Contributing to the Overpopulation Problem

Congrats to Pat and Sabrina for the birth of their daughter Anna Kimberly on Friday!  Can't wait to meet her.  And congrats to Rachel for waiting a whole 17 hours before hogging baby time with Anna.

Today is shower number 1 at Casa de Zia.  Good luck ladies!

Things Our Parents Never Said

"I need to finish ripping these tunes and load them onto Zia's ipod."

Yesterday marked my 5 year anniversary with my current employer, and as a token of the company's appreciation for showing up almost every day and pretending to do work while frantically refreshing espn.com, I got to choose a gift from a catalog.  I went with an mp3 player so we could load it up with lullabies and  reggae to create a peaceful and womb-like atmosphere for Zia.  Although if we were really creating a womb-like atmosphere, we'd have to find a way to pipe in my voice randomly bellowing "Luke.... I am your faaaatttthhhhhher" and have the crib flooded with Franks Hot Sauce.

I was going to write a long diatribe here about how much the mp3 player sucks (it does) but didn't want to sound greedy for complaining about a free gift (it sucks a lot though).  I guess the moral of the story is five years of work from me is equal in value to a mp3 player you could buy at a Dollar Store.  Which looking back, seems about right.

We loaded a bunch of the Rockabye Lullaby songs onto the mp3 player.  These are the ones where they take pop music, remove the words and redo them "lullaby style" which appears to mean "more xylophone".  After one or two listens these are kind of quirky and catchy.  I'm just thinking it will be strange to be rocking Zia to sleep while singing along to "Another One Bites the Dust" from the Queen one or singing about blasting fools from the Wu Tang one.  But in any event, I tend to worry about the strangest things related to Zia's birth.  The mp3 player for whatever reason was really high on my list of things we needed to do.  Now that we are done with that, I can focus my energy on what is clearly the most pressing issue: light switch covers for the room (or perhaps what damage I may be doing to our child if it turns out to be a boy yet I have constantly referred to him as female named Zia..... either way)

Quotes from a Pregnant Woman

Me: "You're yelling at me."
Rachel: "Yes"
Me: "Why?"
Rachel: "I don't know.  So there."

And the winner is....

The winner for worst state in the US is: Pennsylvania!  Aside from the perpetual construction and intermittent rain, Pennsylvania is also the home of the nations frumpiest rest areas and most NASCAR decals per capita. This flyover state also boasts a wonderful array of radio selections, including 1) country music 2) religious talk 3) country music with religious themes and 4) static.  So if you ever want to feel better about the state you live in, go visit Pennsylvania, the ugly friend that Ohio, West Virginia and New York hang out with so they look hotter.

Rachel and I completed what will probably the last road trip of substance before the kid is born, and it went surprisingly well considering Rachel has a bladder the size of a gnat, and now Zia is sitting firmly on said bladder.  We had a lot of laughs creating off-color songs about our hatred for Pennsylvania while visiting every rest stop we passed, and whittling our list of baby names down to the same 3 we started with.  Also, little tip for the summer road trippers, while flip flops may be a comfortable alternative to shoes in the car, flip flops and rest stops are not a good combination!

Quotes from a Pregnant Woman

"I don't think I'm going to go tonight because I don't want to wear clothes."

Quotes from a Pregnant Woman

While taking a walk around the block: "I like that the weather is so nice, but kind of hate that everyone is so friendly."

Class, Part II

Day 2 of class is over, and I managed to not unswallow my lunch while watching the birthing scenes.  This was due solely to my ability to appear to be watching the videos when in reality I was trying to calculate how many square inches there are between the top of the screen and the ceiling.  So I think I successful passed test 1 of impending fatherhood, as Rachel has tentatively agreed to let me in the room when Zia is born.

Rachel and I never really considered any hippie alternative birth scenarios, mainly because we embrace this strange concept called logic.  For example, home births.  If you are giving birth in your home and something goes wrong, where do they take you?  The hospital.  Case closed.  But anyway, even if we weren't already completely sold on this modern witchcraft called "doctors" and "hospitals", last night's videos would have sealed the deal.  One of the women giving birth hired a doula, which is Latin for "woman with unshaven pits that annoys the nurses and rubs your back when pregnant" and is pronounced "weyst of muhn-ee".  Anyway, after the birth, the doula picks up the placenta, holds it up to the light, and shows everyone in the room while saying "isn't this cool?!?!?" No, that is disgusting.  Please put down the afterbirth and stop talking.

There is a couple in our class that I have grown to dislike immensely in our short time together.  I was starting to get annoyed a bit because regardless of what the instructor says, they have a question.  This makes class even longer than it already is, and really, what confusion could their possibly be when the instructor says "we will take a 10 minute break.  Be back in 10 minutes"?????  But, yesterday, after 4 or 5 games worth of 20 questions, we learn that this guy is not only a doctor, but a doctor that delivers babies for a living. So this guy is either a really horrible doctor and knows less than the volunteer teacher at the community college, or he is asking questions he already knows the answer to.  Either way, he has to go. Next class, I am calling for a vote for kicking these people out.

But there was one important thing that we did learn between Dr. Jack Ass's inane questions: it is recommended that mother and baby bond together for the first 80 minutes of the kids life.  So although I was joking about the 5 day waiting period for people to hold our kid (ok, I wasn't joking but Rachel overruled me), there will in fact be an 80 minute waiting period.  We are trying to figure out if we should just not tell people that labor has begun until 80 minutes after the kid is born, or tell everyone immediately and let the 2 Grandmas and Aunt Sandy maul each other in the waiting room.

And Zia is now the size of a head of lettuce!

Squash and dirty phonecalls

Day one of class was Tuesday, and luckily it was rather uneventful.  Uneventful meaning we did not have to watch any videos of live births.  Unfortunately, that changes next week, when we will have to watch three (3!) live births.  Now, call me unmanly if you will, say I'm a wuss, whatever, but I'm just as Baby Jesus made me, and I know my limits.  I know that being subjected to 3 videos translates into a roughly 105% chance that I will end up puking violently during class next week (+/- 5%).  To avoid this, I thought it would be a good idea to just pretend I got a phone call and have to leave the room when the videos start.  Rachel however, did not share my enthusiasm for this idea, and refuses to budge from her "you WILL be in the room when those videos play" platform.  To be perfectly clear, I asked "so in your book, me throwing up in a roomful of people is preferable to me pretending to be rude and taking a fake phone call and avoiding the vomiting?" To which she immediately replied "Absolutely.  You WILL be in the room during the videos, and if you throw up, well, you'll just have to live with the shame."

So needless to say, if any of my classmates are reading this, sit FAAAAAARRRR away from me on Tuesday.

The rest of class consisted of 1) icebreakers, 2) anatomically correct diagrams that made me giggle, and 3) meditation techniques.  First, icebreakers... turns out I am ok with ice that is unbroken.  The icebreaker here was to interview another couple then introduce them to the rest of the class.  No offense, but I really don't need to know that Connie's favorite movie is "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer" or that Ted has an extensive Lego Castle collection.  Although, during icebreakers, we did learn that one guy in the class was clearly a drug dealer.  The poor kid who interviewed him was like "Johnny is.... uh.... self employed..... he.... uh, well, he..... he repackages products for sale.... and anyway, he's self-employed."

For part 2, the diagrams, it went about as expected considering I have the maturity of a 4th grader.

And finally, meditation techniques: could have been helpful, had the instructor NOT used a deep, breathy voice that made the exercise sound like a really confusing obscene phone call. "Go to your special place... open the gate to your special place... thrust your mind into and out of your special place....."   Still, as this was at the end of the class, I was able to relax a little bit.  Rachel, for some unknown reason, found it hard to get comfortable and relax while laying on a hard floor while 30 weeks pregnant.

All in all I give class number one a B+ because the only cervixes (cervices?) I saw were drawings.

And Zia continues to grow, and is now apparently the size of a butternut squash!

Done!

After back-to-back night time paint sessions, the room is done!  (Note to aspiring painters, your work will look a lot worse in the morning).  Aside from a light green cornea, we are feeling great!

We also spent the morning assembling the crib and mobile.  Strangely, the mobile was three times as hard to construct as the crib.

So, many many thanks to all who helped us get the room ready.  Twas an eclectic cast of characters made up of friends, family and I'm pretty sure at least one Hell's Angel on our window crew, but we are all sorts of thankful and lucky to have such a great support team.