Sex with Mum and Dad. No, not like that.

We told our respective parents a few weeks ago when Jenny was in the hospital, mostly because we kind of had to. In a perfect world we would have waited til around the twelve week mark, but then dehydration reared its head and the decision was made for us.

But we hadn’t told our respective siblings who live in other countries yet. We did that yesterday. It was good fun seeing my sister freak out. Her face kind of resembled the OMG Cat for a few seconds and I think she nearly cried. It was pretty funny. Jenny’s brother and his wife were less surprised; probably because we only Skype them if there’s something to tell. I figure they guessed what the news was. 

It was EXACTLY like this, actually.

Anyway, the whole process of telling people is weird. You tend to say things along the lines of ‘we’re pregnant’ or ‘we’re having a baby’ or sometimes you just show them the scan and they start to resemble OMG Cat, but when you do this what you’re really saying to your parents, your brothers and sisters and your friends is ‘WE HAD SEX!’

Which is not something you usually talk about with those people. 

Not in my family anyway.

And, as is usually the case with baby making (at least in my own experience, which isn’t much to be fair) there’s a lot of sex involved. A lot. Like, an exhausting amount. When we told our respective parents about the miscarriage the words ‘we’ve been trying for a while’ were said a lot. Now obviously during that sad time I didn’t vocalise what this translated to in my head.  But really when you say that you’re saying ‘WE HAD A LOT OF SEX!’ to your mum and dad.

Nobody else seems to think this way, except for me. Everybody gets caught up in the wonder and excitement of the impending baby that they forget about the horrible sex preamble. I mean, I know we’re adults and married and that horizontal furniture assembly [insert rod P into slot V] is kind of implied post nuptials, but saying it out loud is bizarre.

Or is it just me? 

"I am a man. And therefore useless."

I am a man.

And therefore, useless.

Okay, that’s a bit of an overstatement, and perhaps just refers to me, but since Jenny has been in and out of the hospital with hyperemisis (I could be spelling that wrong) and now that she’s home has been confined to bed for a large part of the time*, I’ve come to realise that I’m fairly useless.

Now I knew this already. My continued existence on this planet is made immeasurably easier by my wife, without whom I’d probably be living in my own filth [see also, parents]. She does countless things everyday that never enter my sphere of thought, yet with her out of action some of these decisions fall to me.

This is not a good thing.

A previous blog outlined my uselessness when it comes to thinking of food. Well, now that Jenny has to eat little and often she’s not eating at our usual dinner time and it turns out when it comes to cooking for and feeding myself, I lack inspiration or sometimes even the most basic understanding of the fact that I need food to survive. When I’m sitting there at 6 in the evening and start to feel hungry, I visit the kitchen, open the cupboard doors/fridge and stare at the various cans, jars and meat available to me and despite the fact that there are many many things that I feasibly could make, there are very few that I have the patience to actually just make for myself. If it involves anything more than pouring boiling water into it, heating it up in the microwave or at a stretch putting something in the oven, it’s not getting made.

I’ve been eating a lot of takeaways.

This uselessness extends to the house as a whole as well which in the absence of a woman’s touch has fallen into a state of disrepair. Again, overstatement but I know that when I’m sick Jenny continues about her daily duties and chores and everything is as it would be were I still fit and healthy. This is all making it sound like I do literally nothing about the house, which isn’t true but right now by the time I’ve shifted my arse to make something to eat – a process that can take up to and including an hour – I’m either too tired or simply can’t be arsed to do anything like hoover or clean. I’ve occasionally done the dishes but that’s about it.

I’m telling you, this pregnancy lark is fucking exhausting me.

Bye

* everything is fine with the progeny FYI. We had our scan and all’s good. Low risk pregnancy according to the doctor.

We're pregnant again.

Probably should have mentioned that before. 

9 weeks.

Ta-ra.

Serious Entry Time - Sorry.

So I haven’t written in a while.

Mostly because on the day of my last entry - the day I wrote a blog about, well, you can read it for yourself. I’m trying not to be too flippant in this entry - was the day we urgently went to the hospital because Jenny wasn’t feeling well and were told we had had a miscarriage.

Which was terrible.

Obviously.  

In fact that day was probably the worst day of my entire life. There was crying and numbness and crying and decisions and some more crying. Everything happened and was done all on that one day. Suffice to say it was fairly exhausting for all concerned.

But…it’s not all bad news because, although that day and the days after were fairly emotional and not the happiest, at least now we know that we can get pregnant and that’s surely a positive. The miscarriage thing, we’ve been told, is a fairly common occurrence – almost a third of all pregnancies go this way – so while yes, it was, and occasionally still is, horrible it’s nothing too major and we’ll be trying again before too long.

We’ve drawn a line under it and moved on.

Positive thoughts, people.

Positive thoughts.

"An appointment...for wanking."

One of our doctor’s visits involved Jenny getting all sorts of blood tests and internal examinations at the hospital. All fairly standard procedures in the run up to babies, and we were basically trying to work out why we hadn’t been able to conceive, despite having had quite a lot of sex (more on this later).

So Jenny has all of her tests and we start talking to the doctor afterwards. Once he’s asked her all her questions he starts writing down something illegible on his notepad and without looking away, calm as you like, asks ‘Have you ever had a semen analysis?’

It takes me a second to realise he’s probably not talking to Jenny anymore.

I compose myself and say no.

He tells us that I’ll have to provide one for testing, and for the briefest moment I think he means that he wants me to provide one right now, but then he says he’ll arrange an appointment for me to get one done and starts writing more notes.

This man is arranging an appointment for me to have a wank.

An appointment...for wanking.

Wanking!

After we leave I think of a joke I should of said but didn’t [“Where were you when I was fifteen, doc?” – cause I’m cool and call doctors ‘doc’ apparently] because I’m frankly too dumbfounded to speak at that moment. I don’t know why; it’s something we had known would likely happen but I never thought that it would actually come to pass (pun intended).

So we leave and eagerly await the day the letter will arrive with a date, place and time at which I’ll be indulging in some self love.

For science.

And babies.

I’ll tell you about it next time. As you may have guessed, it’s also quite awkward.

"Even the f*cking monster is pregnant!"

This is a wee story that just popped into my head there for a bizarre reason.

I just received an email from Amazon informing me that based on my previous purchases they think I’d be interested in the fact that Pacific Rim will be coming out on DVD soon.

[Bear with me; this does have relevance to the blog]

It reminded me of when we went to see it in the cinema at the Northern Ireland premiere. Because of the fact that it was the first showing in the country the cinema was packed out. We were in early, as we always are, and people watched for a bit.

A lot of pregnant women came in to the cinema with their husbands/partners. This enraged/upset my good lady wife as at the time we were still in the unsuccessfully trying, going to the doctors a lot stage. I just sort of rub her leg, make a smiley face and be as comforting as I can be in a cinema full of people. This sort of thing has happened a lot over the past wee while, getting a little sad at all the babies and mothers around.

But it’s quickly gotten over and forgotten about and the movie starts.

We’re about halfway through and two scientist types are inside the belly of a fallen monster. They hear a heartbeat. Oh no, maybe the monster isn’t dead. Quick! Everyone out. But wait. It’s not the big monster. it looks like they’re at the monster’s womb. It’s a little baby monster.

At which point Jenny turns to me with a face that half anger, half in stitches and says…

“Even the fucking monster is pregnant!”

And we crack up laughing in the cinema.

"...on toast."

Over the weekend Jenny hasn’t had much of an appetite and doesn’t know what she’s going to want for breakfast or lunch or dinner. Usually we have some idea of what we’ll have for tea before we come home from work but not at the minute. 

This has lead to the decision making falling to me.

Now I’m not a very good person when it comes to thinking up meals to eat, even when I don’t have a pregnant wife unsure of what she wants. If it were up to me my dinner schedule would be something like this:

Monday: Beans on toast.

Tuesday: Cheese on toast.

Wednesday: Scrambled eggs on toast

Thursday: Beans, cheese and scrambled eggs on toast

Friday: Takeaway…on toast.

The past two days I’ve had to go out at about 11AM to get things that Jenny has requested that she’s fairly certain she will/can eat. I’m ok with this as it takes the pressure off me, and my toaster, but it’s a strain on the wallet, especially as I’ve bought GTA V today (reasoning: if I’m playing it, I’m not spending money elsewhere).

We’re going shopping later. Hopefully Jenny has a better idea today of what she can and can’t eat. .

Or we’ll be buying a shitload of bread.

"Dildo cam. Dildo cam. Dildo cam!"

So we had the little scan the other day.

Not the one that you see all the time on TV and in movies. That comes later, so I’m told. No, we had a ridiculously early scan because we’re new to this whole thing, and aren’t totally convinced by the pee stick test.  

So we go to the hospital and Jenny gets the goo splodged on her belly that gets squidged around with the thingummydoodle (can you tell I don’t know much about these things?) and I see the familiar black and grey thing you see in these types of scenarios. Only I can’t see anything on the screen. At all. We’re informed that this is normal at such an early stage, and that there’s another test to try but it’s an internal one.

I fully expect to have to leave the room while this is happening because in some of the other tests we’ve done I’ve been asked to. Not here. I go behind a curtain for a while as Jenny gets undressed (odd, considering what’s about to happen). When everyone’s ready the nurse whips out a massive phallic thing that has a name but I’ll be damned if I can remember what it is as all that’s running through my head is ‘dildo cam, dildo cam, dildo cam!’

So while Jenny is lying on the bed, legs splayed in preparation, the nurse puts a condom on the dildo cam and starts to lube it up. This is the weirdest situation I’ve ever been in. And probably the closest I’m ever going to get to a threesome. It’d probably be quite similar as well; two girls doing their thing while I sit awkwardly off to the side, unsure of what to do.

And then all of a sudden she slips the camera in, wiggles it about a bit and shows us where our little spud is on the screen. Again, I have to take her word for it because I have no idea what I’m looking at.

But if I’m being honest I had a brief moment when she talked about a heartbeat. A heartbeat. A little human that we made. I mean, that’s phenomenal. I had a little inward cry and I think my face crumpled for a split second before I managed to stop myself.

God knows what I’ll be like at the 12 week scan. 

Gurning on the floor most likely.

Hmmm...

You know how I said I wasn't freaking out? Well, I don't think I've done any work today.

In fact I can't really remember much of anything after leaving the hospital this morning.

Hmmm...

It begins...

They say God has a wicked sense of humour.

That may well be true.

In my experience, I think He has more of a strange sense of timing.  

For just days after my good lady wife informs me that after a few months of trying, countless trips to the doctors for both her and myself, as well as having a lot of sex (a lot of sex), that she’s/we’re going to take a break from the baby making endeavours and not worry about it so much anymore, we discover that she just might be pregnant.

In fact, today we went for a scan and were shown a tiny little dot and a flutter of movement that’s apparently a heartbeat (I’m assured that there was a dot and a heartbeat by the doctor, I didn’t know what I was looking at and just nodded and tried not to look too petrified).

So it appears that I am going to be a father, and although its early days (six weeks) and I shan’t be counting any chickens until their hatched, or babies til they’re born, I thought I’d collect my thoughts on the impending birth on this here blog.

I haven’t had any freakouts or anything yet, but if I do I’ll write about it. I’ll also be recounting the events leading up to this day in my own inimitable style.

Also, it’ll be a private blog until such time as I feel I can actually tell folks about the good news, and/or until we’re more or less in the clear, complications wise. 

And thus, it begins...

Wish me luck

Ta-ra