Pregnancy Patterns

With all the baby crazy in the world these days, I think it is funny that most of our friends who have had children ended up being whoopsies!

In one case, the couple had been dating for maybe a month or two and BAM, kidneys. They've been married now for about 8 years. Another couple had been dating for years and years and were in a band together, then they took a trip to NYC. It was in a lovely hotel in Manhattan that their little boy was created. Another just happened to get pregnant when some antibiotics interfered with the birth control. All of the whoopsies! that I'm aware of are really pretty happy with the whole process and have been quite exceptional parents.

On the flip side, some of my friends and relatives have really wanted to have children for a long time and have had a shit time of it. For whatever reason, my cousin and her hubs were having difficulty, so they went the IVF route and came up with twins. They managed to have them just in time for her mother to get to know her grandchildren before she passed away last month. Another couple I know has some history of genetic disorders on his side of the family, so they went with IVF and a donor. That's a story unto itself, and maybe I'll ask them to do a guest-blog sometime.

Other people I know have semi-planned to have kids and it didn't work out quite the way they expected. My sister and her hubs planned to have a child and decided to start after he completed his first triathlon. The very next day, some of his boys had another successful swim and BAM, new triathlete in the making. This is pretty much how Carly and I have envisioned the process. We just decided to start trying without much in the way of preparation or planning, and right now seems like a good time to do it.

Most of the pregnancy books and websites out there say that if you want to have kids, you should start gearing up at least six months before you actually start. That is great and all if you want to go through that whole planned pregnancy thing, and you don't deal well with disappointment, but I say, fuck that. I mean, hell. We already have a back up plan if this whole kid thing doesn't work out--we're getting another dog and a Fiat 500. I get to buy the Lego Star Wars Imperial Star Destroyer. So there's something in it for us if we don't get pregnant.

The books go on to say that you should work out, get in shape, start eating healthy, quit smoking, etc. These are all good ideas even if you're not looking to get infested with a big ol' parasite. But the one that really sticks in my gullet is that even the most calm and collected books say that you should abstain from alcohol for months before you get pregnant.

FUCK. THAT.

My niece, eating marshmallows that she did not roast.

I mean, isn't alcohol the thing that actually gets people pregnant? Almost all the whoopsies, the planned ones, and the semi-planned pregnancies I know of involved at least a little bit of boozing. Hell, when my sister told us all that she thought she was pregnant, we were all downing beers at the bar where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death. And my niece? Fucking brilliant. To wit:

My niece, playing with fire. Like you should.

Now, that doesn't mean we're not doing anything. I mean, even the more liberal pregnancy books say don't have more than one or two drinks a week while pregnant, and most warn you away from alcohol for the first trimester, as the critical growth and development happen in that time, so yeah.... been doing some research. I'll probably be posting a lot of "FUCK. THAT." stuff as this thing develops, basically blowing apart the logic of pregnant people who want you to live in a bubble and eat only burned Tofurkey.

So yeah, we're not going to do anything too silly. Here's what we're doing right now: we're both exercising quite a bit--she's running, doing yoga and weights, I walk about 5-6 miles a day on average, lift a lot of beer glasses. She's cutting back on alcohol and taking some vitamins. Oh yeah, and she's keeping track of our sex life on her phone. [It turns out that this is a hell of a lot more common than I thought--a co-worker who is not trying to get pregnant keeps track of her adventures as a matter of course. With her, I think it's actually a locker room tally. I dunno.]

Friday Night and Saturday Morning

The regimen I've set for myself on this blog seems a bit too light. I feel like there's a little too long between Wednesday and Sunday posts. So, I'm going to start some kind of weekly thing on Fridays. I feel like it should be a themed Friday, and it should be entertainment. Because Fridays are for entertainment, yo!

This week's thing will be a YouTube playlist that I'm working on that has the rough theme of "songs that make you never want to have kids." Because if there are three pieces of advice my parents have given me, it is these:

1. Don't bring home anything you've got to feed or cure.
2. Question everything; take no shit.
3. Never get married, don't have kids.

So here you go: Never Have Kids.




If you have any playlist suggestions, I'm happy to hear them. Please, keep your selections to things that have to do only with people killing their kids, kids killing their parents, kids killing each other, heartache, abuse, and torture. Oh, that reminds me, I have songs to add.

On Disparities

I haven't collected my thoughts properly for this post, so it's just going to be a generalized rant, disassociated from much intense research. But the main thrust is, the disparity between being a man and a woman in a relationship that results in a pregnancy.

I will paraphrase my good friend, Tony, who said, in regards to his existing child, "My wife had a baby. I didn't do shit." He will then qualify somewhat, talking about sperm and fucking and all that, but he's reasonably self-deprecating when it comes to the whole process. I tend to agree. However, I don't discount that WE will have a baby someday, even if SHE is the one who carries the poor, rotten bugger.

I bring this up because of some of the weird shit that comes up when you start telling people that you're trying to have a kid. I mean, anyone who's ever been pregnant gets all googley and moogley about the prospects, as though having babies is the best thing ever. As though they don't have enough fucking babies of their own...

Anyhow... There's a co-worker of mine who is now the father of two kids. When he and his wife birthed their first offspring, they determined that wifey could still work. When number two rolled around, it didn't really work out. Wife's income didn't even offset child care, and number two had some minor medical issues, so having her take care of the rugrats and not working made a lot of sense. At least, for the time being.

However, the wifey doesn't have the skill of Driving (zero dots, or -10 untrained), so hubby would be required to drive to any doctors' appointments for any kids. Hubby, my friend, put in for the opportunity to work from home for a few months (I think the request was for six months) so that he could drive the fam to the doctor if needs be. His commute is a pretty long one, so it seemed to make a lot of sense. The requirements for working from home include, but are not limited to, that you must have a private space to work from, you must have a computer, and you will not do any child care while you're at it. During your shift, you've got to work. No breast-feeding, even if you're a fella. My friend fit all those criteria, and his request seemed reasonable.

Unfortunately, he was denied that benefit. For whatever reason, it wasn't deemed appropriate. I'm not sure he was given a reason. Anyway... Shortly after his request was denied, at least three women were granted the work-from-home option after birthing their young. It seemed a bit shitty to me, and, in fact, smelled of gender discrimination. Ladies had babies, so they can stay home (despite the prohibition from doing actual child care--other than incidentals--during the day), while the big, buxom fellow cannot. Fuck. That.

There happens to be a court case rattling around the federal courts right now, Erhardt v. LaHood, I think. Look it up. It's a doozy.

I have gone on the record fighting for the rights of Middle Class White Dudes in the past, but I don't really go to bat for the class that I tend to fit in. I mean, it's tasteless to say that white dudes get a raw deal when we make about 15% more than our female counterparts and don't EVEN get me started on brown people. It's a shit world and sadly, I have a genetic marker that makes it a hell of a lot easier for me to get by than most people. However, I enjoy the idea of an equality standard, and I think that in some ways (not many), white dudes get a raw deal. And in my co-worker's case, I think he's been handed one. So there.

I bring this up because Carly and I are discussing the logistics of having a kid, and how we'll manage child care and time off and all that. And so help me Hunter S. Thompson, if I get denied medical leave to take care of my kid because I didn't pop the baby out of my own scrotum, HOLY SHIT, I will kill a guy.

That's all for now.

Sexy Time

It's a little weird, looking at my wife's calendar, and seeing a little mark for every time we've had sex in the last month or so. That is apparently one of those things you have to do when you want to get knocked up. No, not the sex--that's not important. What's important is keeping track of things, apparently.

Carly and I really decided to start the baby dance about three or four months ago. We have been decidedly unscientific. We originally planned for her to go off of birth control on April Fool's Day. We thought that was awfully funny. But then there were quirks. She missed a period in March and decided, fuck it, why wait?

Carly had been on birth control of one sort or another since she was a teenager. In fact, she's pretty much never missed a pill. There were never any concerns about accidental pregnancies with us, and we were tested and clean, so other forms of contraceptives were not required. Depending on the kinds of birth control she was on, Carly's sex drive would either be in overdrive or in park. The last prescription she had put her pretty much in the menopausal category, and she'd rather have a glass of sherry and read a magazine than get naked. It wasn't a chore, but it was definitely me who initiated sex during that time.

This is what gets me in trouble.

In January, Carly's new doctor changed her prescription to something low-dose, and the changes were instant and quite dramatic. I remember one night--it was a typical Wednesday--I was sitting at the table around 10:00PM, doinking around on my laptop, and Carly goes and jumps into bed. She asks, "What are you doing?" I told her I was playing a game or something. "Why?" she asked. Again--I was used to Carly going to bed meaning that Carly was going to bed. 10:00 was early, but not that early. So she ultimately croons, "You should come to bed. Now." And I did. It's been a fun couple of months.

But in March, she missed a period. We had already decided to start the kid process, but hadn't really done any planning, prepping, or anything. The idea was to just stop with the birth control and see how it goes. If there were complications or if we weren't able to have kids, we'd just adopt another dog and get a new Fiat. Seemed like a solid thing. Carly took a couple of pregnancy tests and they came back negative, so no big deal.

But it was a big deal, actually. In those two or three days when she was wondering why she missed her period, we started to mentally prepare for the possibility of a child. And in Carly's estimation, we'd waited long enough. After she took the pregnancy tests, she stopped taking the birth control. I should mention that she didn't tell me for a day or two, and when she did, it was in passing conversation. She said, "oh, I haven't taken them since Thursday," and I was like, "WHUUUUUUUTTTT???" Especially considering that we'd gotten all sloppy that morning. And the night before. Did I mention that Carly was suddenly a teenager? It was awesome.

Anyway, the biological barriers have been down since mid-March. And now my sex life is plotted out on some calendar in some app in her phone. A more serious tally than in any high school locker room on the planet. Indeed.

Why We Want to Have Kids

Carly and I don't particularly have a strong drive to have children. Neither of us grew up wishing that we could be parents, and for our relationship, it's been just a vague thing out on the horizon--something to do when we got older, maybe. We'd talked about it, considered what we'd name our imaginary children, but ultimately we were pretty cool just being ourselves. For us, having kids is just one of a number of fun projects we could do in our lives. That's why we're approaching it not as a mission, but as an adventure.

So, why have kids? Why now? We're just barely getting settled into our jobs. We are just now paying off all of our credit, and we still have a heap of other debts to go. We could just sit back, coast and get down to a happy zero balance on everything before we start the whole kid adventure, right?

Well... there is evolution. When it comes down to it, we are just big piles of genes and cells and hormones. Piles that have been conditioned over millions of years to enjoy the hell out of the procreative process, and piles that are designed to match up pretty well as easily as possible, considering our relatively short fertility range and long gestation cycles. Yeah, there are some incompatibility issues, and things don't always bake up the way you want them, but more often than not we turn a night of drunk fun or a morning pipe-cleaning romp into another pile of genes and cells that will one day manage to crash your car into a ditch trying to pull off a stunt from Fast Five (the physics in this movie are stupid). So, considering all that, we're kind of starting to feel the urge to procreate. Our genes are starting to tell our higher selves that it's time to do the evolution.

We also just kind of think it will be a fun experiment. Can we screw a kid up worse than our parents did us? Can we make the kid eat things that we never ate when we were kids? Can we learn things from some runt that we never thought of teaching them in the first place? Rotten buggers, always getting in your skulls: babies. Huh. What? Where was I?

And, of course, there's the societal stuff. If we're going to have kids, we don't want to be those people who are walking their kids down the aisle in a walker, or whatever. I want to have the energy to actually do all the things I want to do in the experiment. Considering that my body is engineered basically to shut off around age 68, I want to make sure I can torture my poor offspring for as long as possible.

The last reason is my favorite: my kids will be SUCH assholes. I mean, they'll be snotty, know-it-all jerks. And they'll turn out at least as snarky and horrible as I was, probably worse. I really, really, want to subject future generations to the kind of wisdom that can only come from a smaller, meaner version of me. I want it to be rotten.

Things to Think About When Thinking About Having Kids

One of the things that I strictly want to avoid in this adventure is the Crazy. With a capital C. In my estimation, lots and lots of American parents overthink the whole thing. They worry and listen to half-truths without really considering what is really important. I don't want to be one of those people, so I have been doing some research. And I've been reaching out to the things that I trust. To wit:

Freakonomics Radio - The Economist's Guide to Parenting



The question of the show is, "do parents really matter?" When it all shakes out, how does obsessive parenting really affect a child's ultimate earning power, education, etc.? There are other issues, but the punchline is, "not all that much." Obsessive parenting just doesn't do much for a kid's development. Give it a listen. It's good stuff. It's especially funny to hear the economists talk about all the dumb helicopter parenting shit they do, then say, "Yeah, that doesn't really matter all that much, and I'm happier when I don't do it."

The Plan

The plan for this blog is to update it religiously--that means, only on Wednesdays, Sundays, and major occasions. Each post will have some kind of pertinent media attachment, like a photo, video, or link to a podcast. I will try to keep them to a few paragraphs in length, and even the appointed days where I don't have much to say, something will be added.

Carly started referring to the blog as "our blog." I had to correct her, it is MY blog. This isn't to say that I don't want her involved in the thing--the adventure is very much more hers than mine--but this will be a frame for my own experiences and how my particular psychology works out through the whole thing.

So, for those of you who feel like maybe I'm being mean, here's a reminder of why I'm involved in this project in the first place:

 

Yep, that chick right there.

Bellyotes & Bowolves

Typical night at home with me and Carly.

Every now and then I get the urge to start a blog. Now, I think I might have a good reason to. You see, Carly and I have decided to embark upon the journey of parenthood. We decided this rather deliberately, and not out of any particular dream of "having kids someday" or "wanting to be a parent." No, we think it will be a fun experiment and want to see how well we could do at this thing. Sure, there's probably a bit of evolutionary conditioning in there, and not a small amount of parental and social pressure, but I like to think that none of those things weighed heavily on our decision. Rather, it seems like an interesting venture, we have all the materials we need to get started, and we think that there will be some prizes at the end.

This blog will generally track my experiences and observations in the procreation process, a place to vent if needs be, and room to wax philosophical whenever I like.

The name derives from Carly and my words for the sounds that your guts make when you're hungry. Those long, howling whines that come up from your belly and sound like coyotes are bellyotes (pronounced belly-OH-tees). Bowolves (prounced BOW-wolves). are the sounds of growling and grumbling sounds of a wolf deep in your bowels. These concepts apply directly to the idea of having a child--a little monster in your guts, declaring its horrible intent.

So, Bellyotes & Bowolves will be the theme for that thing that will very likely be rumbling in Carly's guts over the next many months. I hope you enjoy it.