Ask me what's new. Please! Because for the last couple of months anytime someone asks I've been keeping my mouth shut, although something very
small BIG is new. I'm finally ready to announce to the world, Laura and I are expecting a baby in March!
So go ahead and make a snack and get cozy because this is a big one. In fact, it's most likely my largest post to date.
This is a multi-part entry, if it seems disjointed from here to there it's because I wrote parts on different days. You will be able to tell when a new one ends with a date that is written like so: [7-26].
The beginning of this blog entry was supposed to be written weeks ago, approximately 4-6 of them to be precise. But I'll just channel my former self's thoughts here:
Laura and I started not preventing babies in
February. This was after months and months of Laura waiting for me to proclaim I was ready, and to her credit she was not annoying about it in the least bit (seriously she was great and so patient with me). But before we get to the good stuff I'll rewind a bit...what goes through a person's mind when they reach the point that they want to procreate? In my case I realized...nothing. All I've ever thought was, I want to teach a kid fun things, what's right, what's wrong, and do fun things that will be new to me (and them). But when do I want that? Why do I want to do those things? Why would I want someone else to govern when I can do anything? Currently I can do whatever I want, whenever I want, within reason. Who wants to clean up after a little monster that doesn't do much more than poop and cry? Why should we start paying a babysitter to make just barley more than that back in real work? Who wants these things ruining a perfectly lovely life that is otherwise governed by me and my lovely wife? Me? Her? Parents? The government? god? Friends? No one should expect people to make babies. Parents often want to be grandparents, but they usually get all the good parts, holding, laughing, spoiling, and usually very little if any of the discipline, screaming ect. Non-issue. Anyway do I want a baby? No, I want a toddler, someone I can communicate with laugh with and be a little rough with. A baby? no.
So I had to overcome these notions and more. I had lots of conversations with myself, and Laura that went something like this:
I'm not ready to have a baby in my life.
Well, why not?
I don't know. I like my independence?
So really what you want is a child, not a baby.
Sure...?
Yeah, so...
Ok, well, I'm too selfish. That's it, I like
MY life.
I like doing things that
I want to do.
I like living
MY dream. Afterall
I only have
ONE life to live and love, why should
I give it up?
You don't have to.
Really?
Nope. Just do the things you like with the new critter. There will be some times that will test your patience but between those times are going to be the golden things that you've always thought would be cool to share with a child, your child.
So we can stay up late, watch movies, play video games, brew beer, ski, play in the snow, hike, camp, run, hang with friends, and all sorts of other stuff?
Yeah!
Ok, I guess I should get over my selfishness.
Yeah, but take your time, it is your life, do some fun stuff when you don't have to worry about keeping another being alive. Plan a stellar vacation. Then after some pretty useful conversations with your future baby's momma and friends you'll realize that your life will still be yours, you just get to share it with someone else who is going to love it.
Ok, Deal.
And there you have it, an immensely abbreviated conversation that played out over (probably) many years in my brain. The decision to make a baby really revolved around me being selfish with my time and life. I had basically been under the impression that rigorous schedules needed to be followed and that you will hole yourself up and never come out again. But slowly those mores were chipped away by both Laura and my observation/reflection of some families.
Ok now we're moving on.
Even though we went several months unprotected and baby free I hadn't really been stressing out about the whole "well, we've had unprotected sex and you're not pregnant yet." because we weren't trying yet. In my eyes, trying means there is a concentrated effort dedicated to timing and more, sometimes much more. But there was a time that we were a bit concerned, Laura got a bladder infection and needed an antibiotic. Which was necessary but we didn't know if anything was brewing at the time, it wasn't. The
timing of it was poor and it added some stress to the weekend otherwise. This was the first time we got to learn about pregnancy tests.
Fast forward a few months and Laura is late. We began talking about taking another pregnancy test. Laura is all sorts of excited, I on the other hand was not in the least bit excited. Scarred shitless really. So the whole conversation about how she is going to tell me she's pregnant comes up (again). In a perfect world we would both be excited and would jump up and down holding a stick full of pee with a + showing. But no, I'm scared, I'm wondering if I made the right choice, I'm not excited. We wait a few weeks and I try to rationalize why I'm scared, the earlier conversation a few paragraphs ago should save us some time on that reflection.
But then I realized you know what? I can relate this to something else in my life, our cat
Jinx.
Prior to getting Jinx I would have proudly told anyone that cats drool and dogs are cool, but that's because all of the cats I've lived with have just tolerated me as I have them. So before capturing Jinx I wasn't super excited about having a cat, but I liked this cat because it liked me. So I was like you know what, I think this baby will like me and I will like it. I don't have to be excited right now because someday I will be and it's going to work out great.
So one morning Laura arrives in the bedroom smiling a tearyeyed smile, guess what!? She shows me the pregnancy test, I can hardly open my eyes, I was so sleepy and it was bright outside and it was so close to my face. After a few seconds I can plainly see, we are expecting.
Now comes the research...thanks internet! We find out when we should make our first appointment. Next we have to choose a location and a Doc. Laura comes out of the gate saying she wants a female, I ask why? Because really, who cares. But after looking at photos of doctors I've decided that dudes that want to primarily deliver babies are probably creeps (based off looks alone). For us it was an easy choice to choose where (Champaign vs Danville) Chamapign hospitals consistently rank better than the Dville variety, and after working for a company that does funeral things...you hear things. Maybe we will regret this decision while driving a half hour to Champaign on D-Day but that's for the future to tell. We choose a lady who looks a little crazy and runs her own clinic.
Pit stop! Jon and Kara get married, we took a vacation to our respective parent's homes. We decided we need a game plan to inform our friends and family why Laura wasn't drinking. Because when someone is a social drinker, and then stops, something is up. We don't technically know anything for sure at this point (I wanted certified proof), we don't want anyone to be unnecessarily excited/scared for us. The only projected problem people are moms and Justin. We don't know anything, we're being safe, we're not ready to talk about it, leave me alone, was our montra. Sure everyone noted Laura's lack of imbibing, my Dad even told me so at one point, but at this point there was nothing to know, nothing to tell. We were being safe.
The first appointment has now come and gone. Leaving it feeling overwhelmed was a large understatement. First off, we got there and waited for ages and then when doc finally showed up she just dumped info on us and said lets get you an ultrasound! I can see how people spend so much money on medical things, you're too overwhelmed to think straight or ask questions, things just happen. Anyway, previous to this appointment I had been in a mild state of denial because a stick that Laura peed on was the most official thing we had on the whole "you're pregnant!" thing, I like professional opinions. Even more, I like seeing proof.
So we hop into the ultrasound room and Laura gets to sit on one of these chairs that I had only seen in a Titacular Tuesday movie. And then the nurse took a very large wand that I imagine was inspired by some of the most artistic (and futuristic) dildos I've seen, and shoved it inside! On the wall is a giant TV mirroring a black and white version of the inside of Laura. On that screen the nurse pointed out some things (she could have been making them up honestly) and then said there is your little one's heart beating. Listen, it sounds healthy!
Yeah.
This shit just got real.
Real fast.
After some more poking and probing and some fascinating learning she called it quits, pulled out, cleaned up, and then the doc took over. She fondled my wife in ways that...well...yeah. Anyway, we were given a goody bag a big pack of vitamins and another appointment in four more weeks.
So what did I manage to learn? Babies are measured in weeks, 40 of them, although the first two don't count really. Which really doesn't make sense because trimesters don't fit nicely in 40 but do so nicely in 39. Whatever.
We learned that we were almost 8 weeks along.
We learned that if we want to spend a lot of money on tests we certainly can.
We learned that we need to learn a lot, in a short amount of time.
I'm sure some other stuff too.
I felt my first pings of excitement.
Until further notice we are on learn and research mode. We've learned that since the first Trimester is the riskiest for things to go bad it's easiest to keep the news to yourselves for that time. So we are. It's also the most unsettling time for moms-to-be. So far Laura hasn't been sick, but has been nauseous, light headed, bloated, gassy, she poops more now, and her boobs have been growing. TMI? Oh well, now you know.[7-27]
Not sharing this information with people has been an outright challenge. Whenever someone asks, what's new? I want to say, oh not much, our lives are about to change dramatically in several months, that's all. For example, Laura and I shopped for bedroom furniture recently because A) we wanted something that could hold all of our clothes. B) Because we share two dressers in different rooms of the house, one in future baby's room. Obviously that will have to be for baby's things, not ours. But we couldn't tell people that part of the equation yet.
So we decided that we'll tell our families after the next doc appointment, and depending on some other info we'll break the news to our friends and co-workers a few weeks later. Yeah it's hard to hold this info in but it's easier than telling people who may be excited for you that things didn't work out for whatever reason.
But we are about a week out now from telling our parents and we decided that since we were so close to telling our parents we would tell Justin and Allison our news since we were visiting them. We actually debated saying nothing but after some serious conversation about who should be first to know vs wouldn't it be nice to tell someone in person. We opted to break the news. To be perfectly honest, it was such a good decision, something broke in me mentally after we were finally able to tell someone, I felt more excited for Baby J's arrival, I'm still nervous but I'm definitely a bit excited. [8-11]
We are starting to roll out our announcements to our families and friends who we think might be interested in hearing the news personally. We started spreading the news with Larua's parents. It was pretty funny. Here is the roundabout story; We got this big stuffed turtle to take some progress pics with Laura and eventually baby. So it's just been hanging around in our living room for Jinx to cautiously sniff. We decided that we should Skype with Laura's parents to share the news, Skype has an Xbox One app and I was like, sweet we can sit on the couch and skype! So we get connected and barely after any hellos are exchanged Laura's Mom says, Oh look you have a big stuffed turtle! After Laura and I exchanged glances saying, well I guess we'll just get right into it... The summary is Laura's Mom was beaming and Laura's Dad took it like I expect most people. We actually had plans to tell my parents as well that evening but we decided we really enjoyed watching the reactions so we skipped over the phone reveal.
Now that we've decided to come out with it I'm starting to get impatient. I just want to tell everyone so I don't have to worry about who knows what, and since when. Also I'm a bit of a talker and It's hard to not just casually mention something like, did you know that when a baby is first born the cold air is a shock to it which causes it to activate it's lungs and take it's first breath? [8-21]
I'm consistently surprised with the large amount resources and information is freely available to a person expecting a child.
This weekend we managed to get ahold of my parents and sister. My mom shed some cute tears of joy and was very excited about being a grandma! As expected my Dad wasn't jumping around for joy (this is old hat for him). I'm suspecting he and my mom were discussing this would be the reason behind a randomly scheduled FaceTime date minutes before the call.
Amanda had a very different reaction, "HA I win! I mean...congratulations." Background: Laura and I have been in a race with Amanda and Andy to second. The second couple to have a baby was going to be the winner. We thought we were a shoe-in for the V on this race because they have been building a sizable family since before they got married. First with a cat, then another cat, then a dog, and then another dog, to top it off they had some chickens as well. I should have known that when Andy slaughtered their chickens they were just pulling off an elaborate ruse.
Altogether for some reason I expected more when we told people our news, like fireworks, parades, and the whole nine. When people hear this type of news it seems to fall in four categories, excited, apathetic, mildly (maybe fake) happy for you, or they are wondering why you're doing this to yourself. Up until recently I fell into the latter group. Fortunately that attitude has changed for me. So in hindsight, I really don't know what I was expecting. [8-24]
I'm not making phone calls or texting most of my friends on this news because I don't know how people will feel, hell I don't know how I feel, so this epic blog post will hopefully make it easy for all of us. I'm confident that a few of my closest
stalkers friends will have read all the way down to these lines and will be genuinely excited for us. If you extend some congratulations, I've learned to just say "Thank You", even though I want to say more, I don't know what else I to say. My excitement is growing (daily it seems like), but it's still under those layers of nerves and scaredy-cats. Until our baby's birth day I'm going to be anxiously waiting for our little one to be pushed into this world.
When that day comes I'll be a Dad.
I'll be a Dad with a kid who likes me, and I'll like them, and by then I'll definitely be excited to show it the world. [9-1]
