My Big Fat Mouth

People call me "Dad" at work. I have a blog about my soon-to-be son or daughter. People know the deal: we're pregnant.

That wasn't always the case.

It turns out that there are tons of social politics involved in determining when you are allowed to start telling people that there's a baby on the way, not to mention who you're allowed to tell.

Being impatient folks, and having gotten that positive pregnancy test on Christmas Eve, we decided to tell the immediate family right away. Most of the books and things don't really recommend that, citing basically that you should tell anybody that you wouldn't be comfortable disappointing. A lot can happen to a little tiny, rapidly multiplying pile of cells, so lots of people keep their mouths shut until slightly later in the pregnancy.

We didn't. We went for it, at least with the family.

Obviously, they were stoked, but we also had to do a lot of hush-hushing because we didn't want to let the cat completely out of the bag. The instructions given to me were clear: don't tell anybody until we have the first doctor appointment. Got it. No problem.

What I didn't realize until much too late was that the first doctor appointment, in our case anyway, didn't count.

Ouch.

We went to the doctor's office. We sat in the waiting room. We went in the little tiny exam room. Baby Car was poked and prodded. We were given an approximate due date.

To me, that equals "appointment."

Turns out not.

We didn't see the actual doctor. We didn't take a fancy, medical-grade pregnancy test. We didn't hear a heartbeat or see a sonogram. So that means it didn't count.

I did not realize this.

I got home after the appointment, took my dogs out in the back yard, and dialed my cell phone. The one and only person that I told lived about 1000 miles away and didn't ever seem like the gossipy type.

Oops.

I think after I hung up, it took about eight minutes for the news to make it from Austin, Texas right on back to our little corner of Pennsylvania and blow up right in my big stupid face.

People at my work found out about it. People that Baby Car used to work with found out about it. Basically, my loving wife was counting down the days until she could excitedly tell everybody our big news and my single phone call systematically destroyed the whole thing.

It was a bad move. I got in trouble. And even if I didn't get in trouble, I would have still felt bad about the whole thing.

It turns out that one of the best things about being pregnant (aside from the comedic waddling) is sharing the news.

So take a note: don't screw it up!

The First Trimester (Part Three: The Money Shot)

You've probably picked up on the fact that the first trimester wasn't exactly Lifetime Original Movie material, but towards the end I got to have the coolest experience of my life. Finally, after waiting and fretting and looking forward to it for weeks, we got to have our first sonogram. I think it was actually much earlier than standard operating procedure, but because we requested a specific prenatal screening test (for the sake of getting the ultrasound), we got the ultrasound. You'd think there would be a lot involved, but it was quick. Baby Car hopped up on the little doctor table, popped her hood, and got all gelled up with some goop that I was glad was all over her and not me. Then BAM there it was, on the screen.

It happened unbelievably fast, like opening the door to the fridge. Want a coke? Oh look, your unborn child. Needless to say, it was really, really cool. The ultrasound tech told us that the baby was about 6 centimeters long (<2.5 inches in layman's terms). The kid was active as hell, squirming around all over the place when Baby Car laughed or moved around. There were arms and legs flapping around and the tech said that everything looked healthy as can be.

We finally have proof. There really is a little person in there – and for the first time in my life I have pictures to show off that aren't dogs.

Baby showers and diaper days

The other day, Baby Car went to a baby shower for our pregnant friend, who will be pooping out her son any day now. I don't know what goes on at baby showers, but it is my understanding that they tend to be slightly emotional and highly demeaning. Regardless, our gift to the mom-to-be was this stack of baby crap lovingly crafted to look like a cake. A note for readers: pregnant chicks love this kind of thing. If you aren't creative/artistic/inclined enough to do something like this, I highly recommend teaming up with someone who is. I have my Baby Car. You find your own.

I wasn't there, but I'm sure the baby clothes cake was a hit. I also heard something about a "diaper cake," but I still don't know exactly what that is.

Speaking of diapers, while Baby Car went to the shower, I got to attend a "diaper party" with the fellow dad-to-be, who was undoubtedly relieved to learn that he wasn't expected to make an appearance at the shower. At a diaper party, the daddy-type buys some beer and his friends come over bearing a pack or two of diapers (apparently babies use diapers like it's going out of style).

Personally, I think it is brilliant to have a socially mandated drinking session for the expectant father, especially as the baby's due date looms near. I don't see the guy enough to know for sure, but based on the vibe he gave off that night, he really needed to relax and knock back a few. At the moment, I don't really feel compelled to engage in any heavy drinking. However, when I was at his house and saw things like a stroller in the corner and a crib at the foot of their bed, I definitely saw how the reality of the situation could set in and really make a guy reach for a six-pack or two.

The First Trimester (Part Two)

Back to my frantic summary of the first trimester. It consists of research, general anxiety, and anticipation of various doctor appointments. When Baby Car first started calling her Obstemagician, they made it really clear that they weren't interested in seeing her until deep into that first trimester. When we finally got to go, we had gone for weeks with only our little plastic pregnancy tests (albeit a damn ton of them) to indicate that she was pregnant. When we finally got to go ( a full MONTH after we got our positive pregnancy test), we were excited to at least have a medical professional tell us that Baby Car was, indeed, a Baby Car (and not just a queasy, hormonal mess).

So we met with the nurse – not a doctor – and she performed a cursory physical exam and used her little cardboard spinny wheel to give us an estimated due date. There was no official declaration of pregnancy or anything cool like that. We asked for an ultrasound, or really anything to prove to us that there was a little person in there, but no luck. Rules are rules I guess. The nurse pretty much hit Baby Car with a bunch of questions about her medical history and sucked about eight kinds of fluid out of her body.

Bottom line: the whole thing was pretty anti-climactic. Baby Car was bummed, too – which made me sad.

A week or so later…STOP! Okay, I know if you've been reading any other blogs or articles or message boards or pregnancy-themed graffiti, you've noticed that everybody else that's writing about this sort of thing can break the whole thing down week by week and tell you exactly when everything happened. I can't. Moving forward, I'll try, but looking back, I have no freaking clue. Sorry about that. Anyway…a week or so later, we got to see the actual doctor.

This particular obstemagician was very hardcore and made it very clear that her priority was the baby, not the Baby Car. She was stern, clinical, and sort of bossy. She managed to make up for it somewhat by breaking out a little gismo that she said had a chance of picking up the baby's heartbeat. In the interest of anybody out there that might be excitedly waiting to hear that first heartbeat, I did some cheating (peeked at Baby Car's blog) and figured out that this happened at week 12. Don't get mad at me if your doctor doesn't do things the same way, but for us, we got the little heartbeat gismo at week 12.

The way the doctor set the stage for the heartbeat, I wasn't expecting much. "Let's see if we can hear anything that sounds like a heartbeat in there," she said. I was expecting to be able to barely make out some distant noise, like listening to radio static under water, but as soon as she pushed the anal-probe looking thing up to Baby Car's belly, there is was badumbadumbadumbadum – fast. It was really cool. I think it was humming along at 157 beats per minute, or to put it in perspective, roughly the same as my heart rate when climbing stairs after eating Mexican food.

I was stoked. Baby Car was not. I could tell that she wasn't going to be happy until she saw an actual ultrasound.

Baby Car

The more I write, the more I realize how awkward it is to keep using terms like "the mom-to-be" and "my wife" over and over and over. I really don't want to throw her name out there into the wide wild world of cyberspace, so until it gets old, let's stick with "Baby Car."

As she gets more and more focused on her role as a womb with legs and hormones, I see my wife more and more as a beautiful vehicle for our unborn baby.

Hence, Baby Car.

I hope Baby Car doesn't mind.

The first trimester (part one)

By now you may have noticed that my baby story begins a few months before my first post. To be honest, it absolutely took just that long for the whole thing to sink in. Since day one, I have been ridiculously happy about the whole event, but it didn't become real until our second trip to the OB/GYN (obstemagician/gynecologist).

I'll get to that shortly.

From what I understand, the first trimester was a piece of cake – relatively speaking. My wife lucked out, at least in one respect. She had no morning sickness whatsoever. In fact, the only vomiting that took place during the entire first trimester was my little adventure in the ladies' room in the gas station.

Once you have a baby on the way, people that you know will tell you all sorts of things about their experiences with pregnancy – and we heard some horror stories. You might get off as easily as we did, or you might end up with mom-to-be violently vomiting morning, noon, and night. Sure, that sounds bad…but just imagine how old it would get after weeks and week with no relief.

So no complaints from me about the lack of morning sickness, though my wife may beg to differ. She was actually just barely nauseous, pretty much all the time for a couple of months. I know she wouldn't have traded that feeling for the painful constant vomiting, but on the other hand she mentioned more than once how good it would feel to just get it over with already. She had trouble eating and was in a pretty much constant state of trying to balance her nausea out with crackers and ginger ale.

Other than that, there was the fatigue. She was tired – a lot. Fortunately, a recent career move had brought her home to run our writing business full-time, so she was at least able to keep her own hours and take a nap if she damn well felt like it.

I supposed she would have dealt with it one way or another if she was forced to keep regular hours at a regular job, but I'm glad we didn't have to put her through that.

One thing that did happen – perhaps magnified by the fact that she was spending a lot of time at home – was that she developed an obsessive need to research pregnancy. She joined message boards and web communities and read everything there was to read on the subject, which often led her to fret about various symptoms that could be an early indication of this or that.

My advice to any men out there (or lesbians that won the rock-paper-scissors match to determine who had to carry the artificially-conceived bundle of joy) is not to discourage this practice. It is a fight you will not win.

I ended up feeling pretty guilty about not having the same constant and obsessive interest in all things pre-natal, but I just couldn't bring myself to keep up. Instead, I just did my best to stay supportive of whatever she was learning.

When she decided that artificial sugars were bad for the baby, we gave them up together. Same with caffeine (though since she hates coffee, I was permitted to maintain my usual coffee intake guilt-free ~ thank gawd).

So the moral of the story: listen well, nod a lot, and stay supportive.

I know I'm breezing though the ol' pregnancy timeline pretty quickly, but I'm honestly just trying to catch up to the present so I can start recapping the day-to-day now that things have really started to get interesting.

Hang in there, we'll be up at week 12 before you know it!

Evening Sickness

A few short hours after I was hit with the baby bomb, it was off to dinner with the in-laws. They didn't know that their baby was having a baby and we weren't ready to tell them. It's about an hour drive through darks woods and one horse towns to get where they live, and we were letting it all sink in as we drove along.

I didn't know what to make of the whole thing, but I did know this: I did not feel well. For thirty minutes or so I struggled with an upset stomach. I started to get worried. Was my body trying to tell me that I was in way over my head? Had my brain completely malfunctioned, leaving my more primal instincts to recapture the ship and slap some sense into me?

The last thing I wanted to do was look unsure of myself in front of the glowing mom-to-be, but we had to stop for gas and at that point I had no choice. With my happy wife in the passenger seat, I shoved the gas pump into the tank and headed for the men's room.

It was closed. Out of order. Yellow police tape. Broken plunger lying in a puddle in the hall.

I didn't miss a beat. I burst into the ladies' room, slammed the door behind me, and vomited like it was going out of style. It wasn't an insignificant amount of puke. It was everything I had eaten in recent memory and a good portion of the mess ended up splashing back in my face.

As I cleaned myself up in the sink, the now-clogged toilet gurgling next to me, I looked in the mirror to see a huge smile spread across my face. I had never been happier.

And it's pretty much been that way ever since.

If you're ever in the same boat, I really recommend violent vomiting with reckless abandon. If you can swing it, use the ladies' room. It's better that way.

“Really?”

Despite two months of painfully aggressive baby making, it really caught me off guard when I found out my wife was pregnant. I had no idea that it would happen so quickly, or that (apparently) I'm a huge stud.

Anyway, the pregnancy test was stuffed in a Christmas card and I should have noticed that my wife was gushing and on the verge of tears (the good kind) as I opened it.

I didn't immediately occur to me what was going on and at first I turned the thing over and over in my hand. After all, maybe it was just an unused test – perhaps with a note explaining that we would take another stab at this baby-making thing later that night, without the ovulation calendar and without the gravity-minded, clinical approach to sex that would make an Amish grandmother call me a pansy.

But after a few seconds that seemed like much longer, I realized that the thing said "Pregnant" and blurted out my uninspired "Really?!"

She didn't seem to care that I had nothing more impressive to say, and we hugged and smiled like idiots.

We were pregnant.

I say "we" were pregnant, because a few short hours into the pregnancy, my wife very clearly corrected me when I was so callous as to imply that SHE was pregnant. Being a generally obedient husband who knows how to pick my battles, I filed that note away in the marriage-saving section of the male subconscious that keeps track of things like what endearing nicknames she hates (honey, woman) and what kind of flowers she likes (any – you jackass).

Apparently, it isn't that simple. "We" are pregnant whenever we are talking about spreading the news at family gatherings, buying baby stuff, or reading any of the 1800 pages of baby books we owned before the pregnancy test was dry.

"She" is pregnant when we talk about how miserable she feels or how I am failing to live up to my role as hunter/gatherer/man servant.

I find that the best way to go is to stick with "we" until it gets me yelled at, unless circumstances really make it seem like a bad idea. If she is in the bathroom, lying on the floor after throwing up and peeing on herself ever-so-slightly, that is a BAD time to point out that "we" are pregnant. SHE is pregnant, and SHE is suffering.

I can go grab a bottle of water and get her pregnant butt up off of the floor. WE can go buy her some saltines in the morning.