As an expecting father you learn a few things during those nine months. Like not to let your pregnant wife go grocery shopping alone. Partially because they shouldn't be carrying groceries by themselves from the car to the house for safety purposes but also because $200 will be spent on junk food. "Hey honey! I see a bag of cheese puffs, Doritos, Ice Cream, Powdered Donuts, and a lot of chocolate but is there anything for dinner this week?............oh and did you know there is a half eaten Chic-fil-a sandwich in one of these bags?" That only happened once and that was because I was working. After that I made sure I went with her even though nothing makes me hate humanity more than grocery shopping. But that is a whole nother blog post.
Another lesson I learned was that a pregnant woman will have mood swings and that can sometimes result in her saying things in a way that she may not normally say them. I'll use an example. "Can you please do the dishes?" Will turn into "Are you going to do the dishes or are we gonna live like hillbillies for the next nine months?" If you are smart, you will just do the dishes and be done with it. A smart ass retort will result in a verbal beat down. Hey you wouldn't get in a cage with a lion while wearing a suit made of steaks would you? Just do the dishes and don't say a word.
My wife wasn't as moody as mentioned above and I learned right away to be as supportive as I could possibly be. I didn't want to be the "you did this to me!" Guy. I can completely understand being moody, sore all over, tired, and hungry for junk food. I mean after all there is a human being growing in there. A man will definitely have a new found respect for a woman once he sees them carry and deliver a child. At least he better.
Hospitals do a great job at making the expecting mother as comfortable as they possibly can. Well that was our experience. For the father however, it's a whole different world. The hospital don't care about us. As it should be. We aren't the ones who carried the baby for nine months, we don't have to give birth to them, and we don't have to endure all of the healing afterwards. So if you are a female reading this, understand that I'm not trying make light of all that you go through during pregnancy. It really is a miracle. This is just to give an idea to what an expecting father goes through during this time.
We had to get induced. So we went on a Thursday night to check in. A nurse takes us to a huge room with wood floors, a tv in a nice wooden cabinet, a decent looking couch, and a hospital bed. I've stayed in hotel rooms that looked worse than this room did. The nurse has my wife fill out some paper work and has her slip into one of those fugly gowns. I take a seat at the couch which the nurse had told me I could pull out into a bed to sleep on. A different nurse comes in and hooks a monitor up to my wife that will track our sons heartbeat. It's cool to hear your child's heartbeat while it's still in the womb. However after about 20 minutes it is grating. The worst part about these monitors is that when the baby moves and the monitor can't pick up the heartbeat as well a nurse has to come in and find it again. She moves it around my wife's belly while it makes a noise like turning on a microphone and running your hand over it.
This game of hide and seek goes on all night about about every 20-25 minutes. Making it near impossible for neither my wife or I to sleep. As it turns out my couch didn't really pull out into a bed. It pulled up a bit and the seat flipped to reveal a mattress. Not just any mattress but what would turn out to be the hardest mattress in all of Recorded history. Homeless people would turn this mattress down it was so firm but as it turns out as you'll soon see in part two of this multi part blog post. I'm going to end up missing that couch. Like I said before, it's a whole different world for the dad.
Part 2 coming soon
No comments:
Post a Comment