Pregnancy&Newborn

On a Serious Note

Dec 1, 2008 For those of you that have been reading regularly be warned that this post is not going to be the usual chuckle-filled ramblings that I typically write about.  While fatherhood (both current and expectant) is full of awesome events that I strongly believe everyone should experience, there are also a few dark days to be had.

My own personal situation is mostly responsible for some of the current frowns and wary looks around the house.  I’ve been unemployed for three months and have only been able to pick up a few freelance gigs here and there (I was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to write for this blog as one of those gigs).  I have not yet gotten any large jobs that would constitute a paycheck.

What this means is that The Wife has been bringing in about 90% of all of our income for the last 3 months.  It also means that there is a huge amount of added stress on her; being that she works with rambunctious children and is pregnant, I constantly feel that this added stress is totally unfair to her and, at times, it makes me feel rather helpless.

She’s a bit bummed because she started showing earlier with this baby than she did with Emma.  So I’m hearing the typical lines of “God, I look so fat,” and “Look how much my ankles have swollen.”  I assure her that she looks beautiful (she does, after all) and all the while I continue to feel as if I am not fulfilling my duty as husband and father by not having a job.  Sure, it’s a bit material to think that more money will make everything better, but it’s a philosophy that is easy to buy into when you’ve been without work for 3 months.  So far, the three of us have managed to scrape by.  But the Holidays are coming up. And in about 4 months, Baby #2 (still unnamed at this point) will be here.

The Wife is getting to the point where she needs help getting up and putting her shoes on.  I do my best to make sure she has water when she needs it.  I try my best to cater to Emma’s needs so that The Wife can relax.  I try to do everything I can for her but still feel as if I am doing nothing since I am doing very little to put some padding in our checking account.

The Wife…she’s like a superhero.  She has trouble sleeping at times because the baby isn’t allowing her to sleep in her favorite comfortable positions.  She clings to a body pillow most of the night (and yes, I am slightly jealous of this).  She wakes up, hurries to get ready tog o to work.  Then she goes to work to deal with constant drama and loud children only to return home to another loud child (Emma is 20 months old now and is all about testing her vocal cords and the limits of Mommy and Daddy).  She goes to bed early because she is exhausted and the only real thing she has to look forward to is the hopes of getting a good 7-8 hours of sleep so that she can get up to repeat the same thing all over again.

And very rarely does she complain.

Meanwhile, I find myself at home on most days, working on freelance jobs that don’t pay very much at all or scouring the internet for jobs.  And while I have the high hopes that I will eventually land a fulltime job or, at the very least, a large contract freelance gig, I still know that there is a lot resting on the outcome of my job search.

I love my family dearly and I can not wait for this new baby boy to come along.  But it is very painful to not be certain that I am going to be able to consistently provide for them.  So until something more substantial comes along, the best I can do is to give The Wife backrubs when she asks for them or to play the crudely improvised game of tag that Emma and I have created just before she goes to bed.  I can help The Wife with her shoes and I can make her muffins in the morning.

It’s a hard thing to accept: not only is my wife undergoing the daily routine mentioned above, but she is also growing a human being inside of her.  Like I said, she is a superhero.  And on the darker days, I can only look at her in awe and wonder just how in the hell she can do it.

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Sonograms and sickness

Nov 18, 2008Well, first of all, it was a Monday.  And not only that, it was a Monday that rode in on the coattails of a weekend that had found The Wife sick with a stomach bug.

She had found herself in the bathroom at 2:30 on Saturday morning, throwing up several times.  She repeated this process several times into the day.  She stayed cooped up in our bedroom as to make sure Emma didn’t get it.  Saturday came and went and by the time Sunday morning rolled around, she seemed fine.

Monday finally rolled around.  It was Sonogram day; the day when we would finally find out the sex of the new baby.  The Wife was feeling much better and so far neither myself no Emma had caught the nastiness that had plagued The Wife over the weekend.  My in-laws even came up to sit in the waiting room with Emma.  We wanted Emma to come in at the end of the session so she could see the skeletal-looking figure of her new brother or sister.

As my wife and I sat there in front of the screen (the in-laws and Emma still in the waiting room), the doctor asked “So you want to know what it is?”  We both gave a very enthusiastic “YES.”  And with much celebration, we found that Emma will have a baby brother sometime in March or early April.

Emma came in with the in-laws and didn’t care much for what she saw on the screen.  She was much more worried about why mommy was on that odd-looking table with a bunch of goop on her stomach.  But still, we kept pointing to the screen, asking her if she could see the baby.  And while she can say “baby” (more like bay-bee right now), she clearly did not see how that black and white image was a baby.

After the sonogram, the in-laws took us out to eat.  We chose Applebee’s because the in-laws have a gift card and because we are broke.  So we place our orders and talk about how raising a boy is going to be different than raising a girl.  And somewhere in the midst of that, Emma suddenly stopped entertaining her grandparents….and threw up.

She only threw up that single time.  We don’t know if it was the virus that had ttacked The Wife or not.  But I do know that as I write this, I myself am getting over the 24 hour bug my wife had.  But Emma threw up only once and was her usual chipper self afterwards.  I don’t know if she was legitimately sick or if the day was simply too exciting for her.  All I know is that I spent a good 10 minutes cleaning up puke from the floor of Applebee’s and that somewhere along the course of that Monday, Emma had eaten a lot of oranges.

Needless to say, it was a very exciting and hectic Sonogram Monday.

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Maternal VooDoo

Oct 15, 2008 When The Wife was pregnant with Emma, she felt absolutely certain that we were having a boy. She could tell by the way she was carrying it, by the foods that she was craving and, most astounding of all, by the way a needle hovered over her arm.

 

            No, seriously.

 

            Somewhere or another, she read about a trick that you can do that will tell you not only the sex of the baby you are currently carrying, but the sex of your other children as well. What you do is this: get a plain sewing needle and thread it. Then hold the string by its end, holding the needle downwards like the pendulum of a clock. You then hold this primitive device over the wrist (or stomach depending on which flavor of maternal voodoo you prescribe to) of the expectant mother and wa-la.

 

            The creepy thing about this is that so far, it’s dead on. With the exception of my wife, of course. Every single woman she has performed this trick on, the needle has predicted it correctly every time except for two. The running tally is 12 out of 14, one of which was an incorrect reading on The Wife. There are supposedly a bunch of other ways that you can predict the sex of the bay without having your doctor tell you. One involves mixing your pee with a cleaning chemical. Another has something to do with a full moon, a tomato shaped like Elmo’s head and the Cubs once again not making it to the World Series. (Okay, so I made the last one up…but the pee/cleaning chemical one is true).

 

            I don’t understand this. My wife doesn’t even believe in ghosts and when I come so close as to mention the existence of UFOs, I get a baffled “who did I marry?” look. But predicting a baby’s sex by watching the progression of a needle or peeing into Drano is perfectly plausible. Maybe you ladies can tell me…does logic and reason take a back seat to things like this while pregnant?

 

            Anyway, despite The Wife’s suspicions and every voodoo-clue under the sun, our first child was obviously not a boy.  My wife, a bit out of it from the medication given to her during the C-Section (Emma was breach), even asked the doctors “Are you sure?” when they announced “It’s a girl.”

 

            She hasn’t done the needle test to see what this one will be. We’re going to do it the old fashioned way and let the doctor tell us. Still, I’ll admit that being so close to Halloween, I’ll miss the voodoo aspects to those at-home sorts of tests. Luckily for me, there’s an election right around the corner…superstitious or not, I really don’t see the harm in marketing political voodoo dolls.

 

Oh, by the way…if you’re unfamiliar with the Needle Trick, you can learn all about it here: http://www.tryingtoconceive.com/needle.htm

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28 years old and I'm sitting down to pee

Oct 6, 2008 It’s been a light-hearted discussion in my house ever since we went out and purchased my daughter’s first potty. She’s was only 17 months old when we purchased it and I know that there are varying discussions on the proper time to introduce the potty, but we wanted to get the ball rolling as early as possible (and, admittedly, shrug some of the potty-training responsibility off on the folks at her day care). So now, if my wife is busy and I have to go to the bathroom, I am inviting my daughter to come in with me so that she can get used to the potty.

And even for a Number One, I have to sit down. (I don’t invite her in for Number Two because I’m apparently too picky about such things…I won’t even yell through the door to my wife during this special time). So while she’s sitting there with her bare bottom on her little plastic seat, she’s looking at me to make sure she’s doing it right. We just sort of stare at each other for a while and I sometimes wonder if she somehow knows that Daddy doesn’t really have to sit down to go Number One. Yet she does grin at me when she hears water hitting water, so I know she gets the gist of it.

This whole ordeal has me wondering at what age she needs to have me sit down with her and explain why Daddy has different equipment that she does. I know for a fact that she’s already aware of it. One of the weirdest glances you will ever get is from your 17 month old daughter as she sees you naked, tilting her head and looking quizzically at certain areas.

Before we found out that we were pregnant again, my wife and I had a nice little system worked out. At night, we'd take turns going to lay Emma back down if she woke up crying. This rarely happens any more, but there are those rare occasions...like as of late when all of her remaining teeth decided to come in at the same time, painfully waking her at 11:30, 2:15, 3:20, 4:00 and 5:30. But I suppose this is good...it's a good way to get reaccustomed to what it will be like to have a newborn in the house.

Anyway, trying to be a nice husband and realizing that my wife is currently in the stage of pregnancy that has her constantly tired, I let her get a full nigth's sleep. So for the past two months or so, I have been getting up to go to Emma whenever she wakes up. Now before you go singing my praises, you should know the weird part to it all...

I sleep naked. I know, I know, but how dare you frown at my sleeping preferences?  It’s comfortable and sometimes' depending on the mood of The Wife, convenient. So until there is absolutely no way I can get away with it, this won’t change. So naturally, ever since our daughter first figured out the trick of getting the parents to come to her at the ungodly hazy hours after 11pm by sheer screaming force, I would stumble into the nursery half-asleep with no clothes on. I’d check on her, reinsert her pacifier into her mouth, kiss her cheek and then return to bed. It's dark, she's tired and I assume that she can't see much anyway.

But now I get that inquisitive look as she peers through the slats of her crib, wondering what certain things are. She knows she doesn’t have one (since discovering her belly-button, she’s also gotten curious about her other southernmost areas) so it’s obviously a point of interest to her. Sort of like when she figured out that our cat has a tail. And that if she’s quick enough she can reach out and snatch it.

And that, if snatched, the cat hates it.

So while I do sleep with a pair of gym shorts next to the bed, I sometimes forget to put them on when she wakes up at 2 or 3 in the morning.  And then there are the times where I am changing clothes in the bedroom and forget to close the door tightly behind me. It was on such an occasion where she gave her cute little confused look and then pointed. I had never felt more naked in my life.

So I asked her, “Sweetie, where’s the kitty cat?”  Luckily, she’s easily distracted. She turned around to go find the cat. Because until I can get into the habit of constantly wearing a full wardrobe around the house AT ALL TIMES, I’d much rather the cat have its tail pulled a few times instead of my daughter learning at an early age how to inflict as much pain as possible upon men.

But until we get this whole thing all sorted out, I’ll still sit down to pee. And if any male readers out there have any suggestions as to shaking those last few drops out (no, this is not just a male myth) without making my daughter even more curious, by all means, let me know.

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