There is so much I can and hope to say about the baby and birthing process. Men – wear comfy shoes that you think you can stand for 35 hours in, and women – you are all each and every one truly amazing. If I ever get free time again I will write about the birth, the in-hospital after-birth, the coming home, and life in chaos, but time is so utterly precious right now I’ll be brief. All of these events are incredible and soul altering, but of all things, I feel I must whine a bit this time. Consider this the 5th or so posting about the birth, where the others will come sometime :)

o My wife is amazing; I could never have done what she has done with anywhere near as much energy and strength .. especially after the complications and such she’s been through

o Our baby is beautiful beyond belief, but boy can she wail :)

o You know, when having a baby, life will be forever different, that sleep will be interupted and priorities will change; but you cannot understand the scope of life shock until it happens.. omg! It makes you wonder, at this early point, how anyone survives at all. I know it will get better but right now, it just seems like a scary future :)

There is so much to say about the baby and life and all, but right now I’m feeling super-stresses; worrying about my wife and the baby and caring for them at the expense of myself has shaken me .. walking for 5 hours at night time to get the baby to sleep through her cramps (she’s not pooping enough) has totally messed me up. I want to spend more time with my wife (I so regret everything I did that was not with my wife, before the birth), and have a good nights sleep again, and I wonder when (if ever) we’ll be able to flop down and watch TV or I’ll have a moment to read .. or play a game or any such frivilous thing. Right now we’re still in that panic-period where the baby is either asleep or screaming (usually the latter :), so we spend all our time being amazed by tiny toes, or trying to just get past the current tirade to the next time when we can rest.

Luckily my mother-in-law popped by a few times so I coudl crash for a couple hours during the day, but its still left me weird; we’ve decided ‘bed time’ is now 8pm and hoping to last 12 hours, so that somewhere in that 8-to-8 period we might get 5 hours or more sleep. Catching a cat-nap for an hour or two in the day is a rare luxury, but then just makes for problems later when we try to really hit the bed.. <– overwhelmed

Just .. wow. My wife lacks energy from loss of blood et al, but she can handle it all .. simply amazing. I find myself a bundle of nerves, rushing store to store to buy what we need, worrying about getting to a doctor to help with the babies constipation (counting the hours until Tuesday for that appointment), and dealing with sleeping in scraps during the day while zombing during the night.

Heres to hoping that sometime in the next couple weeks it’ll get better.. I’m not sure I can handle it all as it is, though I know that I will somehow or another :)

We’ve all said it, but maybe it bears repeating — too many people are either opportunistic or stupid (or both), resulting in all those completely frivilous lawsuits that sometimes pay out. You know the ones – you hear about some jackass who will sue some entity or person when really they just did something stupid. How soon until someone goes after the city due to tripping on sidewalk cracks? The problem we have is not only is this expensive on the system, but out of fear the cities will no doubt invent crackless-sidewalks, or rubber-sidewalks.. at enormous taxpayer cost. Anyway, this instinct to sue makes organizations sometimes overly cautious.. all bad for advancement as a society. It breeds corporations into a culture of lawsuit defence, which can be benefitial, but is it where we want to spend our energy? Anyway.

I write today because sometimes it annoys me when I think about how paranoid people have gotten with respect to their kids, and how other people and organizations will prey upon those paranoid people. Ex: Many sources suggest ‘baby mirrors’ are actually a bad thing, but really.. they should never have been invented, and paranoid people should know better than to buy them. (A little mirror system to make it easier to see your baby while they’re tucked in the backseat of your car; to wit, the baby mirror can become a projectile in an accident, and really.. should you be watching your baby when you should be spying on the road? Just as bad as the cellphone I say..) Example the second: Bouncy-chairs for babies have seatbelts now, since some tiny percentage of children got hurt, likely due to silly parenting or bad luck. Most likely bad luck. Ex: We’re all guilty of using training wheels on a bicycle, but maybe thats not so bad. Ex: Bicycle helments as a legal requirement.. another toughy — saving the medical system costs, or frivilous?

Either way — when I was young we let physics teach children lessons — if you biked too fast, with no helmet, no training wheels, and wiped out.. well, you learned not to do it like that again. Sure it hurt a little (and I had some winners!), but you learned both physics, and how to not be stupid.

With all this technology to protect companies from lawsuits (not really to protect people as you might assume), we’re really just building a society that is scared — a generation of wussies.

How are we to expect to return to the moon, or to head to Mars, or do anything halfway interesting really, when our kids aren’t allowed to go to the park and play without 50 parents standing in a circle around them? Will they take the dive and start a new company to produce some cool gadget, when they’ve been raised never to take risks, or that someone would always be there to run to?

While we will for sure take good care of our future child, we’ll try not to go ‘too far’ and over-protect the poor thing .. sometimes you need to let a knee get skinned, don’t you?

(I have worried for months about what we will do the first time our very own child comes home with a bloody nose; I know every parent will come down and crap on me for this posting, but I do not suggest letting your kid run willy-nilly around.. but I just mean — lets not teach our children fear, lets teach them to have spirit and take calculated risks.. or even to just take a jump shot once in awhile.)

This last year I found myself on several occasions trying to remember something I very much know I could recall on demand a couple years ago. After wrapping up two long full days of baby-classes I’m sure that I could absorb and process much more information when back in school. I imagine like anything else those are skills – muscles needing flexing – and so with day to day life post-school you get lazier in your mass cram abilities. But damn, it does make you feel a little slower…

Some future day I hope to remember to tell our grown up child: You won’t understand this but we were on top of things once; after raising a baby and managing its poop and food and temperature and every minutia in its life for years at a time, of course we lose the ability to be objective and rational. Thats how I think it’ll go anyway .. these two days of learning the stages of labor and delivery and how to deal with scary body things, and what to do after you get home (how to swaddle and diaper a squirmy baby :), and how to expect to lose parts of your life now over to taking care of a baby… it does make you wonder, and you know.. makes you excited. With only some 5 weeks to go, we’re starting to want the baby right now …. gorramnit.

But anyway, the reason I’m posting today — when you go on a trip and take 7000 photos with your digital camera, only send a few per day to your friends. Or better yet – take only 10 or 20 per day, of interesting things. Always including people, or something exceptional. No need to take pictures of your toilet or food, and if you do.. don’t send them to friends. Spare them :) But save yourself — you won’t want to look over those thousands of photos down the road. (On the other hand maybe take a million photos and rely on good solid not-invented-yet photo management software to auto-pick interesting scenes…)

Anyway, whew, wiped out after long classes :)

So much to say that will have to wait for later. I did have brainfart a moment ago though, which I thought I’d share.

I’ve long thought it’d be cool that my kid will be aces with Pac Man (or hate video games altogether, we’ll see). And that I’ll be there the first time the child comes home with a bloody nose or skinned knee, and be there to show the kid how to use a flashlight, and how to operate a little plastic hammer to knock blocks through a template. Cool.

The brainfart was this — that in addition to all those iconic first moments, I’ll be there to show the kid how to motherfrapping ROCK OUT. Bring on some Sepultura or The Troggs or something, and I’ll show the kid how to gorramned headbang. Sign of the cow, diapers, and headwaving, and babymoshing.

Oooh yeah, this is going to be a good year :)

It is amusing to note how irrelevent so many of our daily thoughts are; what time to get up today? whats on the tube tonight? where am I going to lunch today? While vital to know where you’re going to dine, its not really going to make a long term impact. Well, unless the fajitas are _that_ delicious.

Being so early in the pregnancy means it is still very surreal to us – we can’t really see the little guy (for sake of arugment we call him ‘guy’ but we do not know) nor hear him with the shiny new head-paining stethoscope I picked up from Active Surplus, nor does my wife throw up every night or after every meal like my brother in laws unfortunate wife. We just hope he’s still in there growing away. Its very worrysome, but we’ll be visiting the doc again in a week or two to get another ultrasound and see the little gaffer moving around in real time fuzzovision. We’ve done an ultrasound before to make sure everything was in the right place, and thats where the thoughts got serious, quick. Serious to us, anyway. But I did see, in a quick glimpse that the little guy had 4 appendages, and got to say “Hello” to the cathode-ray-baby. I’ll remember that moment.

We chatted with the doctor (ob-gyn’s always have a good sense of humour) and I was trying to not sound like an embarassed clueless male and keep my foot out of his mouth; do we have to pre-book at the hospital? does she need to eat certain things or have vitamin supplements? if a headache or heartburn erupts, can we do anything? Fine and dandy, but getting real. A little. (Heartburn, inability to sleep, sore joints.. lots of strange things happen to women even this early on as the body adjusts to caretaking and to loosen the joints for later, and as the baby-sack grows and pushes organs around.. its a whole party in there! Sorry, I know I just lost 80% of my readers.)

Something like — do you wish to perform another ultrasound and this fluid extraction (forgetting the terms because I am a big doofus male) to deduce if the child will have down-syndrome or other ‘obvious’ birth defects? What? ‘Scuse me?

That hits you – thats real; this isn’t figuring out which brand of socks to buy. Meekly you ask.. is there a risk? Well, dear friends I tell you this.. we humans don’t know as much as we think we do; there is always a risk, and while ultrasounds are not known to cause damage to a child there is much research into it. We can handle a GWAR show later in life but using intense sound to get a picture of a child when his ears are the size of a pinhead.. I dunno. Knowing we’re the Intertube generation who reads _everything_ without comprehending, the doctor (who seems a really great guy and really on top of his bidniz) points out that ultrasounds are generally only performed once during a normal pregnancy and are best avoided. At any rate, visions pop through our heads of the poor child being vibrated near to death, or them performing amniotic fluid analysis and poking the babies head with a needle by mistake. The risks are small but you know what? No way man. As our first act of future-parenting we decided we’ll take any baby that we can get, and that no-one is going to stick a needle unnecessarily near to our little 3″ baby. My wife absent-mindedly puts hands around her belly. She doesn’t notice that sort of thing, but I do — women protect their babies like demons, from day zero.

Strange Days I tell you.

Anyway, we watched an episode of Birth TV or whatever on TLC the other night; lo and behold they were showing some poor woman in labour.. and our doctor was the one in charge. Thats sort of cool.

Before I close for the day, I’ll also say.. its pretty exciting times. We so look forward to seeing the baby in 5 or 6 months or whatever, but we have those journals that tell you whats going on every day inside. Each day I cheer a little more .. you go guy, way to grow that little liver. You’ve got little toes now — thats my boy-or-girl! That time I mentioned above when I got to see a first ultrasound.. you could _see_ the heart beating. It was tiny, like a little fluorescent cursor blinking away.. but it was unmistakable. The first organ to grow and start operating itself was the heart, and never a more beautiful site have I beheld.

Disclaimer: I hereby reserve the right to be dopey and trite; if you’re only interested in the GP2X or PSP or my bitching about government and people, feel free to just ignore the entire Personal section of the blog. Consider yourself warning ;)

So far along I’ve been hesitant to go on about personal things – really while I like to think I’m an ever happy and open individual in The Real .. when it comes to the Intertube I’ve always been friendly but a little unrevealing. When you write some fifty-thousand-odd support emails (no joke!), you keep a certain.. voice. But here, dear reader, I will expose a few thoughts I’ve been holding for a time.

We’d been hoping for a baby over the last few years — what seems a great long time. To us life had reached a certain plateau: jobs were good, our little business was businessing, the house was fine, and we’ve got good family and friends. Life was good and certainly we could not complain.. but it still felt like we were at impasse. Days would come and go but the routine would change little. One begins to wonder, to become insecure — is there something wrong with us? Why can’t anyone really tell us what we’ve done wrong? Your parents bug you — wheres their grandchild? Your own grandparents are getting very old and they begin to ask.. where is their great-grandchild, before they die? You offer advice to friends with kids but always wonder.. what is going on here? But time passes.. you work harder than ever before, and the years go by.

I’ll not go into the ripe details, but suffice to say we suffered somewhere here .. my wife for wondering if she wasn’t a whole woman, and me for the horror of looking into my her eyes while she blamed herself for the problem; certainly it did keep me sad at times, but I’m not one to dwell.. but certainly I couldn’t bring it up with her .. I was her rock. I couldn’t be sad to her, for she needed me – she had her own guilt and worries and concerns. Anyway.

The News

One day we started to suspect that perhaps luck had turned (and got all paranoid not to jinx it..); I’d bought a two-pack of pregnancy test sticks and the first showed a faint faint line — the sort of line that the world across had teenagers screaming in confused frustration. A day later the second test showed what could quite possibly have been a darker line.. but who could tell? the first had already faded of its own accord so it was difficult to compare. We’d gone for bloodwork and were waiting for a call from the lab.. and naturally they didn’t call on that first or second day. I was freaking out.

So here we were on the third day of wondering, and it was already late in the day. Before me lay two options — head to the lab and butcher the lot of them, or hit up the drugstore for yet another home pregnancy test. Why not? If the line was darker still, it would be that much more evidence that maybe we’d have a happy year again. If you could, picture this scene…

I walk in the door and the spidey-sense goes off; something is terribly.. quiet. My girl is standing, shocked, over in the kitchen (we have a small open concept place.. you can see the whole place from the front door.) She says. ‘They called.’ and I drop the bag of stuff I’d carried in.

It was Fathers Day.

If they didn’t call, I’d have had a heart-attack, but here they were.. after the lab hours were passed, calling. Affirmative, yes that meant what I thought, and yes, confirmed. Right. Yep. We cried in the kitchen.

Now what?

I’m sure every man goes through the same thought process — oh Crom, my wife is going to be in total agony for 10-36 hours and I won’t be able to help. Will I faint and crack my skull open in the delivery room? Will I be able to get her to the hospital in time 9 months later? Will they like D&D, Robotech and hockey? Will I be a good father/husband/provider? Will I ever see another movie again? How much does a big screen TV cost?

I have some special concerns.. after having built and run a tiny little company that eats up every available spare moment.. do I have to give it up? Can I manage the big contract, the side work, the baby and wife? Can I somehow work it so the business takes care of itself for awhile so I can be a good husband to help my wife the next 9 months? Certainly when the baby comes (only 5 months or so to go now!).. everything else will be tertiary.

I should ask my brother; he’s been there.

I’ve got a lot to say; I’ve held a lot in during these years, and fortunately it can all be discarded now… now is a time of exitement, of jubilation, and nervous energy. I already know half the answers.. will I be a good father?

Hell yes.