A christmas wish from the pregnant bloke

It's nearly time for some of us to be tucked up in bed before Santa does his annual housebreaking act to those of us without chimneys!

If you've been good, I hope that santa brings you whatever you want
If you've been a little bit naughty, I hope that you still get what you want
If you're in the middle of an Australian summer with a very pregnant woman I hope that Santa brings her a seat under the air conditioning for your sake!

Thank you for following my rants and rambles over the past few months. I hope that I can continue to entertain you with tales of my woe and suffering.

Merry Christmas!

SYB

P.S. Don't forget to keep an eye on where Santa is!

Is that all it was?!

So after the highs of finding out that I wasn't shooting blanks and the lows of random bleeding and 'poor' test results it was time to go back to see our fertility specialist for SWMBO's final checkup before the FS finally admitted success and we could walk around with a spring in our step.

SWMBO was still bleeding at this point (the friday after our aborted shopping trip) and although we were kind of OK getting used to it (a woman who says she's not concerned about bleeding during pregnancy is as rare as a bloke who doesn't wank) we still couldn't wait to get in and see the FS.

You want how much?!

So, we were starting to settle down a bit after seeing bubs' heartbeat again and getting lots of reassuring words from doctors and midwives. TBH, the latter we more reassuring but if you nod wisely at doctors while they're assuming you know what the hell they're on about, they stop talking eventually.

Now it was time to go shopping. Well not shopping so much, but to have a look at what we'd need to buy if everything goes to plan. I'd read in the "You're going to be a dad, don't panic" type books that I should be prepared, but WTF?! As soon as something is for a baby the price quadruples!

I mean seriously. Who in their right mind would pay $80 for a pair of RM Williams baby booties?! OK, so I would, but they're really cute and when SWMBO lets me get a pair of brown RMs bubs and I will co-ordinate.

Is there such a thing as too much testing?

SWMBO and I are very tangible creatures - we believe things that we can see and/or. This makes things a bit difficult with the early stages of pregnancy as other than being hormonal and feeling sick, there are not many outward and visible signs that you're pregnant.

A week or so after we'd seen Blob's heartbeat, SWMBO got her backside into gear and registered with a popular obstetrician in these parts. Although she had a referral from our fertility specialist, this is only valid for 3 months (we were hoping to be pregnant for a bit longer than that!) so SWMBO made an appointment at our local doctor's surgery and got landed with the most incompetent GP there. This wouldn't have been a problem, but the GP decided that SWMBO needed another blood test because the 5 that she'd already had obviously weren't good enough. This was done on a Friday afternoon, so we had to wait until the next day for the results. Then the fun began...

Having a baby makes you more passionate

If there's one thing I've noted on our short pregnancy journey so far it's that people get very passionate about the 'right way' of doing things (that'd be their way), and 9 times out of 10 they're not shy of telling you what their way is and that not doing it is tantamount to abusing your child (unborn or otherwise). As the saying goes, opinions are like arseholes - everybody has one and some of them stink.


For a bit of a lighter post after the fun and games of finding out why SWMBO was bleeding and then finding out that she really did have a heart-filled blob growing inside her, I thought I'd run through some of the 'bigger' things that will cause pregnant (and not so pregnant) women to have a conniption if you don't agree with them.

In other news, The Pregnant Bloke is now on Twitter. Tweet! Tweet! Come say hello!

Say hello to blob

After our 'interesting' afternoon/evening at the Women's ED it was time for SWMBO's appointment with dildocam (as an aside, is there such a thing as a men's ED? You know, where we go if we nail our balls to the workbench or something similarly stupid). In case you're wondering, we didn't sleep particularly well that night. I have an annoying (to SWMBO) knack of being able to sleep through most things, but that night we spent a lot of time awake, holding each other and not saying an awful lot.

We'd both been wanting SWMBO to be pregnant for such a long time that to have it taken away from us after 6 weeks was fairly devastating. I tried to be positive (usually my role in our relationship), but after hearing the 'M' word from the midwife my heart was well and truly not in it. Once we got home, we googled for threatened miscarriage but it didn't make much difference at the time, we were still beside ourselves.

It's just a bit of blood, right?

Don't Panic!

There are two words that no pregnant bloke ever wants to hear from his partner: I'm bleeding.

Just to mess with your head, there's bad bleeding and not so bad bleeding. Unfortunately they don't come with signs to say what they are - you have to guess, have faith, panic, go seek help or do some combination of all the above.

Not long after she started using the Crinone pessaries, SWMBO started bleeding slightly. We left it for a couple of days, but it carried on. Then one day while she was at work, the bleeding got worse and we decided that it would be best to go to the local Women's Emergency Department. Fortunately for SWMBO she works quite close. Unfortunately for me I don't, and couldn't find a taxi so I drove, maybe just a little bit quicker than I should have.

You put it where?!

After the seriousness of the last couple of posts, it's probably time for a bit of light-heartedness (there is some of it where being a pregnant bloke is concerned!). As you'll have read before, SWMBO and I were seeing a fertility specialist. Once we got ourselves pregnant, our fertility specialist decided that SWMBO needed some hormonal help "just to be on the safe side". Evidently there weren't going to be enough hormones flying around over the coming weeks, and I needed to be punished for something bad that I"d done in a previous life.

The hormonal help came in the form of a drug called Crinone and it's given as a pessary (just google it, preferably with "safe search" turned on and not from a work computer). Now, I like to think of myself as a 'new man'. I'm sensitive to SWMBO's needs and realise that she has to do certain things, but sending me to pick these up is akin to sending me to the supermarket to pick up a box of Tampax, it just shouldn't be done!

So I'm pregnant - The third (and final!) prequel

You know what? I'd actually have given my left bollock to someone if it meant that SWMBO could've gotten pregnant sooner. Having spoken to a couple of medical professionals, this course of action isn't recommended. I tell ya though, I've fondled by balls enough to know which one's working and which is the slacker.

So anyway, I've offered strange women samples of my semen and announced it to a packed laboratory, I've had my GP try to have a two-way conversation about semen analysis results while I'm in an open plan office, I've found out that my handle on bubhub is entirely appropriate and SWMBO has had to have surgery, drugs and more blood tests than you can shake a big needle at. What else can happen? Oh yeah, IVF.

Learning the lingo (Part 2)

In an earlier post you were introduced to a whole load of acronyms that if learned properly would give you a whole heap of brownie points. Now we're moving on to the more advanced "pregnant woman" language skills.

If you thought that the acronyms used by your partner were complicated, you ain't seen nothing yet! In my efforts to help you survive your partner's pregnancy unscathed, there's a list of seemingly innocuous words below with their pregnancy meaning. To be honest, your partner may use some of these in her non-pregnant life too. Be warned!

So I'm pregnant - The second prequel

So, in an earlier post, I mentioned about having to provide a semen sample before we went to see out fertility specialist. In actual fact, I had to provide three in the end. Before seeing you and your partner, the fertility specialist will want two samples six weeks apart as the quality of your swimmer can very according to a whole bundle of things. Evidently our fertility specialist thought I enjoyed trying to fill a pot (don't try, you'll barely be able cover the bottom) and cutting through rush hour traffic before embarrassing myself, so she got me to see if I could be the exception to prove the "third time lucky" rule.

Learning the lingo (Part 1)

So, you're pregnant, trying to conceive or just trying to figure out what your other half is on about eh? Well, here's a helping hand for you!

When she's talking about conception or pregnancy there's a whole load of different terms and acronyms you'll probably want to know if you want half a chance of figuring out what the hell's going on. You could of course always ask her, but that wouldn't be right would it. We're men, we don't need to ask for help or directions!

I'd love to take the credit for the following list, but I can't. It has been unashamedly 'borrowed' from Bubhub. Bubhub is a fantastic site that contains everything you'll ever want to know (and sometimes a bit more than you want to know!) about conception, pregnancy, child birth and raising your bub. There's even a little place for dad's (see link on the right hand side), but beware of the girls - they can't keep their noses out!

Be warned, this is a bloody long list. It's almost like the women need to come up with their own language (more on "pregnant woman's English" in the next post!)

So I'm pregnant - The first prequel

You want how much?!

In my first post, I mentioned that SWMBO and I had a couple of speedbumps on the way to getting pregnant. Say about 5 years worth. Anyway, the long and short of it is that we'd been trying seriously for 12 months with no success by about February 2010.

By "seriously" I mean that SWMBO was taking her temperature every morning, checking her cervical mucus colour and consistency and peeing on a whole load of OPKs that she bought in bulk from the Internet. My contribution to this seriousness was having sex. Regularly. With SWMBO. Such a hardship I'm sure you'll agree.

Anyway, after 12 months of trying you're classified as infertile and can be referred to a fertility specialist. This is great in theory, however before they'll see you they want to have blood test results from both of you as well as a number of semen samples. Yes boys, you have to masturbate. Into a pot.

So I'm pregnant

Surely they can't all be wrong!

14 weeks ago today I was happily sitting at the computer aimlessly surfing as I often do, when She Who Must Be Obeyed (SWMBO) came running in screaming "Look! Look! Look!" while waving around a little white stick and trying to drag me away from the computer (she doesn't know just how much Internet is out there that needs surfing!).

Like a lot of blokes, I spent much of my life trying to avoid seeing two red lines on a stick or a strip of paper. That all changed a couple of years after SWMBO and I got together. Finally after 5 years of trying, we got to see the two red lines that we've been wanting for so long.