Lack of fatherhood blogs

In doing my searches for like minded fathers and fathers to be, I found plenty of blogs, but not many of them are kept up. That is a bit disheartening. I'm pretty confidant I will keep this up, but I'm sure the others were also writing with the purpose of continued writing.

We shall see now, won't we? I also have not yet told my wife. I hope she approves, as this is for her and the child. Doing things for her always causes me a certain amount of anxiety as I like to make her happy. But I digress, as this isn't about her so much.

Well, it is a little about her as I discuss her pregnancy and whatnot. She is starting to show a bit and it's becoming uncomfortable for her. We ordered a maternity pillow for her. Hopefully that helps. If it doesn't, I'm sure you'll hear about it from me.

Since I haven't updated this for a bit

I know I claimed it would be running item, so maybe it's more of a jogging item, but here are a few more things that have changed since this whole endeavor has started:

4. I see movies and TV is a whole other light. I'm super sympathetic to parents and their plights. I saw Taken before getting pregnant and enjoyed it, and I watched it again recently and it kind of freaked me out thinking that in 18 or 19 years I might be dealing with similar issues. And I won't even be a badass to stop it.

5. My employment status is much more stressful now. I'm in no real danger of losing my job, but man does it feel more stressful in case I lose my job. I mean, I would live and so would my life, but uh, my baby don't make any money.

6. Our eating habits have changed. It's not that our diet has changed much, but where we go out to eat has changed. We're scoping out the more baby friendly joints and planning for the future.

7. I think about my father a whole lot more. My father died 11 years ago (when I was 19) and I've always thought about him plenty, but now I think about him more. I could really use his advice and guidance and picking his brain to find out what he went through becoming a father.

Losing My Office

So we live in a two bedroom townhouse. It's fine for two people. Like everyone we could use more space, but we aren't in a crucial space crunch. But with the baby on the way, it's now looking like my office will be occupied by a baby and baby themed equipment.

So now is the time we need to clear out that room and paint if need be. It's currently a pretty awesome "Incredible Hulk" green. Technically it's an "Appletini" green, but that sounds too girlie for me. But my wife has come up with some schemes to use the green and paint flowers on it so it looks like a field. We'll see how creative we really feel when / if we do paint.

Then it's finding a place for the 2 desks, 1 TV, and 1 bed in there. The bed might actually stay for a bit as someone may need to wake up a lot and breast feed. Either way, whatever stays and goes we will still probably move everything out to do some cleaning and painting.

So where does all that go? If we had a basement, that would be and easy answer. But since we don't, it's likely the family room will have a larger computer presence in it. That leads me to needing to figure out the cabling situation and probably moving some stuff to storage. Who knew that something so small would take up so much space?

Purchasing a crib

Every time my wife says she wants to talk about Cribs, I can't help but think of the stupid MTV show Cribs. With that said, crib shopping can be just as overwhelming as everything else involved with having a baby.

First, you want something safe. There are apparently a million ways a crib can kill a child, and every crib advertises new ways that it prevents new ways of dying. It's pretty crazy. The best thing to do is head on down to a big store that has a large inventory, as well as a varied inventory. You need to see the high end as well as the low end to see what you're paying for.

Low end cribs are typically not solid wood and a little shaky. Those are the floor models. I hear from people that when you assemble them yourself, they aren't nearly that bad. Probably a sales technique for the expensive stuff. The low end ones all seem ok, but probably won't last if you want to put a second kid in it.

On the high end we see multithousand dollar cribs of solid wood and grand design. Throw in the words "certified organic" and you can throw another 25% on top of it. You're long past the point of diminishing returns when looking at these types of cribs. It's just crazy how intricate some of these designs are. Clearly more for the parent than the child.

So the middle tier is where we pretty much reside. We aren't poor, but we definately aren't rich by any means. So with the middle tier, you can still get solid wood and sturdy design. You get non toxic and safe and complying to all the safety standards and whatnot. You can even get what I consider to be overly elaborate design. We've decided to go with the Netto CUB Sleeper. We ordered it yesterday and now I'm overly excited to get it.

This leads me to my next post... Losing my office

About to tell work

So now that the family knows, it's time to tell work. This will be fun to finally be able to spill the beans on my secret, especially because there are a few other people at work that are pregnant and due around the same time. Also, this will finally shut up all the people that have been nagging me to have kids of my own :)

So we told my family

One of the joys of being pregnant is actually getting to tell people about it. At least as long as it's a positive thing, which it definitely is for us. So today we finally broke the news to my family.

We started with my mother, who is quite baby crazy. She has nine grand kids already, so this will be her tenth. She was very excited and even said she is going to get started on a baby quilt, which my wife and I both love. We then went through the litany of brothers and sisters that I have and told them and they were all very thrilled.

The way we told them was very obvious, but still fun. We were both on speaker phone and asked them to guess why we were calling. Pretty much everyone got it right, except my oldest sister wasn't thinking that, but her kids were.

It's pretty fun to be able to share this joy with everyone now. Keeping that bottled up is perhaps the hardest secret I've had to keep.

Babies Я Us

Lordy lordy has it been a while. Things are still going strong, and the morning sickness is still strong. We're at 12 weeks, so we're about to enter the second trimester, so hopefully those will subside shortly.

So, a big contributor to first child anxiety, Babies Я Us. Now I have been a pretty calm cucumber so far. I know I'll be a good father and my wife will be a great mother. We as a team can handle this. Going into Babies Я Us and doing a registry yesterday, it kind of planted some doubts in my head.

First, my wife is really on top of things. She definitely has things covered. I, on the other hand, haven't a clue like I thought I did. So we walk in and it's a pretty good sized store. They call it a super store for a reason. So right at the entrance is the registry uh, registration desk. So there's a good sized crowd there, but we only wait a few minutes and get to sit down.

After we sit down, we start with the paper work. There's a waiting list 5 deep, and now 6 deep for the scanner guns they use to register. As we are filling out paper work, they have a "code Adam". That's Babies Я Us talk for a lost child. The poor little girl was on the verge of tears and that brought my wife to the same verge. After a couple of minutes they girl's father shows up and gives ID and picks up his daughter.

So, after we finally complete the process we walk around for a bit looking at things we will need to check out. My wife is so on top of things, she pretty much knows like 80% of what to register for and figures we will complete that online. Phew, that will save us some time. I'm then informed we will be here for a while, and it's only the first trip of three or four.

So after about 30 minutes our name is called and we get a gun. We head right over to the car seats as that's something we feel we need to see in person. Let me say, there are a trillion options. Thankfully my dear wife has narrowed them down already based on safety reviews and whatnot, so we really only need to look at three. So we check those out, playing with them and trying to figure them out and we move on to cribs.

Now cribs are something I've never thought to be worthy of spending much on, but after looking at all these, the low end ones seems pretty unsafe and unstable to me. I don't think we'll be blowing our savings on one, but the solid wood ones seem like the way to go. So after looking at cribs for a bit, and a few other things, the wife is feeling hungry and nauseous, so we give the gun back and go grab some food at TGI Friday's.

Now, with constant morning sickness, the wife has some unusual demands. At least unusual for a man that will never have to be pregnant. So we order a small amount of food, but the highlight is the wife saying to the waitress, "Could you please not mention food to me?" Now, as she explained it's because thinking about food you don't want makes you more nauseous. The waitress was cool and nice about all that.

So we complete the refueling and head back. We do more investigation of cribs, look at the car seats with some help from the employees, look at play pens (by that I mean, pack 'n' plays), look at bassinets, look at the diaper disposal units, and my wife proceeds to educate me on all kinds of other things I had no clue about. Like what's a Bumbo? It's one of the many mysteries to me until I see it in action. I can't even recall half the things I learned that I had no idea about. It feels like I'm in over my head.

So, that was my day. My head is spinning still. I need to recenter myself so I'm not so freaked out.