The next scan

The twenty week scan (done at week 22-and-a-bit) was not as exciting as I'd hoped. The baby is too big to see all at once, so the whole process is a bit of here’s a cross-section of the head, here's the heart… kidneys, leg, other leg, toes, arm, hand, fingers. And spine. Lots of time going up and down the spine. All very useful and quite telling for a medical technician. But for a parent it's not so much a baby as a guide to its organs, like an X-ray on an adult. I had to just visualise in my head what the baby as a whole looks like: in foetal position, hands in front of face, sitting on my wife's cervix.

They did tell us the sex, though. It was the same thing we were told last scan, but with more certainty. So even that didn't phase us much – which I think disappointed them. Lots of it's a… and pauses for dramatic effect from the technicians , with just a slightly interested Oh, that's nice from us.

Also they kept saying things like do you want to know the baby's gender. I kept have to stop myself from correcting them No, I want to know the sex. I'll let the baby choose their own gender when they're old enough.

Work and labour

I've been rather silent for the past few days as real life has gotten in the way of me writing anything beyond cover letters.

I'm keeping myself quite busy with the job hunt and in bringing my skills up to date. I do wish I could have spent all this time off work after the baby is born when I could really use it. As it stands, I'm spending too much time contemplating the future rather than doing something with it. I'm still rather concerned about all the time off work I'm going to need to take. Paternity leave is only ten days, and, since I'll be too new at the job, I won't get any paid leave. And since I won't have much holiday accrued yet, I'll probably need to spend all of it just on baby.

All the stuff I've been reading lately has got me afraid of how long the wife and kid will spend in hospital. If it is two weeks, there goes all the paternity leave in one fell swoop. Unless things really go wrong, I don't want to spend my days in hospital waiting for test result after test result to see if they'll let us go home. I'm just picturing the wife and I going stir crazy with no sleep waiting for result of a blood test they took 12 hours ago to drop or go above some magic number an NHS manual considers to be healthy.

I'd voiced my concerns to the wife earlier and she asked if I'd reconsidered doing a home birth then. I though about it and then realised that at least in a hospital we only ran the risk of the staff not knowing what they were doing. At home it would be guaranteed.

The wife's superpowers were in full force last night at a house party. Various smells from foods, drinks, people, etc, were starting to annoy her, while being undetectable from everyone else. Or at least the first real day of spring here was blocking my nose enough that I wasn't able to tell at all. It was good getting out and being socialable. And even though she spent most of the party in a chair, she did noticeably have a good time.

She got a bloody nose today. Every year I can tell the first day of spring since I get my first (and often only) bloody nose of the year. I am wondering if the offspring is passing my allergies on to my wife. Is that even possible? Or is this just an oddly timed pregnancy symptom.

The little one's been moving around quite a bit lately. Today I put my cold hand on the wife's belly and I could feel it shift and squirm under the skin. I drew my hand back quickly and said I'm sorry! I'm sorry. I didn’t realise it was so cold. The wife said It's ok. Your hand isn't so cold. You can put it back. Um. I wasn't talking to you — I'd managed to offend them both in one gesture. I'm off to a good start.

And finally, words have started to take on the special birthing meaning. When I hear the word "engage” I immediately think of the proper positioning of the baby's head just before it starts coming out. And the song Express Yourself now just makes me think of lactation.

Kicking and reading

The little one was been moving around enough that even I can feel it. The wife's been giving me reports for a while of various pokings and shufflings, but I've only directly felt anything a few times. It involves a lot of me sitting there with my hand on the wife's belly waiting for something to happen. Not that I mind.

We've been reading each other things, so there's plenty of time for sitting and waiting. I've mostly been reading excerpts from From Here to Paternity and Angela Carter's Book of Fairy Tales. It's mostly for the foetal-one's benefit since it really needs to get used to hearing my voice. The former book is easy since it's just straightforward informative monologue. The latter is a bit harder since I've been using multiple voices for the dialogue in the fairy tales, in practice for reading to the baby once it's out. It's surprisingly hard to come up with new voices on the fly, especially when you have no idea how many characters the story is going to have and double especially when you can't always tell who is speaking. I often find myself forgetting what voices I used at the start of the story when throw-away characters turn out to be significant later.

Why is the prince's father now Canadian? Wasn't he Russian earlier?

Ah. Yes. You see he'd been listening to a lot of CBC while his son was captured by the witch, and it kind of rubbed off on him.

The wife, on the other hand, has been reading to me from pregnancy books and web sites. Each week she reads a Your Baby at Week x from a few different places, so we know how big it is and what organs it had this week. Last night she was reading a section from a new book which covered how to recognise when you're near and in labour.

Anyways, I seem to have gotten sidetracked. Most of the movement I've felt so far can only describe a light brushing. It kind of reminds me of the movement under the covers someone makes when they shift when sleeping (probably because that's essentially what it is). Last night was the first sudden and obvious movement that I could feel. Did you feel that? Wow. Yes. You mean that wasn't you? It felt like she'd strongly flexed a muscle. After that it settled down and went back to its subtle shifting movements. At each one I'd ask Was that —? Yup.

I was in the middle of writing a cover letter when I got distracted and started writing this. I really need to get back to applying for jobs, so I have some income when the baby arrives. It's just that it's so much easier and interesting to write about impending fatherhood than to gently segue into my ability to collaborate with external stakeholders.

I got a no from the job I interviewed for yesterday. It was for a contracting house. I strongly suspect the reason they rejected me is because I clearly stated that I will not work offsite anywhere I can't return to London every night. When I was a toddler my father worked in a different city during the week, and came home on weekends. I didn't resent him for it – in fact, it made it exciting whenever he'd come back (Daddy's home!). My mum would stuff a very sleepy and pyjamad me and my brother in the car and drive to the train station to pick him up.

It can't have been easy on my mother raising two small children by herself during the week (did we have a nanny? I vaguely recall someone else being around, but I can't remember), and it can't have been easy on my father not being around for large chunks of time. I promised myself (and my wife) that I would not do that. Not that I think it's wrong, but I personally I want to be around as much as possible for my kid's babyhood.

Baby book reviews

Since I've going through enough of them I figured I may as well post reviews of the books I've been reading.

The Bloke's Guide To Pregnancy — Fine for the first 20 pages or so. Then it quickly went downhill. It quickly became clear that the men this was written for were not me, and the women it described as pregnant were not my wife. By about page 40 I realised that if nothing so far struck me as appropriate, nothing further down the line would be fitting either. So I skimmed the rest, looking for interesting bits before deciding I should probably clean the bathroom. The thing that I most learned from this book is to not use the last herbal tea bag as a bookmark since you'll regret it when someone is over and asks for a herbal tea.
Verdict: Not meant for me, though it might help if this is the sole book or pamphlet you plan to read during your partner's pregnancy.

Pregnancy for Modern Girls — Pretty factual with random quotes from women thrown in there. It's actually far more structured and organised than the Bloke's guide, and I'm not entirely sure if that fact means it breaks the gender stereotype or enforces it. Like most pregnancy books it's ordered from conception to post-birth, so if you're looking for something specific, it's easy to find. The quotes from the modern girls about their actual pregnancy and birth experiences were the most useful thing about the book, in an OMG that can actually happen kind of way.
Verdict: It's worthwhile if it falls in your lap, but could be replaced by the NHS material plus several days of trawling blogs for a decent variety of personal anecdotes.

Your Pregnancy Bible — Really quite detailed, and goes as far as telling the partner how to deliver the child in case of emergency, which I consider the most useful thing a partner can know. Though it leaves off with putting the placenta in a plastic bag and not cutting the umbilical cord, so I am curious what's supposed to happen next. Like most bibles, this is not actually meant to be read all at once, but as a reference if you need consolation, want to feel completely out of your depth, or if you want to show off that you know more than someone else.
Verdict: I can't say for sure if it's worth it, but it feels like it's worth it.

From Here to Paternity: The Diary of a Pregnant Man — A man's diary of his wife's pregnancy. It's good in that it really focuses on how pregnancy affects the partner. It is rather factual as well, but not in any organised sense – so don't go into it expecting a reference. It's more entertainment than anything else. It's also an easy read. Some might find the wife character to be poorly fleshed out, but I think it's quite reasonable, since the focus is not how the pregnancy affects her, or who she is. The man is fleshed out a bit more since the book would get quite dull between baby events otherwise.
Caveat: I've not finished the book yet, so my opinion might change.
Verdict: A mix of an entertaining read with interesting factual content.

Breaking things

The following may be considered TMI and is not for the easily squicked. You are warned.

It occurs to me that the whole reproductive lifecycle of women is about breaking things. First there's the hymen. Then there's the water breaking at the start of labour. Then there's the vaginal tearing at birth. I can kind of see the point of the water breaking, but the rest just strike me as permanent body modification triggered by incidental events. Why should the body irrevocably change based on something that it's supposed to do? I mean after a period, the uterus heals up again to prep for the next one. It doesn’t just fall out, and there! no more uterine lining for you!

Men just do have anything like that. Body changes are gradual. Hair (for most men) doesn’t all fall out at once in clumps – it just slowly thins. I don't have anything personal to compare to, so I have to rationalise the whole thing. I have to build a model in my head of how it works so it makes sense (curse my academic background).

I can kind of see the point of the vaginal tearing — in a State of Nature kind of way. I mean, women don't really need their bits to be able to pass a baby's head until they're actively reproducing. So if it tears enough to not be able to heal on its own, it just leaves a wider hole for future use. It makes a kind of sense, though it doesn't sound very efficient. I don't see why the bits can't just prepare and stretch in time for birth, rather than just breaking when push comes to shove. The cervix is polite enough to dilate before birth. It doesn't break open. Why can't the perineum become all elasticy in the last month or so? I'd think stretch marks on the undercarriage would be sufficiently acceptable alternative.

Perhaps, as a male, I just don't get it. Perhaps women are used to all the breakings and tearings and bleedings from their genitals that all the breakings around birth is just one more thing for them.