“Mom, where did the seaweed find a job?” My 8-year-old daughter read from a list of jokes that she’d prepared for me. “Where?” I asked, smiling at her and trying not to moan. “In the kelp-wanted ads!” I threw back my head and roared with laughter. I’d recently read that laughter can help ease labor pains. And at that moment, as I was trying to ride the wave of a contraction, my daughter’s silly joke was the funniest thing I had ever heard. A Warm-Up or the Real Thing? You would think that after giving birth to three children—one in the hospital, one at home with a certified nurse-midwife and her assistant, and one at home with a lay midwife and a medical doctor (there as a friend)—I would’ve known whether or not I was in labor.  But in all honesty, I wasn’t entirely sure. I’d been having light contractions …