33 and a half weeks

It's been a very busy time. Part of the process for me has been getting money together so that my Mrs can leave work and we don't go to the poor house. We are really hoping that she gets a few weeks off before the kid comes. Every shop assistant and passer-by seems to feel that they owe it to kt180 to tell her that she could go any day now, that she has a big baby and that she could be having twins. Yeah...they know. In any case we're putting the birth centre on speed dial.

There are some brown discharge stories but I don't wanna say anything about kt that's too private. (ha!)

All is well.

Rock and Roll

uluru by dayDear Blog,

We spent Saturday night at a birth class. There were 5 pregnancies there, 5 partners and one Grandmother-to-be. Of the 5 partners, two were women. Of the two women, I was one. It was very odd when the midwife said at the beginning "OK, men on one side and women on the other." She quickly realised her mathematical and political error and amended most of the rest of the night to referring to the "partner" and not the "man" .

In the video, we saw German women in labour, clutching ropes and husbands. They looked like they were in a lot of pain. I have been very proud of my darling and her very big belly. (It really is big. This photo is two weeks old. It has got bigger). I still am proud, but Jesus, i was a bit worried about her for a bit there. I did that thing, watching the panting, crying germans, when you giggle a lot because you are so terrified. I looked around the room. Other people looked serene and interested. I looked at the pregnant bellies. All of the babies are due weeks sooner than ours. All of the bellies were smaller than KT's. I was even prouder/scareder.

She can almost not get into the shower recess. It only opens so wide. Clambering out of the car, she then closed the door on her belly, not realising it stuck out quite that far.

It was certainly a good and practical class and I feel much more in the spirit of things having done it. I have a good sense now of all the stages of labour, what to do when KT's water breaks (clean it up), when to go in to the Birth Centre ( when the contractions are five minutes apart and/or she can't stand the pain any more or I can't stand the screaming) and what pain relief she can get there (a bath). Also we got a bit friendly with the other lesbians and maybe if one of us is feeling brave we might even call them. Coz they seemed really nice and pretty together. Which could mean they made an attractive couple or that they were relatively grounded and emotionally stable.

There is an adventure ahead, it seems. And that's all before the little tacker comes home.

Soon this will be a parenting blog and not a trying to conceive blog or a pregnancy blog. Parenting seems so grown-up.

Thirty Weeks

Just spent weekend in the country not really doing anything except rubbing KT's delicious belly. I am thinking a lot about the Olgas and Uluru when I look at it. She is thirty weeks. I have even started to photograph it in different lights, much like the rock. I told daddy M that she looked like Uluru and he said I had to respect the indigenous culture and not climb her. We are getting better at being funny with each other which is great for our bonding and understanding. Things are going fabulously with M and J, actually.

Also a whale, I am thinking of.I have to resist saying "my big girl" when I see her as it upsets her enormously. With the emphasis on enormous. Have thought, therefore, that Jonah would be a greeeaaat name for our baby boydee.

You gotta ac-cent Chuwaitthepositive.

Indie Film fodder

Now it just feels like gloating. My GF is bloating and I am gloating.

Watched Away We Go last night on video, being a huge Allison Janney fan and also really liking that nice young fellow John Krasinski when I saw him in It's Complicated, which I bloody LOVED.
Plus it is a baby-on-the-way film. I noticed they never talked to the baby or engaged with her. The pregnant character was about as pregnant as KT is and not once did they have a conversation interrupted by either "Baby's kicking ohmygod!" or "Baby hasn't kicked in ages, ohmygod!" Good film, but. Melanie Lynskey is in it for a bit -another old fave- and her character is a bit sad and then it is revealed that she had her fifth miscarriage last Thursday. I think a fifth misscarriage would drive me to amateur pole dancing, too. It still touches a real nerve, that story for other folks. It's beautifully dealt with in this movie.

I can't believe at all how far we've come. We changed biological mothers. We changed fathers. Would a natural disaster stop us? I have no steady income and my partnerr is leaving work in nine weeks! Baby on the way! Can't wait! This is the best story ever.

viable pregnancy-baby

we got ourselves a baby in there, swimming around and kicking. 24 weeks and all's well. Personally I am drinking like a fish for the last few months in the lead up to my own pre-coception health kick. We are also getting rid of a large amount of stuff so there is room for the bouncing baby. The pregnancy is going well. One thing we learned at the last scan was that the palcenta was over the cervix -which is dodgy for the birth and means if it doesn't move, kt has to have a caesar salad and she is a vegetarian apart from some fish oil of a morning. But usually they move and by all accounts the baby has kicked it out of the way.
this is a terrible post and i'm not fishing.

BoyBandBaby

Gotta heaps lovely friend, B with a boy kid, W. B is up the duff with another boy. We got a boy nearly. Gonna start up a boy band.

22 weeks. Picked out a name and all 4 parents like it. Tick.

Putting a small shed in the backyard to store quite a lot of our stuff.

People often ask "have you got his room ready yet? " ahhhhh...he doesn't have a room. Does he need one?

He moves and wriggles and kicks a lot, which we love, and only adds to my dream of him being in a boyband.

Livin' on a Prayer

My friend B came round with her little boy W today. I minded W while his mother went off to audition for Homo and Gay. Top show. W is about two and a half and his mother has taught him to sing the theme song from The Muppet Show. It is a classy act and she is a classy broad. Looking after this amazing, joyful and obedient little boy made me very much look forward to raising my own one, and teaching him the same song and many others like it. I hope my son likes Sesame Street but I will disinherit him if he doesn't like The Muppet Show.

Oh, and BTW guys, we are at the HALFWAY THERE point. The baby is moving all the time. Well, continually, not continuously. I teach grammar at times and I like to put those two words in context.

Anyway, has anyone read much about The Continuum Concept? It's a 1960s parenting theory. I get that no matter how you raise your kid you are somehow going to put your mother's or your sister's or your mother-in-law's nose out of joint. Like, that is a total given, right? Like, even though you don't expect them to adhere too pedantically to your system and so it will hardly affect them at all...they will still take the way you parent personally. Weird.
SOO...in light of that, I figure we may as well piss as many people off as possible in the biggest freakin way possible by talking about and exploring the notion of attachment parenting.

Not really. I mean, yes, exploration of attachment parenting, but not really in such a beligerent way. I have beligerent moments but they are usually healthily exorcised and expressed on the M5 where they belong.

I like what I have read so far about The Continuum Concept and attachment parenting. I think it would be pretty hard not to everput the baby down because you might just have to put it's a great place to start and I reckon with four parents and many other fam members and sundries we could keep that baby in a sling and in arms relatively a lot. Plus the other thing you do id demand feed, which I am totally all about and so is the Mrs.

The Daddies, M and J are not mentioned a lot in this blog to protect their privacy, and because they don' t even know about it, so it's not fair to talk about them too much behind their backs. We see them about once a week and a real and lovely bond has grown in the year and four months that we have known them. They have their own very busy and very social lives and are very much looking forward to a son. So far discussions and arrangements have gone well, and we have agreed on the legal and parenting arangements with much discussion. It hasn't alsways been easy, but we are getting better at communicating, the four of us. And KT and I are getting super good at not sweating the small stuff.

We have not had the boys to ourselves since we learned the sex of our baby. When we do, we will talk about names. I'm excited about that. And a bit nervous.