Why I love you Wednesday...

Because without you I’d be rubbish.  Because you’re clever and smart but don’t have an ounce of arrogance.  Because you’re always gorgeous, even when you don’t think you are.  Because when I’m grumpy you’ll know what I need to cheer me up.  Because you make me laugh out loud more than anyone else.  Because you put up with all my shit.  Because you’re going to be my baby’s mummy.

These and many more things are why I love you wife.

If there's something or someone you love, get thee over to the linkamythingy at Expatbaby Adventures and join in!

Selfish

Anyone who has read a few of my previous posts can probably tell that I’m really excited about the impending arrival of our little one.

But there are times when I look at how my life is now, the things I can do and the time I have to do them in, and think “never again”.  I’d be lying if I said I was 100% okay with that.  Because I am kind of selfish, and the thing I’m probably most selfish about is my time.  I like having time to myself, time to do the things which benefit me in some way, but not really anyone else.

At the moment I play basketball two nights a week (sometimes three, if there’s a game and training in the same week), I usually get out cycling at least once, we do a pub quiz one evening (wild, I know…) and I sink a quite ridiculous amount of time into a game called Bejewelled Blitz on Facebook.  

Maybe you’re familiar with the latter?  You swap coloured jewels around on a board to line up ones of the same colour, they disappear, you get points, and chain reactions, and a game lasts only a minute.  Except you never just play it once, you play it sixty times in a row.  If you are not familiar with Bejewelled Blitz I strongly urge you not to seek it out, it’s like digitised heroin, but without the euphoria.  It causes you to ignore the people close to you.  I might start a support group.

Not long ago I worked out how long, in total, I had spent playing Bejewelled Blitz.  To my eternal shame, that game has consumed 48 hours of my life.  TWO WHOLE DAYS.  That’s nearly 3,000 games.  As an indicator of how selfish I am, it’s a pretty good one.

I know my wife worries about whether she can rely on me to be supportive once the baby is here.  I can’t tell her she’s being ridiculous, because the evidence is against me.  I honestly believe I’ll be fine, that once the baby is born it will be the Methadone to my current lifestyle's heroin.  Just as addictive and all consuming, but with its own complications.

Things will have to be forfeited; things that I love doing and am genuinely attached to, and I’m happy to let them go.  But that little voice inside me does sometimes pipe up: “what if not playing basketball makes you unbearably miserable?”  I guess I won’t know the answer to that until the little man joins us in the outside world.

Existing parents tell me it’s crucial to keep aside time to be a couple, and I agree.  We both want (as all parents presumably do) to get the balance right, to not have our individual lives utterly consumed by having a child.  I don't hear so much about how important it is to keep some "me" time.  Maybe it's not, I don't know.  I do know that there’s only so much time in the day, and when lots of it is being taken up by a miniature person something’s going to have to give.  I just hope it’s something as trivial as that stupid game, not something which actually matters.  Above all, I hope that I can stop being selfish.

Daddy Does Antenatal

Tomorrow afternoon we have our fourth and final antenatal class.  This is a shame for two reasons:

1.  I will have to stay at work all day on future Mondays, rather than sloping off early.
2.  I've actually been quite enjoying them, contrary to what all the men who had already attended them said.

I don't think antenatal classes are really designed around men (and rightly so, of course.  The only time that should change is if the premise of that Schwarzeneggar travesty 'Junior' ever comes true) but I wanted to go along.  As a man I've found that the best way for me to feel like I'm not completely fucking useless during the pregnancy is to be around for everything that I can, just in case it turns out I can be helpful.

Weeks one and two were about, respectively, labour and pain relief.  Most of week one was spent talking about that woman on TV recently who whipped up a tasty placenta smoothie following the birth.  No-one in our group was planning on doing anything similar, surprisingly.  Week two was primarily happy recollections of the psychotropic side effects of various pain meds.  Both these weeks there were more women than men, but a pretty good showing from the Y chromosome camp.  Not so in week three.

A Knitted Boob

Breast feeding!  You'd think the men would be (figuratively) all over that, no?  It's tits innit.  But there were only four guys this time.  Perhaps the midwife had put the rest off by mentioning that there would be ACTUAL BABIES coming along.  Luckily, as an expectant dad, I quite like babies, so I was looking forward to meeting them.  Maybe it was something else.  Had the men, like my wife, somehow misinterpreted "there'll be some new mums coming along to talk about it" as "there'll be some new mums coming along to give a demonstration of breastfeeding while you all sit, watch and take notes"?  I don't know but, whatever the reason, men were thin on the ground.

It's a shame, as I've found that the midwife running our classes has been informative, very good at putting people at ease and (importantly for me) keeping the men involved.  So all credit to her for being great.  Tomorrow is the final instalment; complicated labours.  I'll definitely be there, and I'll be as participative as I can, I really hope my fellow dads will be joining me.

What were your experiences of antenatal classes?  Were they useful?  Did you make friends?  We're being encouraged to go for coffee after the class, am I going to be the only man there?

Silent Sunday

The Waiting Game

Earlier in the week @motherventing blogged about how she can’t take a compliment.  It’s taken me this long to remember my answer to the question she posed at the bottom of said blog: “what was the last compliment you received?”

It was this: “you are a patient man”.  I rather liked that one, and I think I accepted it by mumbling something unintelligible and largely non-committal, probably including the word “thanks” but not a direct acknowledgement of the compliment.  Then I changed the subject.  I think it is fairly usual for us to be overcome with Britishness where compliments are concerned.  But, despite my none too eloquent acceptance speech (thank goodness I will never have to accept an Oscar) I was actually really rather pleased with the compliment.

Now I’ve gone and ruined it.  I don’t feel patient at all.  I feel fed up, and bored.  I don’t want there to be (probably) another five and a half weeks until the baby arrives.  More if he’s late. 

Of course I’m not suggesting I’d prefer him to be premature, as wonderful and special as those early arriving babies are.  I’d just like to wake tomorrow and find that the world had slipped into a convenient time warp during the night and left me with no more waiting.  Maybe it could be something to do with Dr Who.  Or a DeLorean.  Or Stephen Hawking.

I still enjoy the things I’ve been enjoying throughout the pregnancy; feeling the kicks and punches of the little guy as he enjoys his pre-birth aerobic classes, reading about what developments are going on as the weeks pass, acquiring all the teeny tiny clothes and, most of all, going to bed at night and knowing that the time I wake up will be dictated by my alarm clock and not the cries of a newborn. 

I’m still waiting, because I have no choice, but if someone says I’m a patient man before the birth I’ll be forced to disagree.  I just hope it’s a quality I regain once the baby is born!

Excuse me, I've bought this buggy and now I have no money left

I guess most people have to consider their finances before deciding to start a family; me and Mrs L both have secure (as they can be at the moment) jobs and finances that are more or less under control.  We're certainly not wealthy, but we're okay.  Reasonable to assume then that we could afford to embark on this baby-making journey, right?

Wrong.

I have never felt as poor as I do when I walk around the baby and toddler area of a department store.  I find myself staring in disbelief at the range of buggies (sorry, travel systems) on offer, prices nudging toward four figures.  Cots and car seats vie for your cash.  Except they're not vying for it, because you NEED to have all of it.  If we don't buy the latest, shiniest, expensivest pieces of baby paraphernalia does it make us bad parents?  I hope not.

Thankfully, we didn't have to re-mortgage our house in order to afford all the baby-bling, family came to the rescue.  With our nephew approaching eighteen months old Mrs L's brother and his wife had an attic full of pretty much everything we needed to welcome our own little person into the world.  A visit to London saw us return with a car so chock full of stuff that I'd had to hum the Tetris theme while I loaded it up.  This was when Mrs L was only about three months into the pregnancy, and it was one of those "oh wow, we're really having a baby!" moments.

A Quinny Buzz 3 - We have one, but ours didn't cost four hundred quid, phew!

Which was definitely preferable to the alternative; an "oh crap, we're bankrupt!" moment.

My Dad - He's a Hugger not a Fighter

Inspired by this blog post by @relucthousedad I've been getting all misty eyed and rose tinted about growing up (and hugs, obviously).

My dad is a big bear of a man, all barrel chested and beer bellied.  He has arms like tree trunks as a result of spending almost all his working life lugging around bits of trees.  He did an apprenticeship where the reward for completion was his colleagues stripping him naked, covering him from head to toe in PVA glue and then coating him in sawdust, followed by being tied up in the workshop toilets until the end of the day.  He's the kind of man who people refer to as "big man", you know, like that vigilante hero who threw the alleged fare-dodging scrote off that Scottish train recently?  Yeah, big man.  

All of which would suggest that I grew up in a hug free cocoon, a world of handshakes and scarcely comprehensible manly grunts in place of communication.  Possibly, as a treat if I'd done well at something, I might get tarred and feathered, or something else of a similar nature to my dad's colleagues bizarre ritual.

Thankfully my dad doesn't live up to the expectations that his appearance set out for him.  It's as if when the genes were put together to make him the supervisor on the assembly line had pretensions to physical comedy, placing an entirely inappropriate personality within those physical features.  Which is why my dad is a lovely, loveable, complete and utter softy.  The only man of his age and background I know who actively seeks out hugs at every opportunity.  When me and Mrs L visit we are welcomed with a hug.  If I (or pretty much anyone) happens to be stood up at the same time as he is and gets within range there's a good chance they'll be getting a hug.  He even asks for hugs, and it is rare that he's turned down.  He's always hugged us, and he probably always will, and we've nearly got him to stop doing that manly hug/pat thing too, which makes the hugs even better.

A Far More Photogenic Father and Son Hug Than I Will Ever Manage

I'm pleased to say my dad's love of a hug has been passed on to me and my brother (nature or nurture I wonder; my sister, who he was and is equally affectionate toward, is an awkward recipient of any physical contact) who will enjoy a hug with each other, with parents, with family, with friends. 

So I know our little boy won't ever go without a hug from his dad, or his grandad, I just hope I can pass on the love of the hug to him.