Wow, I cannot tell you how tired I have been lately. Both of us have been working pretty hard lately trying to get a few things caught up so that when the time comes for BM to take some time off from work, we will be in a position to do that.
Well, over the past two weeks, I have become very fond of the McDonalds Ice Coffee. Of course BM (Baby’s Momma) hasn’t had the pleasure of coffee for a couple months now, but I don’t have to live by such strict dietary rules so I have been using coffee as a lift me up to keep the day going.
I think it caught up with me this weekend… Both of us were so tired both yesterday and today that we took it pretty easy this weekend. Both days we took naps lasting more than a couple hours. After we woke up today BM started doing some research and it turns out there is some scientific debate about what kind of physical changes happen to the fathers during pregnancy.
Sure enough one of the primary experiences is being tired. The theory that BM was telling me about indicated that she is putting of pheromones which cause me to experience some pregnancy symptoms not the least of which is being unusually tired. Other symptoms include indigestion and headaches. Go figure.
So, I guess for the time being, I will continue to enjoy may daily iced coffee from McDonalds in an effort to combat the attacking pheromones :)
Slate has an interesting article about the changes to the father during pregnancy. You can read it by clicking here. Wikipedia also has a page dedicated to it which you can read by clicking here.
Over the years I have run across a couple of handy sites for checking out the popularity of baby names. I thought you all might like to see them as well.
Who better to know the US names than our great Social Security Administration. They have a neat system that let’s you browse popular names by year, by state, and overall popularity. http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/
The coolest baby name site that I saw a couple years ago and now have a purpose for digging through it is called BabyNameWizard.com and can be found here: http://www.babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/. This site allows you to track the popularity of a name over time which is how I know that my name wasn’t that popupular when it was given to me but it is very popular today.
This coming Tuesday the baby will be 11 weeks old so the time is near for us to start telling our friends and family that we are having a baby. I am sure the excitement that we are actually having a baby (most of our friends and family have likely given up any hope that we would ever have a child) will quickly give way to the questions that I guess are standard issue for people having a baby. Chiefly, “Boy or a girl?” Followed closely by “Do you have a name picked out yet?”
It goes almost without saying, but we both want to know the gender of our baby before the birth. The idea of a dad running down the halls of a hospital handing out cigars because his wife just gave birth to a baby boy in front of a room full of doctors, nurses, and technicians has given way to very intimate sessions with ultrasound technicians and nurses who draw lots of blood. Not to mention, I guess, that the mother can actually fully appreciate knowing the gender with the same level of lucidity that the father has and at the same time. All in all, we think this makes for a more fair way not only to us and the baby, but also to the friends and family who want to know.
We like to pretend that knowing the gender of the baby will allow us to be better prepared to address the needs of the newborn. ‘Cause, you know, the baby really cares if it has pink or blue walls. Or a stuffed Dora or a stuffed Barney - or whatever the current cool stuffed toys are - which I suppose I will be an expert on in the very near future.
However, our primary reason for wanting to know the gender of the baby is that it immediately cuts the list of potential names about in half. And considering we aren’t really keen on ambiguous names, it probably cuts the list even more so. Which, hopefully will gets us to the answer to the second question above much quicker. Or maybe not, since both of us are prone an extremely methodical and precise level of problem solving… I mean procrastination.
The truth is, both of us have what we consider to be great names. At the time of my birth, my name was relatively obscure compared to its use today. It always surprises me when I am in the grocery store and an attractive woman starts calling my name only to find out she is calling for her five year old boy to stop playing with the boxes of cereal. Come to think of it, maybe she is talking to me.
Baby’s Momma (BM) has an even more unusual name than mine, but it is not uncommon today to hear of a handful of people who share her first name. In school, neither of us really had many if any other people in school that shared our first names and I think both of us like the idea of trying to find a name that would allow our baby to have the same experience.
However, let me say for those who are worried about how obscure we might get, that we don’t want a name so unusual that it draws undo attention to the child. Mostly, we want a name that people will consider normal yet slightly unusual.
Now, having said all of that, the truth is we have no idea about what names we want to consider and what names are off the table. And who knows, maybe the mood will strike us and we will select the same name as half the kids on our block :) But, you can rest assured that once we have a name picked out, we will let everyone know.
Today we met with our OB and had our first ultrasound. We both found the ultrasound process to be very interesting. However, due to other injuries we have both suffered in the past, we have both had ultrasounds so the process wasn’t nearly as exciting to either of us as some have described it.
The technician was amazing with the machine and the first image that was on the screen turned out to be our baby. The baby is about 3cm long now and moved a little during the procedure. It was very exciting for us both.
The baby is now ten weeks along and in a few more weeks we will be able to talk about it with family and friends.
Hopefully, later today, I can post the two images the technician gave us.
The meeting with the doctor went very well. We found him very relaxing and straightforward. He took ample time to answer all our questions and made us both feel very comfortable knowing he will be helping to drive this baby train.
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