Hunter-Gatherer considers his plans...
Guest Post from Puck:
So my wife is pregnant.
First, I should engage in the token gloat:
“Aren’t we just terribly fertile?!“
However much we planned for this and wanted it to happen, it is still news to me. Unlike Mary, I don’t have any obvious biological indicators that we are having a baby but it is mutating my thought patterns in intrusive and masculine ways.
I normally keep a running plan in my head about what is coming next. As soon as I heard the word “Honey!” from the bathroom, there was an entirely different criteria for how I planned my future. A large collection of previous plans (a conference, purchases, weekend plans, and more) were tossed to the side as being too frivolous.
Instead they were replaced with WifeWatch 2010 and the Baby Countdown.
WifeWatch 2010
I am breaking this down into 3 key groups: Mood, Food, and Sleepiness
Mood
The first thing most men hear about pregnant women is that they go from being normal women to irrational, food craving, hormone rockets that might explode at random. With this in mind, 1.7 nanoseconds after the word “Honey!” was translated by my brain I accepted that I was ready to bear the brunt of any explosion. Everyone will get grumpy from time to time and my wife has always been exceptional about giving me good information when she is having a bad day.
At that moment, I mentally wrote her a blank check. If necessary, I will hide the bodies of the people she kills and will accept that their righteous deaths are probably my fault.
Here too is the need to ensure that my wife realizes how gorgeous and amazing she is. There will be body changes, unexpected drama, and discomfort but it is my job to make certain she knows that she is in fact, the smartest, most beautiful woman on the earth.
This is only the first part of WifeWatch 2010. Are her moods stable? Actually, she is surprisingly rational… for now.
Food
As my wife is in danger of becoming irrational at any moment, I need to step in as hunter-gatherer and ensure that she gets enough protein, vegetables, and especially calcium to keep her healthy. As my friend Aeddan once told me, “Baby will get his calcium.”
If a mother is not taking in enough calcium through her diet, the baby can deplete the mother’s bones leading to osteoporosis. That means we have milk, cheese, prenatal vitamins, and a ready supply of calcium rich antacids which help with mommy’s upset tummy and secretly dose her with calcium at the same time.
My other red flag is her hunger curve. Normally, my wife has a hunger curve that provides us anywhere from 30 minutes up to an hour before she goes from hungry to grumpy. At any point that pregnant-wife tells me she wants to eat, there will be food. The smart hunter-gather carries self-protective Mommy-snacks which are intended to increase his own life expectancy.
I have populated the house with quick snacks including bed-side emergency crackers which should help with a queasy stomach. As I usually cook for us, I am also trying to ensure that she gets the food she needs for healthy baby-building which includes a fair share of meat and eggs (protein) cooked in an iron skillet (iron). Lunch is typically a salad with chicken and her snacks are typically cheese, yogurt, bran crackers, and steamed milk with sugar free hazlenut syrup or a decaf tea. (Caffeine has been largely eliminated and alcohol is completey gone.)
I’m also looking at new recipes which should provide us with multiple meals in one shot which leaves us quick-heating left overs. The no-pasta lasagna was frankly pretty stunningly good.
Sleepiness
We hit a spot of luck with Mary’s teaching schedule this quarter because she can come home after lunch and power nap. While she doesn’t look pregnant yet to the untrained eye, she gets pretty fatigued around midday. These aren’t light dozey naps either. These are the hibernating she-bear naps. Nuff said.
The Baby Countdown
There is the state of being pregnant and then there is the process. For any engineering process, there exists an implementation plan and this baby is no exception.
First, we need the manual for the device. I ordered one for her and one for me.
- The Pregnancy Book: Month-by-Month, Everything You Need to Know From America’s Baby Experts
- The Expectant Father: Facts, Tips and Advice for Dads-to-Be, Second Edition
To me, Mary’s Mommy book started with “Isn’t this awesome! What a wonderful miracle!” and my Daddy book was “Here is how much this is going to cost.” It is probably useful information, but I’m not exactly hugging myself with the miracle of procreation after Daddy Chapter 1. 😉
Next, I needed to get our insurance house in order so I made certain that both of us had current insurance cards. Mary went to a medical check-up the Monday following our successful pregnancy test and everything looks ship-shape.
Which leaves my engineering mind spinning continously on the next list of items:
- Picking an OB-GYN
- Picking a Birthing Center
- Any possible wrestling with insurance company
- When to tell work people about upcoming parental status
- Prepping a space for our spawn… (room, crib, car seat, and etc.)
- Reworking my evening schedule to ensure I have time to help
- Prepping my plan for D-Day?
- Actual Baby maintenance planning
Expected baby day is September 7 and today we cross another day off between now and then.
Puck and I love our 10 nieces and 2 nephews, and we were thrilled yesterday to get 2 letters in the mail from our nephew Eric. In the first envelope:
Eric sent us a flower and wrote his and his sister's names.
Every year for the last 8 years I have made a family calendar for everyone for Christmas with lots of photos of the newest members of our growing family, and for the past 6 years or so, Puck has drawn a cover for each calendar featuring Shakti.
Here is the cover for this year's calendar.
In his second envelope, Eric sent us another picture with a one dollar bill folded inside. I love this picture. If you compare it to the calendar cover above, Eric did his own version, but this time he’s the one in the rocket ship heading into outer space. Wonderful!
Eric drew us a spaceship.
Ah, back to writing. I’ve been working on an application, and as the due date approached, I just couldn’t bring myself to type a blog when I should be typing on something else. This new adventure of pregnancy continues, and so far it seems to be going smoothly. I start off each morning with either boiled eggs or yoghurt, and after teaching and prepping then lunch with Puck, I head home to do some more work. I love teaching in the mornings because I love starting the day with my students in our classroom. It gets me energized.
Lately, I’ve had to add yet another step to my daily routine, the very Spanish siesta. About half an hour after lunch, my brain and body just shut down for an hour. Then, they are back up and ready to go. Of course, this sometimes means working later into the evening, but that’s life when your body has a mind of its own. I still try to get to bed before midnight, and I’ve even been trying to get myself tucked under the covers by around 11, unheard of for this night owl.
My body continues to change in little ways, and I think my appetite has gone up a little bit. I find myself craving a small snack between meals to stave off the hunger pains, but Puck is feeding me well. I’m lucky to have a supportive partner on this adventure. I talked him into trying to listen to my belly just in case he could hear a heartbeat (even though we both knew it was unlikely). Instead, he got to hear my tummy gurgling away.
I continue to rub my belly and send the thoughts to the little lifeforce inside, “Be well. Be healthy. Be well. Be healthy.” I find it soothing, and each night I fall asleep to the same mantra.
It’s kind of amazing that there are so many changes detectable in my body already. I’m probably in my 4th week now, and my stomach is slightly queasy much of the time, I head to the restroom more often than before, and every so often my heart just seems to work overtime for no apparent reason. But I am thankful to not be throwing up (at least not yet). Puck teased me when I told him today how crazy it seemed that this “tiny little thing” growing inside me was already affecting my body in so many noticeable ways. He said at least using “tiny little” added some affection to soften the use of the word “thing.”
Over a month ago I had set up an appointment with my doctor for a physical today, and it was nice to get my pulse, blood pressure, etc. checked and to have someone to question about various topics, such as what medicines are better for me to take or not take now. According to the doctor, the estimated due date is September 7th, which agreed with the one Puck had gotten from the American Pregnancy Association website (he set me up to get weekly e-mail updates from this site on what is happening inside me). She was surprised that at my age we got pregnant so very quickly, but then the women in my family just seem to be like that. All went well at the appointment, and now I will have to set about finding an ob/gyn.
After my appointment, I met up with Puck for lunch, and we stopped by Safeway where my honey bought me some decaffeinated tea. Yum. So far, caffeine seems like the main thing that I have to give up since I don’t smoke and I don’t drink alcohol often. I haven’t found the caffeine too difficult to give up, and my new tea will definitely help on that score during these cold winter months.
It’s strange how knowing something about yourself sends ripples out that affect your perspective on so many things. What you know can be a good thing or a bad one. In this case, being pregnant (definitely a good thing), I find myself wondering if that queasiness is because of the life starting to form inside me or if I would normally feel that way. I am more concerned about my body: am I tired, hungry, thirsty, hot, cold? And the hand drifts down to the belly, just to rest there a little while.
Part of me wants large flashing signs updating me on what is going on inside me. “Yyyyyesssss! Another cell has split! Look at that ectoderm forming!” It’s big news. Yet really not much is visibly happening. I have to be patient and wait to see what is coming, wait for those physical signs of developing life (when my body will be adapted to someone else’s needs), wait for a doctor to tell me in the weeks to come so many things that we just can’t know right now. Pregnancy is anticipation, preparation…and waiting.