taken out too, and your uterus and abdomen are sewn up. This same operation may be done if your pelvis is too narrow to let the baby out or if your labor goes on too long. After a Caesarean, you need a long rest and lots of care, just as you would after any major operation. For some women, the doctor will know early that a Caesarean is needed; for others, the doctor will decide at the hospital if the labor is too long or too hard.

     After the birth, the lining of the uterus will come out gradually, as if you were menstruating. It takes longer than your usual menstrual period, so you will need a large supply of sanitary napkins on hand when you come home from the hospital. Tampons won't do because the flow will be too heavy and also because they could cause infection.

You may have some discomfort - itching and pinching - as the cut between your anus and vagina heals. You may have to sit on a special pillow with a hole in the middle or a plastic blow-up swim ring until it heals a little. You can make yourself more comfortable with a medicated ointment. If you ask at the hospital, they will probably give you some.

After the birth you will need to take care of your body to get it back into shape. You will have lost as much as seventeen pounds by giving birth to the baby; you may have to lose some more to get down to a weight you find comfortable. Keeping the diet you had during pregnancy and just cutting down on the amount of food is a safe way to do this.

Besides the extra pounds, you will have some flabbiness in the abdomen. You can start exercising to flatten and tighten it in the first week after normal birth. Lift your head as far as you can. You will feel the pull on your abdominal muscles. Start by doing this five times a day. When it gets easy, change to sit-ups. With your knees bent and your feet under a bed or low chest of drawers, lie on your back, put your hands under your your neck with your elbows out, and slowly lift your head, neck, shoulders, and back until you are sitting up. Try to work up to twenty times a day, but don't do more of any exercise than you can do comfortably. Here's another one that will flatten your abdomen. Get down on your knees and elbows and put your head and shoulders on the floor. Stay that way for twenty minutes if you can stand it.

About six weeks after the birth you should have a checkup to make sure you are healing properly and to be fitted for a new diaphragm, if you use one.