Nothing new

We had the Maternal Foetal Assessment today. Which means we got another scan to figure out why the baby is still in her mum. They waved the magic scanning wand around and ticked off lots of measurements on the screen. Everyone seemed happy. The wife was all healthy. The baby was all healthy. Nothing to be concerned about, beyond her tardiness. In the end we found:

• Her head is 11cm across. The cervix dilates to 10cm. That will be fun.
• She weighs about 6 pounds 12oz. Which is a bit small, but more than I weighed when I was born. So I'm not worried.
• She has hair. The technician pointed it out to us on the monitor See that white stuff there. That's hair. Considering both the wife and I were born with hair, this should not be a surprise.
• She has a 66% chance of being born in the next 7-10 days, on her own, without intervention. Which would be nice, since we just finished the raspberry leaf tea today.

After that, we saw the midwife. She told us the baby's 40% engaged, so at least the progress bar is moving forward. They want to induce next Thu. If the inducement is insufficiently enticing for the wee one, they'll have to put the wife on an oxytocin drip – which means labour ward only, no birthing centre. So we're going to try to hold out till at least the 8th before accepting the induction. Everything is going so smoothly, I don't want to break the pattern just so the medical team can have nice looking numbers for this quarter.

On the trip home we impulse bought a new printer and a pint of ice cream. Both were cheaper than the new PC we actually do need, since mine is slowly falling apart. Off to test the hardware now.

Baby shower

I had my baby shower on Sunday. Well, it wasn't a normal baby shower. Besides the fact that I'm male, of course. It was closer to a low intensity stag do. A few of us went out for drinks and bowling. The basic concept was that it was my last night out before knuckling down and preparing for the birth. After the bowling, the wife came to join us for a few hours of random natter. Definitely fun, though my bowling is terrible. I really must get better before I take the kid bowling – she has to believe I'm wonderful at all things.

Or maybe not. I have promised myself I will try my best to not lie to her. It's hard. Adults have a really hard time not lying to kids. They're just so willing to believe anything. I've caught myself at it a few times, and I'm conscious of it. It's really hard to stop, even though I know that it's just wrong. It must be hardcoded in or something.

There are a number of things I promised myself I would not do, but since I've been doing all kinds of reading on the subject I find that there a logical reasons for a lot of them. Like why people talk to babies in baby talk. However, I am firmly of the mind that babies should be imitating you not the other way around. But it seems that some mimicry is just easier for them to process. So we'll just have to see where I draw the line on dignity.

On that note, I've decided that the baby shower will be my last night of any but the most trivial of drinking. If the wife can pop at any moment, I want a clear head to be always at hand. After the shower we had a little scare that she might be in labour. My reaction was simply Holy shit! I'm not ready. Turns out she wasn't and that this was a known effect of the raspberry leaf tea. But at the time we didn't know, so I had to go around and prepare things. I found that after all those G&Ts that I could not keep more than a single instruction in my head at time. The scare only lasted half an hour, and afterwards I was able to stop panicking. But I realised that I needed to be constantly on the ball for the next month, since I'll have to have some working brains at a moment's notice. It's an interesting lesson to have learnt.