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.
- BD - Baby Dance (baby making sex). Really people? Can you NOT just say SEX?
- BFP - Big Fat Positive (home pregnancy test result) as in "OMG I got my BFP! LOL!" No thanks.
- DH - Dear Husband. Mike, you are dear, but I will never call you DH unless Marty McFly accompanies us back to the 50s.
- NBR - Not Baby Related. Then what the hell are you doing posting it on this board? How friggin desperate are you?
- AF - Aunt Flo (menstruation). I'm not even going to go there.
1 comment:
What if I am designated to hit? Can I be the DH then? I am after all the Big Papi (or "Large Father," as my main man Paps would say...).
Post a Comment