Happy Easter

Our Easter egg:

Nesting

Lately, wifey's been staying up way past her bedtime, fighting exhaustion, to take care of the home... picking stuff up off the floor, placing things in their assigned spots, and putting me in my place. Come sundown, I can expect a tornado of dusting cloths and meticulously aligned objects. She's experiencing the stage of pregnancy called "nesting." They say it's a hormonal catalyst, that forces the mother-to-be to begin preparing the home for their new arrival. As a witness and unwilling participant, I can say that there's no stopping a nesting woman. Let her clean, pick up, and re-arrange. If she starts moving the entertainment center, you should probably help her.

Men aren't immune to nesting either. When men nest, it's more along the lines of building and prepping, whether it be furniture assembly or car seat installation. I'm in this phase now, but I wouldn't call it nesting - it's more like "panic."

Thanks

Just wanted to send out a thank you for all the arrangers, attendees, balloon blowers, bakers, cooks, and drivers this past weekend. Wifey's surprise baby shower was indeed a surprise. It will take us a few days to sort through everything piled waist deep in our living room, and a few weeks to figure out how to use everything. (One of my personal favorites is the WeeBlock.) Our lil' one sure is lucky to have so many admirers. I hope you all feel the same way after he inevitably wets each and every one of you.

Reading, Writing, and Nausea

We attended our birthing class this past weekend. It wasn't at all what I pictured in my mind, from all the TV shows and movies starring pretend-pregnant people. Mom doesn't sit on a floor mat practicing breathing while dad is kneeled next to her for encouragement. (Apparently those are Lamaze classes.) Instead, we all sit in chairs, listen to a teacher, watch videos, and thumb through a workbook, just like in any other 7 hour class. Additionally, the dads don't kneel, but sit slouched in their chairs, turning various shades of red and white. The moms amuse themselves at the dads' discomfort. And the motivation for staying awake in class: a VHS tape showing live births of the 1970's.

We watched the heart tugging and stomach turning stories of several different couples. It was a time when men wore tight shirts and the women donned permed hair - they boldly revealed to the camera their varied experiences of day long labor and the methods they used to cope with it. Topics ranged from choice of painkiller to physical pushing positions. In between interviews, the tape also featured full frontal nudity, as I winced my way through four live births. Each baby I witnessed that burst forth from a loin made me progressively less queasy, and I was actually a bit desensitized by the fourth one. Then they announced the last birth story was a Cesarean, and that's when I felt all the blood rush out of my head again. Luckily for me, they omitted most of the graphic details.

At the end of the class, I learned about mucous plugs and the bloody show (which I am not linking to), Braxton Hicks (a.k.a. false labor), and many assorted numbing medications which I would have gladly volunteered to subject myself to before this class had I known what I was going to see. All in all, very informative, buy not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach. To sum it up, labor and childbirth is vastly different for every woman, and from this point on, anything can happen, so I'd better have my bags ready for the hospital.

Only 6 weeks left to go; then I have to find the After Your Baby is Born class.

Heavy Up

The latest sonnagram we had weighed the baby in at 4.9 pounds (give or take half a pound). A baby gains weight at the rate of about a half a pound a week in the last couple of months of pregnancy. With less than two months left to go, I'm afraid that the baby will be like 12 pounds. (OK, it should be about 8 pounds, if I do the math correctly, and not like I did in college.)

BabyCenter.com offers an amusing slide show of the baby's development compared to produce; according to that, he's about the size of a pineapple right now. (Now that would be painful.)

Even at 8 pounds, that's just a fraction of the weight of the world's biggest baby, who was born at 28 pounds, 4 ounces. And on a related note, the world record for the most children took place in Russia, where a woman was pregnant 27 times and gave birth to 69 children between 1725 and 1765. I don't imagine she got very much sleep...