Your hospital bag is fretted over endlessly. It is quite possibly packed weeks or even months in advance. You are better prepared than some intrepid climbers who have attempted to scale Mt. Everest in terms of snacks (I feel like everyone is convinced that they and their partners are both going to want to spend the duration of labor eating granola bars and bagged nuts). You have several adorable maternity pajama sets that you think are going to look so cute on Instagram but never once consider whether or not you will bleed on them. You have seven different "going home" outfits for your baby so you can see which one "feels right" on them. You have packed way more entertainment options than you will actually need.

LOL! What hospital bag? You mean the empty duffel bag I am going to squeeze as many possible free hospital diapers and mesh underwear in as is humanly possible? That's not so much a hospital bag as a swag bag, my friends.

Since you've never done this before, you really don't know what to expect except, generally, that it's going to hurt. For some women, at first it doesn't hurt as much as they worried at would. However, at some point sh*t is going to get real and you're going to feel betrayed, and that sense of betrayal won't go away until you pop out a kid. There's a decent chance your body has never hurt you like this before, and you don't know why it's starting now. What a spectacularly awful thing to do, body. Why on Earth have you been programmed to do this? It's the worst.

(If you're super lucky, like me, your water will break ahead of time and you won't get as much internal cushioning on each contraction and it will hurt like a mofo from basically the very beginning... so very lucky...)

I'm sure many of you will want me to say, "Oh, you're totally prepared the second time and it feels like your tummy is being gently licked by puppies." Nope. It still hurts. This time, however, you don't feel betrayal so much as sensing that an old enemy has returned and you are bitterly squaring off against them in the field of battle.

A common chuckle among moms who have already given birth is looking back to what we thought we wanted out of a birth experience the first time around versus what we actually wound up wanting. Don't get me wrong, birth plans are a good idea and getting everyone on the same page is best accomplished by literally showing them a page, ya know?

That said, it's hard to truly know what you want if you've never had any substantive experience with the matter at hand. And hey, you might be really intuitive (and lucky) and things will go exactly as you imagined and that would be awesome. But there's also a good chance that things will deviate from expectations just a titch (or, you know, completely).

Second time around, you have a birth under your belt already. Maybe it was great and you want to replicate it as best as possible. Maybe it was miserable and you want to avoid a repeat as much as humanly possible. Maybe you just decide that the exact details aren't as important to you as you once thought, or that you didn't spend enough time thinking up details the last time. Point is, your opinion in how you want to give birth is always important, whether this is your first baby or your fifteenth. But second time around you have an opinion back with personal experience, which is, I've found, tremendously useful.

Inexperience may lead some first time moms to believe that their extensive research is sufficient preparation for a delivery to go exactly as they imagine, from how they will feel to what they will do to how everything will go from a medical standpoint. Extensive research is excellent preparation, but before you are face to face with such a tremendous force of nature, such as childbirth, you can't know exactly how things are going to go down physically, emotionally, or mentally.

Conversely, inexperience may have led other women to fear child birth is something beyond their scope completely and they rely on other people to make decisions for them. Decisions which, ultimately, may not have been what they would have chosen for themselves.

Guys, birth can be overwhelming and scary and even the logistics of it seem completely impossible sometimes. Like "a fully formed human is either going to come out of your vagine or a four inch incision." Say whaaaaa-?! Hell no. Witchcraft. Impossible. Go home, you're drunk.

Because you've done this once before. You are a baby-having goddess already, and now you're coming out of retirement to perform this miraculous feat again. You know from personal experience that your baby is going to come out of you. You also probably know a bit more about birth now, and therefore know there's a lot you don't know. This is actually super empowering, I find, because it gives you a kind of serenity of knowing when to give the power to someone else.

Various and sundry and, of course, they differ from person to person. There's a general fear of the unknown, of course. There's also the Big (if unlikely) Fears: for your own life and safety as well as for your baby. Then there's the fear of what the whole experience is going to feel like, physically and emotionally. And, of course, TV and movies don't really help in that regard, what with everyone dying in childbirth for completely unknown reasons.

Giving birth the first time around may have alleviated some of your fears... or made them worse, depending on your experience. But now you're not afraid of the unknown in the sense that you don't know what it will feel like. You're all too aware of what it's going to feel like. You also have a knew thing to be afraid of: how childbirth might affect your first child. Guys being a mom is so much fun!

Because you're going to have a baby! You're going to be a mom! You're going to have a family! Your life is going to be different! You're going to get to do all the sweet parenting things you've been dreaming of! Sure it's going to be hard, but you're prepared for that! And it's going to be worth it!

First time in L&D, the excitement you feel is the blind enthusiasm of the novice. It's like living in a lovely pink cloud, and it's the best.

You know that the first time around you really weren't truly prepared for anything. And you know that, this time around, you're better prepared but you still don't know what this tiny human is going to throw at you. That's scary, but exhilarating. And you also know just how deeply and completely you can love a child. The excitement second time around is imbued with a kind of reverence that I don't know is possible the first time around.