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.]