Book it

There are many pregnancy books out there, and very few of them are daddy-centric (or even daddy-themed). I find this odd as in 99% of all pregnancies, a daddy is involved. (I say 99% because I actually know someone who was a test-tube baby - this girl named Allison in my dorm freshman year at Penn. She is nice). I wanted to purchase a book like this and study it, as there are a lot of basic baby-type activities (like changing a diaper) that I am woefully clueless about. (On the other hand, I am woefully clueless about a lot in life, baby-related or not, so I guess this is just par for the proverbial course).

The one that I purchased, called Be Prepared, is all right. It does contain some basic info that I learned, like how to swaddle a baby and how to prepare formula. The majority of the book though is lame. A lot of it is very "guy" based, like "Set up a workout for your baby! Urnh! Work those baby abs!" Yeah, that ain't happening. A lot of it is plain stupid, like the page and a half that explained the Five Second Rule and applied it to various baby things (like, "It's ok if the baby's pacifier falls on the floor. Five Second Rule!"). Dude, I understand the Five Second Rule. Not worth explaining. Another enjoyable section of the book was the "Sex After Pregnancy" chapter, which said in delicate terms that if your wife is too tired from dealing with the baby and if she doesn't feel in the mood because her body is still recovering from the birth, you can always take care of your needs by having her give you a blowjob. (Wait, is my mom reading this...?)

But I still would like to read a helpful, entertaining book that describes all sorts of daddy stuff so that I at least have a passing knowledge of simple parenting techniques when Superbaby arrives. If you are a recent dad and read this (who reads this besides Rainy? Shout out for the Rainster! Colorado - what what!!!), and have good daddy book recommendations, please post a comment. If you don't post, and the kid turns out really screwed up, you only have yourselves to blame.

I'm finally showing, or Who knew shopping could be so stressful?

The Babymoon marked the official half way point - last Saturday was 20 weeks - and it was basically that weekend that my belly decided to shoot out. (Oh, and I went with pre-preg bikinis after all. They more or less covered what they needed to cover.) It was an odd week - I could never really be certain if anyone knew, unless they were our waitress at dinner one night to whom my expectancy was apparently so obvious that it was smacking her in the face. No one at the B&B mentioned it until the last day, and we had been eating breakfast with these people for 5 days! Clothing wasn't too much of a challenge since I was in comfy, non-restrictive clothes all week as much as humanly possible. It was such a relaxing vacation - perfect time to rest, have adventures, and get excited planning for Super Baby.

Here I am, officially half way through:

Upon my return, I decided "Denial no more!" and I would hit the shops to accommodate my changing figure. Thus far, I pretty much had one pair of maternity pants which I promptly put on my first morning back to work, once I realized that I was in no mood to see if anything fit anymore. And I needed to dress myself past Wednesday, so... Let me tell you though, when you literally have 2 stores in the mall to choose from shopping isn't so fun anymore. First stop was Pea in a Pod where I spent way too much on a pair of jeans, but dammit if I'm going to be wearing one pair of jeans for the next 5 months they better not fall apart on me. Old Navy was disappointing, but I will likely go back there for some basic t-shirts and stuff once I've stretched out all my other shirts. I also got some new bras, and did some damage online as well. Ann Taylor Loft has a new maternity section on their website and was having a bitchin' sale, so I got some nice pants for work. I think I have now successfully created a miniature wardrobe for the time being, though I know I will be sad when cute spring clothes start arriving in stores and begin to more and more like an elephant.

And here's a picture of Super Baby's feet from the 20 week ultrasound:

You can't see it, but he/she is checking out Zappos as we speak...

OMG! WTF?!

Not long after I came to terms with the fact that I was pregnant and realized that I had some questions - but before we had told anyone - I turned to the trusty ol' internet. And I found The Nest Baby. I could not have been less prepared for what was on there, not to mention it made me feel old because I was not raised in an internet message board world. Email came around freshman year of college (unless you were "lucky" enough to have AOL version 1.4 before that, like my family was, complete with dial up modem that was still kicking around my parents' house until about a month ago), and the internet wasn't all that comprehensive. Nor was it a monumental time suck. But boy do things change when you sit at a computer for 8 hours a day with inevitable down time.

So apparently not only do a lot of people sit around surfing the net all day but - gasp! - they interact with it and other people who also apparently have too much time on their hands. The Nest Baby serves a couple of functions as far as I can tell - provide information about pregnancy, birth, parenting, etc (fair enough) and provide a forum for people experience said life changes to communicate (a can of worms that can never be closed once it's open). I have taken to the pregnancy week-by-week comparison to fruits and vegetables (this week Baby is a mango!) and have found some moderately informative, though not earth shattering, advice.

But oh, the message boards! They are divided up into categories - namely Trying to Conceive (TTC for the hip web kids), 1st trimester, 2nd trimester, 3rd trimester, then ones for various ages of babies. Frankly I don't even know where to begin. For starters, there is a frightening number of ladies whose screen names include "Wifey"...as in "MattsWifey24" or "IlovebeingaWifey". Who are these people??? I lurked on the 1st tri board for a while, realizing that despite the fact I had told virtually no one about the pregnancy, I seemed to know more than the nitwits who were posting and that made me feel a lot better. For example: "I'm six weeks along, and this morning I discovered some bleeding...what should I do?" Um, turn off the computer and get your ass to the doctor? This post found its way to the board roughly 6-7 times a day, along with a host of other inappropriate (as in, why are you asking a bunch of strangers on the web and not your doctor) questions and musings about pregnancy myths and old wives' tales. The rest of the posts fall into one of two buckets - people who must be desperate for social networking and just like to post on the boards to chat with other "nesties" as they call them, and people who actually have questions that are not readily found in books (I actually had a couple of those, and admit that I did post them...).

1st tri was just a warm up. By the time 2nd tri rolls around, these women get downright bitchy. They start making fun of the 1st tri-ers (which clearly I'm doing as well, but in the private domain of my blog, not the whole Nest pregnancy community), and really bitching each other out (hello pregnancy hormones!). I really could go on and on, but I'll share my two favorites:

• A 2nd tri-er was apparently SO bored and unfilled by the 2nd tri board that she decided to check out the TTC kids. But boy did she discover a gem - a woman who was lamenting that after 6 months she hadn't conceived, and let's just say (for the sake of the squeamish) that her understanding of the mechanics of how one gets pregnant were clearly off and thus the reason for her inability to conceive. Sperm has to be inside, ladies. Just saying. This provided hours of amusement in the form of posts back and forth, of course resulting in someone calling everyone bitches for making fun of the poor girl and a tangent shooting off into infinity.
  
• A big thing on the 2nd tri board is announcing the gender after your big ultrasound (or u/s in nest lingo) - lots of internet squealing, if you can imagine it, "I'm on Team Pink!" or "Go Blue!" Hee hee! So someone is REALLY irked that people keep using "gender" and "sex" interchangeably, and decides to call the bitches out on this. I happen to agree because I am grammatically aware and all that, but this really went to another level. The shit really hit the fan when the original nestie posted a definition of the two words and said "trust me, I graduated from Loyola University and I was an English major"...mind you this post was also chock full of glaring grammatical errors. Hilarity ensued. If you're so inclined, you should search for this conversation because I guarantee it will be worth your while.

One other thing to mention - the Nest Baby came up with its own set of board lingo. Some of them may in fact be medically accurate acronyms (like OBGYN), and I do not take issue with those. Allow me to share my top 5 faves (aka you will never catch me DEAD using ANY of these! Ever.):

1. BD - Baby Dance (baby making sex). Really people? Can you NOT just say SEX?
2. BFP - Big Fat Positive (home pregnancy test result) as in "OMG I got my BFP! LOL!" No thanks.
   
3. DH - Dear Husband. Mike, you are dear, but I will never call you DH unless Marty McFly accompanies us back to the 50s.
4. NBR - Not Baby Related. Then what the hell are you doing posting it on this board? How friggin desperate are you?
5. AF - Aunt Flo (menstruation). I'm not even going to go there.

Off to the big u/s today - OMG! I'm rooting for Team Human! - then the BABYMOON tomorrow! More to post after Hawaii...