Wolf Like Me

The news you've all been waiting for: it's going to be a boy!

Carly and I went to the OB/GYN office in Bayonne this weekend and an ultrasound tech put Carly's belly through the paces. Lots of measurements were taken, and about 3/4 of the way through, the tech asked, "do you have an idea of what kind of baby you're going to have?" Carly kind of hummed and said, "I had some dreams that I'd have a girl, but we don't really know." Then, the tech zooms in on something that looks like a chicken leg with some peas on top of it. I said, "That's not a girl." And we all started laughing.

For reference, the chicken leg was his femur. The peas were his testicles. That's right, our child has testicles, which pretty much means it's a boy.

Carly immediately started wondering how we'll keep a boy from getting in fights in middle school. I told her not to worry because it is about 12 years away.

So, we have a name: Jackson Wolf Diroll-Black. "Jackson" is a family name from Carly's father's side, and it's her father's middle name. Diroll-Black is the hyphenated version of our surnames that both of us use, and I have actually legally changed my name to. Wolf is just cool.

Originally, I fought to name the kid Werewolf, because that would be cooler, but Carly vetoed that and we settled on just Wolf. So he's the WOLFBABY.

To that end, I offer you this: Lera Lynn's rendition of Wolf Like Me, by TV on the Radio:

Sexy and Seventeen

I've been holding off on writing anything for a long time for a lot of reasons. We'll get into those later. But, for now, the important thing:

It's official, we are pregnant! Well, Carly is pregnant. With a fetus. And it's about 17 weeks old at this point. We've gotten an ultrasound to confirm that it is a human baby, which is good, but I'm not certain the child is mine... the pictures tend to show that it has a brain, so that's a bad sign. Preliminary tests put the bad, testable defects out past the orbit of Pluto, but we haven't gotten to find out what the gender is.

So far, everything is normal and regular and totally textbook. Carly has started to feel the first stirrings of the Blob this week, which she has described as "someone taking one of those coffee stirring sticks and blowing tiny bubbles inside my uterus." I told her that it's actually the fetus trying to claw its way out (it has fingernails), but in any event, it's pretty cool.

We've been holding off on telling everyone mainly because we got our hopes up last time. But we've known for a while. Carly failed her pregnancy tests around Xmas, and by my birthday, it was a sure thing. Now--fuck, we're halfway through this thing--we're just waiting for everything to develop, find out what breed we've got, and start figuring out this whole baby problem.

More to come! I have to write some stuff about all the things that have been keeping me off of actually writing. It's been kind of an awful year, except for this, a few good friends, and sometimes--a new dog. I'll get back to at least weekly updates very very soon.