The Importance of Being Ernest

19 weeks. My lovely girlfriend is as happy as I have ever known her to be. Even on a rainy day, even when work is a bitch. And by happy I mean round.

But that's not what you want to hear. You want to hear about yesterday's scan. The baby is moving and growing and healthy and correctly shaped without a cleft palate and with a penis. So OM fucken G we are having a boy. Oh, boy.

I feel terribly excited because despite my open-minded, free-thinking, non-identity pushing, anti gender stereoptyping, hippy-femmo-lezo-zen-tofu loving, bong-smoking pretensions, I still can only properly relate to a person when I know what sex she or he is. There it is. I can't even grammatically refer to him or her without being incorrect ("them/they") or long-winded and awkward ("him or her"), or sexist ("him"). Now, I have often been grammatically incorrect, long-winded and awkward and sexist...but surely one must, in this instance, realise the importance of the -albeit borrowed-identity that gender lends one?

I was reading Oscar Wilde last night. He says"one" a lot, in that way. I find it hilarious.

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.

I am excited and delighted to think there is a boy in there and he will be our son. And he may well be terribly loud and boistrous but hopefully he will read Oscar Wilde a bit, too.

Either way we are going to train him to give us good cuddles by making a velcro suit that my mother thought up and sticking him to us.

We are also seriously researching slings.

18 weeks

Hi. There is still a baby in my girlfriend's belly and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger every day. Which rocks. KT is now 18 weeks pregnant and starting to feel gentle prods and pokes from the inside. Last night I went to sleep with my hand on the round bump and dreamt I could feel the movement from the outside. Or did it happen? I will never know. Then I dreamt on... From the various prods I could clearly see if it was a hand or a foot pressing outwards through the skin. Like in Alien. Then the baby pressed its little face against the inside and I could see the shape of it. Then the face got clearer and clearer and I freaked out a little bit.

The next scan is in about 5 days. If the universe wills it, we will learn about the male-female status. So the baby had better enjoy it last few days of having a pure, gender-free, identity-free existence. We need to get naming, so this will help. KT has a boy's name that comes from her family which just needs to be signed off by M and J, the daddies. She wore me down on it over the course of the last two years, so I'm in.

We have not discussed names with other people because once upon a time I was pregnant with our red herring Donor Dad and we (just him and me) thought Grover was a groovy name, like Grover Cleveland, the jazz muso. And then because of some little known kids show from the 70s, everyone was totally mean to us about it and really pleasant evenings with friends were unexpectedly ruined. People are cool with naming their child after Oscar the Grouch and Felix the Cat and Milo and Otis and Winnie the Pooh and Jack and the Beanstalk and Oliver Twist. You never hear "Oh don't call your son Oliver! He'll be teased at school because everyone will think of the little Dickensian orphan boy and start singing "who will buy?" whenever he walks past." No, because some parents pushed through on the grounds that the kid would have his own personality eventually and the connotations would fade and die. And now all you think is "Oh for christ's sake, not another fucking Oliver." I am, at times, a teacher of children, so I know how many Olivers there are. And, Hollies and Mollies and Tom Tom Toms. Not many Pollies, though. But then people would keep telling her to put the kettle on, so that's probably why. You have to be a bit of a pioneer with names, surely. Anyway, I don't want to use Grover --even though it is a fabulous, gorgeous name and I LOOOVE the friendly, furry little blue monster at the end of this book --so don't start in, I'm just making a point about not discussing names.

So we probably have a boy name; we have a couple of girl names on the list, and we are almost ready to buy a big sexy washing machine for nappies. The washing machine will be called a Speed Queen. Yep. You can do lines off the top of it. Which you need when you have a first baby and you're using cloth nappies. We don't have the nappies yet. We are researching nappies.

We are also saving money because we are going to lose our main income when KT leaves her job in July. No paid maternity leave. I am doing some work and things are good right now, but the sporadic nature of my freelance stuff means we are instigating a fabulous saving plan so we can buy the nappies and also pay rent till KT satrts taking in some editing jobs at home. Bit like taking in washing. She does the ironing & mending for a bit extra.

TRIMESTER TWO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Go on, cry.

What you're looking at here is a PERFECT 12 week foetus. Yesterday's scan was the nuchal one which for us was mostly about was there going to still be a heartbeat (apart from mine that was beating for Australia) and was the baby going to be growing at the right rate. The nuchal news tells you about chances of Down's and possibly some other syndromes, which for us was obviously important as we would need all the prep we could get on that kind of baby, but we were honestly just so wanting it to be alive (with no "real" reason to have been thinking otherwiswe.)

It even has a brain with two hemispheres. It is a very pretty baby, I think, from the profile, despite the face that you can see its brain. I wondered for a split second "is it ok that the baby is transparent?". Then I realised that so was my darling GF KT and she was fine. The magic of it all. Doctor very happy. Dads very happy. Mums very happy and relieved. Grannies pissing selves. We know we are not home and hosed but we realise now that we never actually will be ever again home or hosed.

Baby does have arms and legs, despite appearances. Sex tbc. Again not important at all to me as I am such a free thinking liberal minded groovy unlabelled yummy mummy to be. But important to daddies and helpful with naming by committee so we might know in a couple months.

Bonza, eh?

gay your life must be

there is a kookaburra living in the park opposit the house. this is not it . this is a stuffed one i saw at the museum. i think kookaburras are my favorite bird. i like really obvious things like mozart is my favorite composer and picasso is my favorite painter.

anyway the kookaburra is young and alone and living on the street in the inner city. he doesn't know how to laugh properly. we hear him every morning doing that run-up laugh they do, but it never starts up, fully fledging, so to speak into the hearty cackle. KT thinks it needs to hear others to copy. She thinks we could get a recording of one and play it. I did actually take a photo of it but it was not very good. Maybe it's depressed.

All well on the preggas front.. As of yesterday KT is more pregnant than I ever was. We are glad to be passed that milestone and looking forward to the eleven week mark in a couple days and discussing names with the boys. Wish us luck with that.

Twenty Ten

My Mrs is Ten Weeks up the duff today. It's still in there and we even saw the little tacker. ( I almost said blighter which is not the best of choices). We saw the now "foetus" a week and two days ago and it has a heartbeat. KT and the two Dads were there too so it was really crowded in the little dark room and therefore didn't take much for me to flood it with tears. I had been a wee anxsty in the lead up let me let you. My history of scans is appalling, bloody awful. It is riddled with comments like No, that's not an eight week foetus, more like six and I'm sure it's just at a funny angle; sometimes they get camera-shy and I might just see if the Doctor is available to come talk to you and I can't really see the hearbeat.

So when we saw the heartbeat straight away it was a good start. But what I wanted to hear was That is for shizzle an eight week foetus. And what we got was 8 weeks 5 days. So I bathed the room and everyone in it with my relief. I know it's only rock and roll, but I like it.

Last night I went to my twenty year school reunion. I told everyone of my impending motherhood. That was huge fun. People were totally excited and gorgeous. Lot of babies born of that year. An average of eleven per old-girl. Quite a few miscarriages among them too. Hadn't seen most of the women there for twenty years. Everyone said I was exactly the same. I denied it.

So now we crawl to the second tri and see if we can score a field goal. I shouldn't do sport talk, I know.

7 weeks

Everything's going well. The progesterone levels were in the zone of early pregnancy and since then there have been many signs and symptoms to support the theory that we have a good pregnancy on our hands. The boobs thing is pretty cool, for a start. But it is somewhat undercut by the fact that KT is running at about four hundred and thirty degrees, due to the progesterone, which means that on a warm day I cannot touch my girlfriend. Really cannot touch her. She's like a super hero and her thing is heat. Hotgirl, they call her.

-"Help, my bed is comfortable, my sheets are fresh and cool and I'm nearly falling asleep!! Who can I turn to? Who will save me?"

-"Never Fear, Hotgirl is here to save the day and/or night. Just stay calm and still while I snuggle up to you and set you and the whole bed alight. That should keep you awake."

-"Thanks Hotgirl. Say, can you iron my shirt for tomorrow with your bare hands?"

-"No I'm too tired to move. My powers are confined to snuggling, radiating heat and getting rid of any pesky foodstuffs around the house or suburb."

and scene.

pregnant

KT180 is pregnant. We have managed to get her over the line. Six weeks in at the moment. The crying that came out of me when I saw the two lines. What a blissful christmas we had. We did another test on christmas morning just to be sure. It was also positive.

During the last week which has included telling family and a few close friends and a lovely NYE, KT has had some pain and one proper episode of dark (not fresh) spotting, and several follow up episodes of dark brown (old) blood (tiny amounts) in the mucus. We have had several heart attacks and went up to the hospital and got her bloods tested. Later that day we got the hCG levels back and they were fine. This is the pregnancy hormone and she had 25,000 somethings of it-which was consistent with a 6 week preg. But we went on the morning of NYE and nobody was working and we couldn't get a scan and although we also got the progesterone tested it is now the 3rd of january and we still don't know her levels. Progesterone is damn important and if the levels are low then we could maybe do something about it but not if we wait much longer and, like, we got the blood taken last year.

So we have confined ourselves to bedrest (important for the partner to rest a lot too) and videos. A friend came to visit the slightly nervous mothers-to-be yesterday and reccommended we hire out Junebug. Amy Adams is pregnant throughout the film. How appropriate we thought. [spoiler alert] The baby dies. KT would not let me ring this friend and tell her off. Come on!

Anyway we might hear from the hospital tomorrow and get the levels and in the meantime we are pretty good as gold girls. Plus when she sits up she is nauseated. I want her to vomit with it.