Bringing up Baby, but Baby isn’t a leopard.

Posh

Ok so  our sweet Alan Alda look-a-like OBGYN just stopped by. He said he is determined to deliver our wee one since he delivered Val. GENERATIONS OF CATROWS. You may remember a discussion a while back on the sheer number of private parts Dr. Miller has seen of our family.

Anyway, he showed up with a loooong plastic syringe filled with “gel.” I think we all know what happened next. After a rather personal application of said gel we’ve got some rather long and regular contractions. I hear tell that Dr. Miller “really knows where to stick that stuff.” I mean I could tell you where to stick it.

Ok so we are at the hospital. I just spent about half an hour filling out some forms and signing things — 300$ copay! How disgusting is an emergency room? I had to “register” the wife there. It was a filled with old, sick, and oldandsick people. It also was plastered with tebereculous warnings which made me feel uncomfortable.

We’ve been alerted by the hospital that it is time to come on in for various miracle drugs to encourage our stuborn child’s movement downward. SO IT BEGINS

Here we are, T+3days. Val, as I’m sure you know, is none too pleased with this turn of events. The child in her womb has transitioned from a welcomed guest in need of care to a freeloading bum who needs to get out. EVICTION TIME.

Baby overtime is a lot like college overtime: you know it will come to an end eventually, but the coin toss certainly isn’t going to decide anything. So we wait for the defense (aka cervix) to make a mistake. We know it’ll happen we just don’t know when.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Just an FYI here: this is going to be where I post pictures and do some “live blogging” type shits. Stay tuned.

The second trimester has left us. General William “Third Trimester” Sherman has replaced it and is now on a death march to the sea leaving a swath of destruction in its path. Survivors march westward carrying what few things they can underneath the glow of the burning city. Oh, it’s not that bad, really.

Here is some advice which you should heed well: do not attempt to be pregnant, sell a house, buy a house, and quit a job all in the span of a few weeks. Tensions will run high. You will rue several things and people. But! We have passed through these trials unscathed and are now stronger than ever! Like Batman!

One of the worst things about having an offspring on the way while your house is on the market is the inability to “nest.” While the desire was much stronger in Val, I admit that there were times when I wished we could just paint the damn kids room. It was one more psychological weight thrown on top of the already vast stack of anvils on our shoulders. So, one of the first things we did on purchase of the new house was paint the baby’s room (orange). Hand-me-down furniture is on the way and should be installed by Monday. Valerie is pleased. (We also are going to buy an ostentatiously large television).

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Now that birth is upon us we’ve signed up for “child birth classes” — something I am incredibly dubious about due to all the newagey hoo-ha involved. But let’s be honest here: no one should give a shit about what I think. If preggo wants to do it, we’ll do it. The class we are taking is quasi lamaze. The whole point of the thing is to teach mothers how to cope and relax themselves without (within reason) the use of pain medication but with the use of things like “breathing,” “massage,” and “crystals.” Ok, I made that last one up, but the lady did say “you have many chakras in your body.” And this lady is a registered nurse! I’m just saying.

Anyway the class has been insightful thus far and the first one was not a total waste of time. We did lay on the floor in the dark while listening to new age music, which was kind of nice/weird? We’ll see how the rest go — I hear there is a video of a birth?

On Sunday I didn’t love HW. Sure, in an abstract way I was committed to taking care of and providing for it, but at the time there was no practical way for me to emotional connect with lil’ foetus. Then we had our twenty week ultrasound Monday afternoon. You can read the whole story over here if you’d like. Short version:

Monday the ultrasound technician casually dropped the words “amniotic band” during our appointment. We didn’t think anything of it until googling it later that evening. Tuesday we got back in to talk to our doctor and he suggested that we see a specialist. Thankfully we got into see the specialist, Dr. Head, on Wednesday. Dr. Head, whom, incidentally, always makes me think of this, quickly discovered that there were no amniotic bands and that everything is just fine in utero.

This week was excruciating while also devastatingly happy. Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday we just felt so helpless — there was literally nothing we could do other than wait to hear what the doctors had to say. Everything — tv, people, work, inets — reminded me that some little thing inside my wife wasn’t safe and I couldn’t do anything about it. It was utterly depressing.

Wednesday morning I was distracted and nervous. Like, really really nervous. I couldn’t think and my chest felt constricted — for like four hours. I thought our best case scenario was going to be: “Well, we’ll keep an eye on it. Everything is fine for now.” But through some miracle we walked out of the specialist’s office with a healthy baby once again. And things were fantastic.

So I bought a huge beer and drank it to celebrate.

But somehow, through all of this utter shit, I’ve come out loving HW. Like really loving it. Nothing like a crucible of a terrible medical anomaly to sort your out feelings.

THAT'S RIGHT. FEELINGS. I'VE UPGRADED MY OPERATING SYSTEM TO INCLUDE THOSE. SOMETIMES THEY ARE INCONVENIENT. EOL. EOF.

So Val is fifty percent pregnant (week 19). I, occasionally, wistfully remember how recently I awoke to barfing each morning. Those were the days folks. When men were men, and women were barfing constantly. But honestly people, the second trimester is serious logz: the wife gets fatter and a wee bit saner, but things remain relatively plateaued.

Now we wait for The Happening or The Quickening or The Somethinging.

Quantitative proof

It has always been a possibility that this whole “pregnancy” has been an elaborate ruse put on by Val to cover up her burgeoning beer belly. There was no real proof that something — something wondeful/disgusting (wonderfully disgusting?) — was growing inside of her loins. That is … UNTIL NOW.

On Sunday I felt HW punch Valerie in the guts. Most likely Val had said something which HW and I both disagreed with and HW decided to voice his/her displeasure with violence. I blame video games. But it was really cool and bizarre.

Also, HW can now hear — opposed to his/her’s namesake (IRONY!). So we’ve loaded some tunes onto the ol’ iPod shuffle and blast them nightly into the ol’ uterus. The list of approved music follows:

• The Beatles
• Otis Redding
• Johnny Cash

Screw Mozart.

Materialism

We are also starting to get our first influx of child related things. The great part is we haven’t spent a dime. Things have miraculously apparated into our house with alarming frequency. For small things — and luckily most baby things are necessarily small — this is fine. We tuck them in a draw and forget about them.

I am wary, however, of all the stuff you “need” to have a kid. Chairs, bouncy things, rocky things, soft things, terrible plastic things that make noises. People: I am trying to de-clutter here. I am also, hopefully, trying to raise a kid who doesn’t use stuff as a measure of self-worth.

We’ll see how far I’ll get in this my current quest.