HAI!
Apparently Japan's rich history of graphic novels has given those 2-byte otaku ninjas yet another edge over the rest of us: MetaFilter reports that Nipponese emoticons are vastly superior to their lame Western counterparts. Who knew?
1/29/2003
1/27/2003
FLYING CAR STOLEN
My car Gunther, who has been known in some semi-imaginary incarnations to fly, was stolen right out of my driveway last night in Willowdale, Ontario. Of course, Toronto's finest are on the case, but Constable Martin has suggested that the hopes of recovery are slim. Indeed a Strange Sunday for me and mine.
My car Gunther, who has been known in some semi-imaginary incarnations to fly, was stolen right out of my driveway last night in Willowdale, Ontario. Of course, Toronto's finest are on the case, but Constable Martin has suggested that the hopes of recovery are slim. Indeed a Strange Sunday for me and mine.
1/25/2003
CARE BEARS LEARN EBONICS
How could you fail to love a site with a snappy name like Black People Love Us? This silly site is laced with both tongue-in-cheek hilarity (like this photograph) and genuinely ignorant hilarity, like this angry letter from a visitor to the site:
How could you fail to love a site with a snappy name like Black People Love Us? This silly site is laced with both tongue-in-cheek hilarity (like this photograph) and genuinely ignorant hilarity, like this angry letter from a visitor to the site:
Let me ask you this, if you think that having black friends is novelty enough that you'd make a corny...website dedicated to it, you're singling out black people as somehow being different enough that it's strange for whites befriend them. That as far as I'm concerned is...racism.
1/24/2003
THIRD TRIMESTER REPORT
"The baby is coming today."
That is the sound of my wife calmly declaring that she was several hours into labour as she sat on the livingroom couch watching cartoons in the bright, slanted sunshine of the early morning. I had just woken up. I rubbed my eyes, tightened my robe, and felt a sudden urge to throw up.
In the months that have passed since I issued my first and second reports on our efforts to homebrew a fresh human being, I have become more at home with the idea of my imminent parenthood. None the less, nothing could prepare me for the terrifying rush of realising that that imminence was about to transform into immediacy.
The final showdown between infant and birth-canal is nigh: at long last, this is my Third Trimester Report.
The first trimester is about reading, retching, and vague notions; the second trimester is about the novelty of those notions becoming concrete in the form of a wriggling, swelling parasite. This third trimester has been mainly about waiting.
As we drew into the home-stretch of pregnancy my wife's uterus had inflated to the size of a decent watermelon, housing an energetic infant, half a pound of placental goo and a thick umbilical cord over two feet long. Her breasts had grown heavier, and frequently leaked nutritious and delicious colostrum. When sitting naked on the bed she was embarrassed to discover that she was leaving behind little puddles of leukorrhea from her nethers. She was an absent-minded, waddling, perpetually hungry baby-oven with leaks of all kinds, being tenderised from the inside out by her fierce and feisty tenant.
We found ourselves with a profusion of options available in the realm of prenatal classes, but very little to choose from in the way of birthing classes. While the former category deals largely with lifestyle and education issues (how to avoid inadvertantly wounding your child, and so on), the latter category deals exclusively with methods for coping with the birthing process itself. The classes are specific to each method.
Two of the most popular methods for managing natural childbirth (or psychoprophylaxis) are Lamaze and Bradley. The well-known namesake of French obstetrician Dr Ferdinand Lamaze hinges on using patterned breathing techniques and point-focus autohypnosis to manage the pain of the uterine contractions. The Lamaze method does not rule out the use of drugs. The method of Dr Robert A. Bradley, in contrast, is predicated on a total lack of anaesthetic medication. It emphasises gaining control of natural breathing rather than introducing unfamiliar breathing techniques. Proponents of the method would argue that the Bradley emphasis on inward focus and concentration on the events taking place is vastly more useful compared to what they would characterise as the Lamaze tendency to "distract" through outward focus. Lastly, where Lamaze is very open-ended with regard to the presence or absence of coaches, the Bradley method requires a consistent and intimate coach (I say "intimate" because Lamaze coaches are not necessarily obliged to massage their partner's perineum, which is indeed one of my happy duties).
While Lamaze classes were fairly plentiful, my wife was determined to go the rarer Bradley route. Since the next session of Bradley classes was not scheduled to begin until a week or two before our baby was due to be born, we opted to borrow a Bradley book from the midwives' free library instead. And since it seemed that most of the material featured in the more general prenatal classes was either painfully obvious or already thoroughlly covered in the books we had bought, we ended up taking absolutely no classes at all.
How much stuff do you need for a newborn baby? Not much, really. The real expenses don't kick in until later on, I'm told by reliable elder sources. A fresh baby needs a reasonable changing table, a crib, some wet-wipes, and a bunch of jumpers, sleepers and diapers. Notwithstanding the Thoreau-like simplicity of a newborn's life, our friends and relations have seen fit to launch at us volley after volley of innovative "vital" gifts.
Of course, we're not looking gift horses in the mouth. Just because we wouldn't have thought something was worth buying for ourselves doesn't mean the stuff we've ended up with isn't cool. For instance, we now have a diaper-pail that twists closed in such a way as to trap the stink inside. A marvel!
Beyond that, we have been inundated with all sorts of polymorphable plastic contraptions covered in industrial-orange and black striped stickers warning dire consequences for the unwary user in both official languages. We have been generously gifted a play-pen that folds down with a flick of a wrist into something the size of a hefty Rubik's Cube. We have truckloads of mobiles featuring licenced likenesses of all sorts of cute copyrighted critters, which spin and tinkle quiet tunes. Someone thoughtfully bought us a folding stroller with cup-holders and better suspension than my car.
For the birth event itself we have prepared receiving blankets for swaddling the recently de-wombed, bright flashlights for peering into my wife's cavities, clear plastic tarps to protect the hardwood floors from excessive wetness, plastic sheets to protect our bed from looking like a murder scene, olive oil for perineal message, weaveless maxipads and adult incontinence diapers for postpartum bleeding, rags and towels for sopping up offal, and two large bowls: one for catching vomit and one for catching afterbirth.
The birthing pool itself we managed to inflate with help from my father-in-law's leaf-blower. It fit easily into the nursery...once we took out most of the other furniture.
And so: we had settled on a course of study, prepared the essential materials for the birth, inflated the pool and finally decided on names. There remained nothing more but a steadily growing buzz of anticipation...
One afternoon we were lazing John & Yoko style in our bed, plucking idly at our PowerBooks and indulging in elaborate fantasies about our lifetime to come with Baby. We capped it off with a bit of hot sex. I was roused from my post-coital napping by my wife's enthusiastic announcement from the washroom: "My mucus-plug came out!"
The mucus-plug is stopper of snot that seals the mouth of the uterus for the duration of pregnancy. While its expulsion does not in and of itself signal the onset of labour, it is an indicator that the cervix -- the opening of the uterus -- has begun to prepare itself to move aside in order to permit the passage some fat freight. My wife's mucus-plug was streaked with blood, which suggested that the process of effacement had begun, heralded by the breaking of cervical capillaries. If it was indeed evidence of effacement that we were seeing, labour could be counted on to start within fifty hours.
Contractions started fifteen minutes later.
My wife's meatsack had been farting around with Braxton Hicks contractions for months, squishing itself experimentally when stimulated by walking or orgasm. These new contractions that she began to feel after her mucus-plug came out, however, did not peter out after a few minutes. Instead they continued to knock gently at her innards throughout dinner and into the night. "Maybe they're not contractions," my wife said while we watched some crappy movie on TV. "Maybe Baby is just kicking a lot."
"This movie isn't funny," I said, glancing up briefly from the Internet on my lap.
Somewhere in there I fell asleep, and woke up alone in bed five or six hours later. I padded out into the livingroom and saw my wife sitting on the couch surrounded by our pets, watching cartoons and surfing the web for first person accounts of giving birth. "The baby is coming today," she said simply.
We took the dog for a romp through the snow. My wife was experiencing mild contractions every 7 - 10 minutes, with a more intense contraction occuring irregularly in the mix, causing us to pause on the sidewalk and hunker against the wind quietly for a moment while she let it pass. When we got home we decided to tidy up a bit. She announced the start of her contractions from the laundry room while I loaded the dishwasher with a stopwatch in my hand, charting the duration, spacing and reported intensity. On paper the pattern was very clear: the time between contractions was compressing quickly, and the more intense contractions were coming more frequently and with greater regularity.
"Should we page our crack team of ace midwives now?" I asked.
"Nah, not yet," said my wife with confidence...
Her next contraction, beginning at 11:32:15, was different enough in character that it was immediately apparent even to me that something new was happening. She leaned over and held herself in a strange, semi-oblique pose against the table for almost forty seconds. "That one was stronger," she said as it began to fade. "I felt it in my back."
We retired to the bedroom for a back massage. With her next contraction at 11:35:16 she made a little involuntary groan. "I think my water just broke," she said. We shambled over to the washroom to investigate, and found her underwear soaked through with clear liquid. "Now I'm paging the midwives," I declared.
I paged the midwives at 11:39:20, then I drew my wife a warm bath in the washroom and helped her into it. Next I called all of the friends and relations who had asked to be notified when real labour began. Many of them jumped into cars and raced to our house immediately.
When I had not heard from the midwives a quarter hour later I paged again, leaving a more detailed message about my wife's condition. The contractions were coming less than a minute apart now, and lasting almost as long. The intensity was slowly mounting. I massaged her just below the small of her back, where the ligaments that anchor the rear of the uterus attach, doing what I could to soothe the mounting ache. "They feel different than I thought," she said; "It's a duller, more generalised pain than I had imagined it would be. Not at all like the sharp pain of a menstrual cramp."
At noon the apprentice midwife called. She told me that I no longer had to keep track of contractions, and that they would be arriving presently. Outside of the washroom the friends and relations had flown into action. My wife's parents arrived first, and immediately set to filling up the birthing pool with warm water from our laundry sink. When the hot water tank was empty they commanded a small squadron of hangers-on to action, boiling pots of water and relaying them into the nursery.
Twenty minutes later I noticed that the shape of my wife's pelvis was changing, ballooning out in front above her mons veneris. "Jeez, it almost looks like Baby's head is right there in your cooch," I said like an idiot. It slowly dawned on me that was exactly what was going on. While I felt around for the telephone I reminded my wife to try to keep her breathing slow and deep as she recovered from her latest contraction, leaning against the side of the tub, fighting to control her breath and keep her muscles relaxed. I paged the midwives a third time, letting more urgency leak into my voice. "It seems like we're progressing very quickly here," I said to the pager. During the next contraction bloody mucus squirted out into the bath water.
"I don't feel like I'm holding up very well," my wife said in a small voice between strong contractions. It broke my heart. In truth she was holding up like a champion, managing to control her muscles and reign in her breathing with calm determination. "You're my hero," I said.
When the midwives arrived they plopped down on the washroom floor beside me and deftly inserted a brace of fingers into my wife. "Your baby has a nice head of hair," reported the apprentice. The cervix had dilated to over eight centimeters. "We'd bitta move her now or we're going to heff thes beby right here," pronounced the senior midwife with melodious South African inflection.
When the latest contraction subsided I helped haul my wife up out of the tub, and we formed a little shuffling choo-choo train into the nursery as she held on to my shoulders. It was quarter past two in the afternoon, or a little less than three hours after labour had begun in earnest. Once she was lying down in the massive, steaming birthing tub the apprentice midwife examined her yoni again. "We're fully dilated," she said. The senior midwife asked, "Do you feel pressure on your bum? Like you heff to go to the toilet?"
Grimacing, my wife nodded yes emphatically.
And suddenly the all-clear was given: no longer was she to keep her muscles as relaxed as possible, but should instead begin to push with each contraction. The baby was coming -- right now. I hastily pulled my cellular telephone and fob-watch out of my pockets and jumped into the pool, making myself a human chair for my wife to lean into from behind. The contractions were coming one on top of another now, and within seconds she was pushing with everything she was worth, crushing my hands in hers spasmodically.
A line of intimates had accumulated at the door of the nursery: our mothers, my sister, the dog... I could see from the expression on their faces that there was suddenly something to see, though I could not myself see beyond my wife's twitching belly. "I can see your baby's head!" my wife's best friend cried. Already? Could we really be so near the end?
The next push sent out more streams of bloody mucus, curling and swooping lazily through the hot water. My wife cried out loudly, clenching my hands painfully in her grip. I felt the need to pee.
As she started her next push I saw clouds of runny blood blooming out from beneath her, diffusing into the water in a series of spurts. Stringy yellow fluid followed in slippery loop-de-loops as my wife let out a soul-blanching scream, simultaneously rocketing her head back and slamming my skull against the wall behind me. Through the dancing silver pinprick stars in my vision I saw the eyes of the attendees widen.
The apprentice midwife smiled. "The head is born!"
The final push was easier than the one before. In a single graceful motion the midwife scooped up a tiny creature with indigo skin and lay it on my wife's breast, squirming and clean, fresh from the water. A powerful urge overcame me, startling in its instinctive force, compelling me to take rapid but careful tally of the baby: ten fingers, ten toes, minimal skull deformation from passing through the birth canal, skin changing rapidly from purple to pink...
"You did it," I told my wife softly. "We have a little girl."
The rest is anticlimax. While my wife passed the placenta through her largely numbed loins I showed off my daughter to the friends and relations. My parents cried. Someone handed me a cigar and a glass of bubbly wine. The dog licked the newborn and wagged his tail. Baby took it all in with wide-eyed aplomb, quietly looking at whoever was talking, twisting her little earlobe with her tiny, perfect fingers. "Buh," she said, experimentally. "Bah," she added after a moment of reflection.
Before we committed the placenta to the freezer for future burial we took a tour of the organ as a family, with the midwives peeling through the various layers and lobes of red, shiny gore with rubber gloves. More wine was poured. "Ooo-meck," commented Baby as she was put to the breast and introduced to oral feeding.
"She's suckling," my wife confirmed, falling in love.
Yesterday night the sun set on me for the first time as a father. Things are different now. I am somebody's daddy. From this day forward, I live first for someone else.
The end.
"The baby is coming today."
That is the sound of my wife calmly declaring that she was several hours into labour as she sat on the livingroom couch watching cartoons in the bright, slanted sunshine of the early morning. I had just woken up. I rubbed my eyes, tightened my robe, and felt a sudden urge to throw up.
In the months that have passed since I issued my first and second reports on our efforts to homebrew a fresh human being, I have become more at home with the idea of my imminent parenthood. None the less, nothing could prepare me for the terrifying rush of realising that that imminence was about to transform into immediacy.
The final showdown between infant and birth-canal is nigh: at long last, this is my Third Trimester Report.
The first trimester is about reading, retching, and vague notions; the second trimester is about the novelty of those notions becoming concrete in the form of a wriggling, swelling parasite. This third trimester has been mainly about waiting.
As we drew into the home-stretch of pregnancy my wife's uterus had inflated to the size of a decent watermelon, housing an energetic infant, half a pound of placental goo and a thick umbilical cord over two feet long. Her breasts had grown heavier, and frequently leaked nutritious and delicious colostrum. When sitting naked on the bed she was embarrassed to discover that she was leaving behind little puddles of leukorrhea from her nethers. She was an absent-minded, waddling, perpetually hungry baby-oven with leaks of all kinds, being tenderised from the inside out by her fierce and feisty tenant.
We found ourselves with a profusion of options available in the realm of prenatal classes, but very little to choose from in the way of birthing classes. While the former category deals largely with lifestyle and education issues (how to avoid inadvertantly wounding your child, and so on), the latter category deals exclusively with methods for coping with the birthing process itself. The classes are specific to each method.
Two of the most popular methods for managing natural childbirth (or psychoprophylaxis) are Lamaze and Bradley. The well-known namesake of French obstetrician Dr Ferdinand Lamaze hinges on using patterned breathing techniques and point-focus autohypnosis to manage the pain of the uterine contractions. The Lamaze method does not rule out the use of drugs. The method of Dr Robert A. Bradley, in contrast, is predicated on a total lack of anaesthetic medication. It emphasises gaining control of natural breathing rather than introducing unfamiliar breathing techniques. Proponents of the method would argue that the Bradley emphasis on inward focus and concentration on the events taking place is vastly more useful compared to what they would characterise as the Lamaze tendency to "distract" through outward focus. Lastly, where Lamaze is very open-ended with regard to the presence or absence of coaches, the Bradley method requires a consistent and intimate coach (I say "intimate" because Lamaze coaches are not necessarily obliged to massage their partner's perineum, which is indeed one of my happy duties).
While Lamaze classes were fairly plentiful, my wife was determined to go the rarer Bradley route. Since the next session of Bradley classes was not scheduled to begin until a week or two before our baby was due to be born, we opted to borrow a Bradley book from the midwives' free library instead. And since it seemed that most of the material featured in the more general prenatal classes was either painfully obvious or already thoroughlly covered in the books we had bought, we ended up taking absolutely no classes at all.
How much stuff do you need for a newborn baby? Not much, really. The real expenses don't kick in until later on, I'm told by reliable elder sources. A fresh baby needs a reasonable changing table, a crib, some wet-wipes, and a bunch of jumpers, sleepers and diapers. Notwithstanding the Thoreau-like simplicity of a newborn's life, our friends and relations have seen fit to launch at us volley after volley of innovative "vital" gifts.
Of course, we're not looking gift horses in the mouth. Just because we wouldn't have thought something was worth buying for ourselves doesn't mean the stuff we've ended up with isn't cool. For instance, we now have a diaper-pail that twists closed in such a way as to trap the stink inside. A marvel!
Beyond that, we have been inundated with all sorts of polymorphable plastic contraptions covered in industrial-orange and black striped stickers warning dire consequences for the unwary user in both official languages. We have been generously gifted a play-pen that folds down with a flick of a wrist into something the size of a hefty Rubik's Cube. We have truckloads of mobiles featuring licenced likenesses of all sorts of cute copyrighted critters, which spin and tinkle quiet tunes. Someone thoughtfully bought us a folding stroller with cup-holders and better suspension than my car.
For the birth event itself we have prepared receiving blankets for swaddling the recently de-wombed, bright flashlights for peering into my wife's cavities, clear plastic tarps to protect the hardwood floors from excessive wetness, plastic sheets to protect our bed from looking like a murder scene, olive oil for perineal message, weaveless maxipads and adult incontinence diapers for postpartum bleeding, rags and towels for sopping up offal, and two large bowls: one for catching vomit and one for catching afterbirth.
The birthing pool itself we managed to inflate with help from my father-in-law's leaf-blower. It fit easily into the nursery...once we took out most of the other furniture.
And so: we had settled on a course of study, prepared the essential materials for the birth, inflated the pool and finally decided on names. There remained nothing more but a steadily growing buzz of anticipation...
One afternoon we were lazing John & Yoko style in our bed, plucking idly at our PowerBooks and indulging in elaborate fantasies about our lifetime to come with Baby. We capped it off with a bit of hot sex. I was roused from my post-coital napping by my wife's enthusiastic announcement from the washroom: "My mucus-plug came out!"
The mucus-plug is stopper of snot that seals the mouth of the uterus for the duration of pregnancy. While its expulsion does not in and of itself signal the onset of labour, it is an indicator that the cervix -- the opening of the uterus -- has begun to prepare itself to move aside in order to permit the passage some fat freight. My wife's mucus-plug was streaked with blood, which suggested that the process of effacement had begun, heralded by the breaking of cervical capillaries. If it was indeed evidence of effacement that we were seeing, labour could be counted on to start within fifty hours.
Contractions started fifteen minutes later.
My wife's meatsack had been farting around with Braxton Hicks contractions for months, squishing itself experimentally when stimulated by walking or orgasm. These new contractions that she began to feel after her mucus-plug came out, however, did not peter out after a few minutes. Instead they continued to knock gently at her innards throughout dinner and into the night. "Maybe they're not contractions," my wife said while we watched some crappy movie on TV. "Maybe Baby is just kicking a lot."
"This movie isn't funny," I said, glancing up briefly from the Internet on my lap.
Somewhere in there I fell asleep, and woke up alone in bed five or six hours later. I padded out into the livingroom and saw my wife sitting on the couch surrounded by our pets, watching cartoons and surfing the web for first person accounts of giving birth. "The baby is coming today," she said simply.
We took the dog for a romp through the snow. My wife was experiencing mild contractions every 7 - 10 minutes, with a more intense contraction occuring irregularly in the mix, causing us to pause on the sidewalk and hunker against the wind quietly for a moment while she let it pass. When we got home we decided to tidy up a bit. She announced the start of her contractions from the laundry room while I loaded the dishwasher with a stopwatch in my hand, charting the duration, spacing and reported intensity. On paper the pattern was very clear: the time between contractions was compressing quickly, and the more intense contractions were coming more frequently and with greater regularity.
"Should we page our crack team of ace midwives now?" I asked.
"Nah, not yet," said my wife with confidence...
Her next contraction, beginning at 11:32:15, was different enough in character that it was immediately apparent even to me that something new was happening. She leaned over and held herself in a strange, semi-oblique pose against the table for almost forty seconds. "That one was stronger," she said as it began to fade. "I felt it in my back."
We retired to the bedroom for a back massage. With her next contraction at 11:35:16 she made a little involuntary groan. "I think my water just broke," she said. We shambled over to the washroom to investigate, and found her underwear soaked through with clear liquid. "Now I'm paging the midwives," I declared.
I paged the midwives at 11:39:20, then I drew my wife a warm bath in the washroom and helped her into it. Next I called all of the friends and relations who had asked to be notified when real labour began. Many of them jumped into cars and raced to our house immediately.
When I had not heard from the midwives a quarter hour later I paged again, leaving a more detailed message about my wife's condition. The contractions were coming less than a minute apart now, and lasting almost as long. The intensity was slowly mounting. I massaged her just below the small of her back, where the ligaments that anchor the rear of the uterus attach, doing what I could to soothe the mounting ache. "They feel different than I thought," she said; "It's a duller, more generalised pain than I had imagined it would be. Not at all like the sharp pain of a menstrual cramp."
At noon the apprentice midwife called. She told me that I no longer had to keep track of contractions, and that they would be arriving presently. Outside of the washroom the friends and relations had flown into action. My wife's parents arrived first, and immediately set to filling up the birthing pool with warm water from our laundry sink. When the hot water tank was empty they commanded a small squadron of hangers-on to action, boiling pots of water and relaying them into the nursery.
Twenty minutes later I noticed that the shape of my wife's pelvis was changing, ballooning out in front above her mons veneris. "Jeez, it almost looks like Baby's head is right there in your cooch," I said like an idiot. It slowly dawned on me that was exactly what was going on. While I felt around for the telephone I reminded my wife to try to keep her breathing slow and deep as she recovered from her latest contraction, leaning against the side of the tub, fighting to control her breath and keep her muscles relaxed. I paged the midwives a third time, letting more urgency leak into my voice. "It seems like we're progressing very quickly here," I said to the pager. During the next contraction bloody mucus squirted out into the bath water.
"I don't feel like I'm holding up very well," my wife said in a small voice between strong contractions. It broke my heart. In truth she was holding up like a champion, managing to control her muscles and reign in her breathing with calm determination. "You're my hero," I said.
When the midwives arrived they plopped down on the washroom floor beside me and deftly inserted a brace of fingers into my wife. "Your baby has a nice head of hair," reported the apprentice. The cervix had dilated to over eight centimeters. "We'd bitta move her now or we're going to heff thes beby right here," pronounced the senior midwife with melodious South African inflection.
When the latest contraction subsided I helped haul my wife up out of the tub, and we formed a little shuffling choo-choo train into the nursery as she held on to my shoulders. It was quarter past two in the afternoon, or a little less than three hours after labour had begun in earnest. Once she was lying down in the massive, steaming birthing tub the apprentice midwife examined her yoni again. "We're fully dilated," she said. The senior midwife asked, "Do you feel pressure on your bum? Like you heff to go to the toilet?"
Grimacing, my wife nodded yes emphatically.
And suddenly the all-clear was given: no longer was she to keep her muscles as relaxed as possible, but should instead begin to push with each contraction. The baby was coming -- right now. I hastily pulled my cellular telephone and fob-watch out of my pockets and jumped into the pool, making myself a human chair for my wife to lean into from behind. The contractions were coming one on top of another now, and within seconds she was pushing with everything she was worth, crushing my hands in hers spasmodically.
A line of intimates had accumulated at the door of the nursery: our mothers, my sister, the dog... I could see from the expression on their faces that there was suddenly something to see, though I could not myself see beyond my wife's twitching belly. "I can see your baby's head!" my wife's best friend cried. Already? Could we really be so near the end?
The next push sent out more streams of bloody mucus, curling and swooping lazily through the hot water. My wife cried out loudly, clenching my hands painfully in her grip. I felt the need to pee.
As she started her next push I saw clouds of runny blood blooming out from beneath her, diffusing into the water in a series of spurts. Stringy yellow fluid followed in slippery loop-de-loops as my wife let out a soul-blanching scream, simultaneously rocketing her head back and slamming my skull against the wall behind me. Through the dancing silver pinprick stars in my vision I saw the eyes of the attendees widen.
The apprentice midwife smiled. "The head is born!"
The final push was easier than the one before. In a single graceful motion the midwife scooped up a tiny creature with indigo skin and lay it on my wife's breast, squirming and clean, fresh from the water. A powerful urge overcame me, startling in its instinctive force, compelling me to take rapid but careful tally of the baby: ten fingers, ten toes, minimal skull deformation from passing through the birth canal, skin changing rapidly from purple to pink...
"You did it," I told my wife softly. "We have a little girl."
The rest is anticlimax. While my wife passed the placenta through her largely numbed loins I showed off my daughter to the friends and relations. My parents cried. Someone handed me a cigar and a glass of bubbly wine. The dog licked the newborn and wagged his tail. Baby took it all in with wide-eyed aplomb, quietly looking at whoever was talking, twisting her little earlobe with her tiny, perfect fingers. "Buh," she said, experimentally. "Bah," she added after a moment of reflection.
Before we committed the placenta to the freezer for future burial we took a tour of the organ as a family, with the midwives peeling through the various layers and lobes of red, shiny gore with rubber gloves. More wine was poured. "Ooo-meck," commented Baby as she was put to the breast and introduced to oral feeding.
"She's suckling," my wife confirmed, falling in love.
Yesterday night the sun set on me for the first time as a father. Things are different now. I am somebody's daddy. From this day forward, I live first for someone else.
The end.
1/22/2003
KURO5HIN SELF-CORRODES
Community-edited superblog Kuro5hin imploded earlier this afternoon, apparently suffering from an excess of popularity. The "Slashdot Effect" occurs when a website's bandwidth is hosed by a sudden surge of surfing resulting from a post on Slashdot; similarly, slang-happy K5ers have been known to call the Kuro5hin version of the effect being "Corroded." Kuro5hin has been slowly corroding itself for months, buckling under the weight of increasing notoriety and the associated traffic. Despite the stalwart efforts of Rusty rex, today the site wilted and ate my Third Trimester Report. Crap. Hopefully the resurrection doesn't take long. I'm sure Rusty has his whip trained on his legions of indentured-labourer hamsters even now, fighting the good fight.
Community-edited superblog Kuro5hin imploded earlier this afternoon, apparently suffering from an excess of popularity. The "Slashdot Effect" occurs when a website's bandwidth is hosed by a sudden surge of surfing resulting from a post on Slashdot; similarly, slang-happy K5ers have been known to call the Kuro5hin version of the effect being "Corroded." Kuro5hin has been slowly corroding itself for months, buckling under the weight of increasing notoriety and the associated traffic. Despite the stalwart efforts of Rusty rex, today the site wilted and ate my Third Trimester Report. Crap. Hopefully the resurrection doesn't take long. I'm sure Rusty has his whip trained on his legions of indentured-labourer hamsters even now, fighting the good fight.
THE FRESHEST HUMAN BEING I KNOW
My daughter was born the other day. I am currently preparing my Third Trimester Report (1st report, 2nd report). In the meantime, I have updated Baby's Homepage. To tell the whole truth, I am pretty taken by this little pea of a girl, sleeping beside me now.
My daughter was born the other day. I am currently preparing my Third Trimester Report (1st report, 2nd report). In the meantime, I have updated Baby's Homepage. To tell the whole truth, I am pretty taken by this little pea of a girl, sleeping beside me now.
1/19/2003
INFORMATION WANTS TO GROW UP
Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder and executive chair John Perry Barlow brings his clean, pedagogical style to the subjects of patents, intellectual property and the life-cycles of Dawkinian memes in this archived article from Wired. Barlow argues that the current sick state of copyright demands a rethinking of the basic tenants of information economics, and prescribes a new framework based on parallels to biological ecosystems. Some excerpts:
MARS BOUND
This /. article has a nice spread of links on the state of the manned mission to Mars. Could it really happen by 2010?
Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder and executive chair John Perry Barlow brings his clean, pedagogical style to the subjects of patents, intellectual property and the life-cycles of Dawkinian memes in this archived article from Wired. Barlow argues that the current sick state of copyright demands a rethinking of the basic tenants of information economics, and prescribes a new framework based on parallels to biological ecosystems. Some excerpts:
Like DNA helices, ideas are relentless expansionists, always seeking new opportunities for Lebensraum. And, as in carbon-based nature, the more robust organisms are extremely adept at finding new places to live...
The "terrain" itself - the architecture of the Net - may come to serve many of the purposes which could only be maintained in the past by legal imposition. For example, it may be unnecessary to constitutionally assure freedom of expression in an environment which, in the words of my fellow EFF co-founder John Gilmore, "treats censorship as a malfunction" and reroutes proscribed ideas around it.
MARS BOUND
This /. article has a nice spread of links on the state of the manned mission to Mars. Could it really happen by 2010?
1/17/2003
RUSTY ARCHITECTURE
Rusty Foster, popular benevolent dictator of the community-edited superblog Kuro5hin, has written this article on Information Architecture for the Online Journalism Review. IA pioneer Richard Saul Wurman defines an Information Architect as "the individual who organizes the patterns in data, making the complex clear." Rusty touches on the short history of IA, discusses some of the current principal players in the field (including the nascent Asilomar Institute for study of the subject and Andrew Hinton's 25 theses), and wraps the whole thing up with an interview with Chris Mandra, executive producer of the recently revamped NPR Online. All in all an interesting if breezy introduction to the subject.
Counter-intuitively, order can sometimes spring from chaos. Consider the roll of blogging as a decentralised, organic solution to one level of Internet content-sorting, as discussed in this essay from Rebecca's Pocket:
Rusty Foster, popular benevolent dictator of the community-edited superblog Kuro5hin, has written this article on Information Architecture for the Online Journalism Review. IA pioneer Richard Saul Wurman defines an Information Architect as "the individual who organizes the patterns in data, making the complex clear." Rusty touches on the short history of IA, discusses some of the current principal players in the field (including the nascent Asilomar Institute for study of the subject and Andrew Hinton's 25 theses), and wraps the whole thing up with an interview with Chris Mandra, executive producer of the recently revamped NPR Online. All in all an interesting if breezy introduction to the subject.
Counter-intuitively, order can sometimes spring from chaos. Consider the roll of blogging as a decentralised, organic solution to one level of Internet content-sorting, as discussed in this essay from Rebecca's Pocket:
"By highlighting articles that may easily be passed over by the typical web user too busy to do more than scan corporate news sites, by searching out articles from lesser-known sources, and by providing additional facts, alternative views, and thoughtful commentary, weblog editors participate in the dissemination and interpretation of the news that is fed to us every day."
1/16/2003
TWO CHEESEBURGERS AND WORLD PEACE, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Popular belief has long held that there is no better use of three Djinn-granted wishes than asking for "two cheeseburgers and world peace," but the question of what kind of burgers ought best be wished for has gained new levels of subtlety for me after reading this artery-choking odyssey through New York's broad spectrum of hamburgoria. As to the question of who will own the made-for-television-movie rights for the dawn of world peace a millennium hence, we must consider the results of recent copyright shannanigans in Washington, DC: for an exercise in coercive memology compare/contrast these two articles on the subject -- the Yahoo/AP article seems to be suggesting that America and the world has somehow dodged a bullet; Dan Gillmor's take is that the now familiar refrain that multinational corporate barons have bullied their way one step closer to taxing our thoughts.
Popular belief has long held that there is no better use of three Djinn-granted wishes than asking for "two cheeseburgers and world peace," but the question of what kind of burgers ought best be wished for has gained new levels of subtlety for me after reading this artery-choking odyssey through New York's broad spectrum of hamburgoria. As to the question of who will own the made-for-television-movie rights for the dawn of world peace a millennium hence, we must consider the results of recent copyright shannanigans in Washington, DC: for an exercise in coercive memology compare/contrast these two articles on the subject -- the Yahoo/AP article seems to be suggesting that America and the world has somehow dodged a bullet; Dan Gillmor's take is that the now familiar refrain that multinational corporate barons have bullied their way one step closer to taxing our thoughts.
1/14/2003
BLOG*SPOT BANNED
Bloggers of all stripes have been silenced in China, including a complete block on the entire *.blogspot.com domain by the people's gateway. Plenty of first hand perspectives are linked through here.
Bloggers of all stripes have been silenced in China, including a complete block on the entire *.blogspot.com domain by the people's gateway. Plenty of first hand perspectives are linked through here.
1/13/2003
MOVING VICARIOUSLY
Further to yesterday's post on the nature of imagined data-spaces, this article by Peter Anders provides a nice introduction to qualifying different kinds of virtual spatial-transformations (if you're into that sort of thing). From the article:
Personally, I found it a very interesting read. Anders explores similar concepts here and here. Meanwhile, on an altogether unrelated note, our baby has dropped.
Further to yesterday's post on the nature of imagined data-spaces, this article by Peter Anders provides a nice introduction to qualifying different kinds of virtual spatial-transformations (if you're into that sort of thing). From the article:
Implicit in any cyberspace community is a space, an environment that embraces the domain’s activity. Engagement with such communities depends on it. This space is founded on our physical experience...In this paper I will describe the relationship between cognitive and perceived motion and the shape of various communities formed in text and graphic environments. I will present categoric and dynamic motion as concepts for understanding movement in these spaces and as an issue that affects their design and use.
Personally, I found it a very interesting read. Anders explores similar concepts here and here. Meanwhile, on an altogether unrelated note, our baby has dropped.
1/12/2003
THE EVOLUTION OF DATA-SPACE
From the moment I first interacted with a computer I was obsessed with the idea of the look and feel of the computing space, both apparent and imagined. By apparent I mean the literal visual aspects of the interface, and by imagined I mean the virtual information space to which the computer is providing access...
My father brought home a Commodore Vic-20, and I was immediately transfixed by the duality between the computing space represented on the screen and the computing space I imagined during the seemingly interminable periods that the Vic-20 spent searching for data on the tape-drive. As a six-year-old my visual metaphor for this latter space was highly derivative: in my mind's eye I saw the Vic-20 as the little pixelated protagonist from IntelliVision's version of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Cloudy Mountain, who revealed the shape of the maze he was in by running around, calling the visual information into being by the proximity of his torch. While I waited, my Vic-20 was jogging around inside the dark, magnetic corridors of the tape-drive, casting its torch hither and yon in a tireless mission to discover and retrieve for me some BASIC program a dozen lines long.
While mucking around with programming my Commodore-64 a couple of years later I fell into a habit that would linger long: the need to customise the visual interface to suit my mood. Before I would write or debug a programme I always had to have the border and background elements of the screen set to colours that I felt somehow contributed to the "feel" of the code. For example, while writing the beginning of a programme I invariably chose to use light text on a black background because I was adding something to nothing, and nothing, like empty space, is inherently dark.
My penchant for visualising emptiness as darkness fit nicely with the monochrome CRT display that I acquired along with an IBM XT from my step-father when I was eleven. The monitor was capable of displaying three non-simultaneous colours -- green, amber or white -- which I switched between constantly. Green I reserved for working in DOS itself, because the green type on the black background reminded me of the "serious" computers I had seen in movies, like Mother from Alien (1979) and Joshua from Wargames (1983).
My step-father himself had upgraded to a newer DOS system from AST that supported colour, and when I used it for creative writing I could change the text and background colour in WordPerfect to suit the tone of my narrative. Passages that took place on sunny days were written with bright blue backgrounds before them, and passages that took place on dark and/or stormy nights were set in shades of foreboding grey. I can't truthfully say that this habit improved the quality of my writing, but it did enhance the experience I had interacting with the computer and stimulating my imagination.
I was cast back into a black and white world at thirteen years old when I became the recipient of my first Macintosh, a used Plus, in the heady days of System 6, when the MultiFinder was new and interactive multimedia was being defined by Macromind VideoWorks. My background colour of choice for the Finder (the Macintosh filesystem browser) was black, for the simple reason that it suggested to me that I was peering into a dark, potentially infinite space behind the glass on that cute little appliance, not unlike the inky window for reading the message on the die inside of a fortune-telling Magic Eight Ball. A black desktop seemed to me to be filled with more "possibilities" than the confining and claustrophobic default grey backdrop.
The consideration of the imagined look of computing space became vastly more common with the popularisation of the Internet. Inspired by cinematic visions like the visuals in the ground-breaking film Tron (1982), clip art directories and stock art catalogues exploded with images of glowing telephones spanning nations, glowing wireframe grids embracing arrays of glowing dots and speeding bullets of light, clusterfucks of lensflares squatting on extruded global maps made of glass...
Meanwhile, the more concrete side of the equation -- the visual aspects of the graphical user interface -- had changed very little. When the public was first introduced to the Internet many found the experience anticlimactic. The reality of clicking on text in little windows just like for anything else paled in comparison to the Gibsonian cyber-porno that had been exploited to sell everybody in:
That's when imaginative morons of all stripes started whipping their developers into a frenzy in an effort to cough up a new and exciting way of accessing the Internet's resources that would finally deliver on the glitz, glamour and industrial-quality light and magic that people apparently wanted. From the semantic end of the spectrum came things like novel prototype browsers that abstracted the relationships between data on web pages in flashy ways with simulated 3D motion that result in little more than more advanced data-mapping techniques, and from the more social end of the spectrum came avatar-soiled bandwidth-behemoths like The Palace and AlphaWorld, determined to create a parallel virtual-space on the Net based on familiar ideas like rooms, roads and real-estate.
It could be argued that these two branches of experimentation -- the semantic and social -- represent two irreconcilable camps of hostile cybernauts: the former, largely composed of academics, scientists and journalists, wants to see the development of the Internet as a superlibrary and information commons; the latter, evidently largely composed of bored, horny people with extraordinary luxury appliances they don't know what to do with, wants to see the development of the Internet as an interactive television, where they can take up familiar activities like hanging out, shopping and consuming media without the discomfort of fighting traffic.
Instead, however, I believe that these are simply two different ways to struggle with the same basic failings of an aging desktop metaphor, too limited to contain the nascent citizen-to-computer relationship that is slowly crystallising in our civilisation. As computing becomes more important to more people on a more persistent basis, like a six-year-old me they find themselves yearning to make a connection to the invisible, busy data-space that they are told is lurking out there between the lines.
Will we ever agree on what the Internet should look like?
From the moment I first interacted with a computer I was obsessed with the idea of the look and feel of the computing space, both apparent and imagined. By apparent I mean the literal visual aspects of the interface, and by imagined I mean the virtual information space to which the computer is providing access...
My father brought home a Commodore Vic-20, and I was immediately transfixed by the duality between the computing space represented on the screen and the computing space I imagined during the seemingly interminable periods that the Vic-20 spent searching for data on the tape-drive. As a six-year-old my visual metaphor for this latter space was highly derivative: in my mind's eye I saw the Vic-20 as the little pixelated protagonist from IntelliVision's version of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Cloudy Mountain, who revealed the shape of the maze he was in by running around, calling the visual information into being by the proximity of his torch. While I waited, my Vic-20 was jogging around inside the dark, magnetic corridors of the tape-drive, casting its torch hither and yon in a tireless mission to discover and retrieve for me some BASIC program a dozen lines long.
While mucking around with programming my Commodore-64 a couple of years later I fell into a habit that would linger long: the need to customise the visual interface to suit my mood. Before I would write or debug a programme I always had to have the border and background elements of the screen set to colours that I felt somehow contributed to the "feel" of the code. For example, while writing the beginning of a programme I invariably chose to use light text on a black background because I was adding something to nothing, and nothing, like empty space, is inherently dark.
My penchant for visualising emptiness as darkness fit nicely with the monochrome CRT display that I acquired along with an IBM XT from my step-father when I was eleven. The monitor was capable of displaying three non-simultaneous colours -- green, amber or white -- which I switched between constantly. Green I reserved for working in DOS itself, because the green type on the black background reminded me of the "serious" computers I had seen in movies, like Mother from Alien (1979) and Joshua from Wargames (1983).
My step-father himself had upgraded to a newer DOS system from AST that supported colour, and when I used it for creative writing I could change the text and background colour in WordPerfect to suit the tone of my narrative. Passages that took place on sunny days were written with bright blue backgrounds before them, and passages that took place on dark and/or stormy nights were set in shades of foreboding grey. I can't truthfully say that this habit improved the quality of my writing, but it did enhance the experience I had interacting with the computer and stimulating my imagination.
I was cast back into a black and white world at thirteen years old when I became the recipient of my first Macintosh, a used Plus, in the heady days of System 6, when the MultiFinder was new and interactive multimedia was being defined by Macromind VideoWorks. My background colour of choice for the Finder (the Macintosh filesystem browser) was black, for the simple reason that it suggested to me that I was peering into a dark, potentially infinite space behind the glass on that cute little appliance, not unlike the inky window for reading the message on the die inside of a fortune-telling Magic Eight Ball. A black desktop seemed to me to be filled with more "possibilities" than the confining and claustrophobic default grey backdrop.
The consideration of the imagined look of computing space became vastly more common with the popularisation of the Internet. Inspired by cinematic visions like the visuals in the ground-breaking film Tron (1982), clip art directories and stock art catalogues exploded with images of glowing telephones spanning nations, glowing wireframe grids embracing arrays of glowing dots and speeding bullets of light, clusterfucks of lensflares squatting on extruded global maps made of glass...
Meanwhile, the more concrete side of the equation -- the visual aspects of the graphical user interface -- had changed very little. When the public was first introduced to the Internet many found the experience anticlimactic. The reality of clicking on text in little windows just like for anything else paled in comparison to the Gibsonian cyber-porno that had been exploited to sell everybody in:
"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts...A graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding..." (Neuromancer, p.51)
That's when imaginative morons of all stripes started whipping their developers into a frenzy in an effort to cough up a new and exciting way of accessing the Internet's resources that would finally deliver on the glitz, glamour and industrial-quality light and magic that people apparently wanted. From the semantic end of the spectrum came things like novel prototype browsers that abstracted the relationships between data on web pages in flashy ways with simulated 3D motion that result in little more than more advanced data-mapping techniques, and from the more social end of the spectrum came avatar-soiled bandwidth-behemoths like The Palace and AlphaWorld, determined to create a parallel virtual-space on the Net based on familiar ideas like rooms, roads and real-estate.
It could be argued that these two branches of experimentation -- the semantic and social -- represent two irreconcilable camps of hostile cybernauts: the former, largely composed of academics, scientists and journalists, wants to see the development of the Internet as a superlibrary and information commons; the latter, evidently largely composed of bored, horny people with extraordinary luxury appliances they don't know what to do with, wants to see the development of the Internet as an interactive television, where they can take up familiar activities like hanging out, shopping and consuming media without the discomfort of fighting traffic.
Instead, however, I believe that these are simply two different ways to struggle with the same basic failings of an aging desktop metaphor, too limited to contain the nascent citizen-to-computer relationship that is slowly crystallising in our civilisation. As computing becomes more important to more people on a more persistent basis, like a six-year-old me they find themselves yearning to make a connection to the invisible, busy data-space that they are told is lurking out there between the lines.
Will we ever agree on what the Internet should look like?
1/11/2003
OTAKU PRECEDENT
Finally, an article about manga and copyright issues that is not predicated on an appreciation of Katsuhiro Otomo or Richard Stallman (despite the fact that the link came through /.). The article, Copy Cats and Robotic Dogs, posits that lawyers could stand to take a lesson from the way the manga (graphic novel) industry tolerates the burgeoning dojinshi (derivative amateur works) industry in Japan. The idea of heavy-handed copyright stifling innovation is not new, but this pithy piece gains extra points for having a real world industry to take examples from, rather than merely empty, angry philosophising about the potential benefits of imagined copyleft utopias (GNU excepted).
Finally, an article about manga and copyright issues that is not predicated on an appreciation of Katsuhiro Otomo or Richard Stallman (despite the fact that the link came through /.). The article, Copy Cats and Robotic Dogs, posits that lawyers could stand to take a lesson from the way the manga (graphic novel) industry tolerates the burgeoning dojinshi (derivative amateur works) industry in Japan. The idea of heavy-handed copyright stifling innovation is not new, but this pithy piece gains extra points for having a real world industry to take examples from, rather than merely empty, angry philosophising about the potential benefits of imagined copyleft utopias (GNU excepted).
1/09/2003
GALLERY OF POST-MODERN HORROR
Something Awful has ponied up a pile of choice photographs that have a certain, elusive phlegmatic appeal. My personal favourties: a portrait in the Dian Arbus tradition of a world-weary teenage mutant ninja turtle, a Henri Bresson inspired decisive moment of bizarre cross-ethnic robbery, this un-merry un-goround, a heart-warming interracial moment, and this horrifying vision of a world in which the terrorists have already won. And of course, no review of tragicomic delights would be complete without the token chimp with a hand-gun snap.
Also: they're getting better at watching.
Something Awful has ponied up a pile of choice photographs that have a certain, elusive phlegmatic appeal. My personal favourties: a portrait in the Dian Arbus tradition of a world-weary teenage mutant ninja turtle, a Henri Bresson inspired decisive moment of bizarre cross-ethnic robbery, this un-merry un-goround, a heart-warming interracial moment, and this horrifying vision of a world in which the terrorists have already won. And of course, no review of tragicomic delights would be complete without the token chimp with a hand-gun snap.
Also: they're getting better at watching.
1/08/2003
THE WOODEN VANDAL
I have recently given a face-lift to the webby home of my 2001 animated short The Wooden Vandal. Why not drop by for a visit? Come for the nested-table splash-screen, stay for the movie.
I have recently given a face-lift to the webby home of my 2001 animated short The Wooden Vandal. Why not drop by for a visit? Come for the nested-table splash-screen, stay for the movie.
OPEN BLOGCHANNELS
Since I have already posted on the subject of being so far behind the trend in my uptake of bloggery, for the sake of balance I'd like to try something a little more au courant. There are always cool ideas being tossed around at Seb's Open Research, but this one seems particularly leading edge: marking individual blog posts with non-garbage meta-data in order to create live streams of topical posts which can be fed from a pool of subscriber bloggers into an automated community-blog via RSS. Cool idea. Some kiwis are trying to make a go of it, detailed here.
Since I have already posted on the subject of being so far behind the trend in my uptake of bloggery, for the sake of balance I'd like to try something a little more au courant. There are always cool ideas being tossed around at Seb's Open Research, but this one seems particularly leading edge: marking individual blog posts with non-garbage meta-data in order to create live streams of topical posts which can be fed from a pool of subscriber bloggers into an automated community-blog via RSS. Cool idea. Some kiwis are trying to make a go of it, detailed here.
1/07/2003
ALSO
I have been a little slow on the uptake with personal blogging, though I have been participating for a while in a few of the meta-level superblogs like ./ and K5. It's old hat that journalists are interested in the blog phenomenon, but apparently even the MBAs are catching on now.
My first experiment was with a free blogspace at Xanga, but the interface was fairly brutal, the servers were rather slow, and customising options were not very flexible. So far I am much more impressed by the free fare offered by Blog*Spot, and am planning on abandoning my Xanga blog.
If anyone is reading this I should also throw in a word for construct-d, a fresh-born community-edited Scoop site in need of a community.
Lastly and leastly, this.
I have been a little slow on the uptake with personal blogging, though I have been participating for a while in a few of the meta-level superblogs like ./ and K5. It's old hat that journalists are interested in the blog phenomenon, but apparently even the MBAs are catching on now.
My first experiment was with a free blogspace at Xanga, but the interface was fairly brutal, the servers were rather slow, and customising options were not very flexible. So far I am much more impressed by the free fare offered by Blog*Spot, and am planning on abandoning my Xanga blog.
If anyone is reading this I should also throw in a word for construct-d, a fresh-born community-edited Scoop site in need of a community.
Lastly and leastly, this.
INTERNATIONAL SUPER TREK
Despite the disquieting and inexplicable amount of Star Trek imagery involved, I must say I found this article (which I found here) to be a very interesting read on the evolving nature of internationalism, diplomacy and conspiratorial gay Europeans.
Also: the oft-discussed but seldom seen screenplay written by Kevin Smith for a Superman movie that never came to be.
Despite the disquieting and inexplicable amount of Star Trek imagery involved, I must say I found this article (which I found here) to be a very interesting read on the evolving nature of internationalism, diplomacy and conspiratorial gay Europeans.
Also: the oft-discussed but seldom seen screenplay written by Kevin Smith for a Superman movie that never came to be.
SECOND TRIMESTER REPORT
Posted originally on Kuro5hin.
"I'm being beaten up from the inside!"
That is the sound of my wife gasping in shock after being punched in the pubic bone by our child-in-progress. In the three months since I filed my first report on this beautiful and terrifying process, the foetus temporarily known as Baby has learned to express his or her moment to moment opinion of the world by bludgeoning my wife's uterine wall. Baby now has a fully articulated spectrum of primitive emotions, including pleasure (belly kicking), displeasure (bowel boxing), boredom (spine punching), and existential angst (bladder jabbing).
Baby is well on the way to becoming a fully-fledged birthable infant, and my wife and I are well on the way to becoming fully-fledged parents. We are some two thirds of the way along now, and so it is time again for me to offer up my observations and experiences from the edge of approaching fatherhood: this is my Second Trimester Report.
In the previous article in this series I described how my wife and I were surprised to learn that somebody was being built inside of her, due in part to an incident involving tainted tunafish and an expectorated birth-control pill.
At this point, Baby is about 30 cm tall, weighs nearly a kilogram, and is covered in a fine, downy hair called lanugo. Baby's eyes can now open and close, and Baby may even shield them with a wee hand in reaction to very bright light. Baby can hear our voices, and we have read that Baby can taste traces of my wife's food through the amniotic fluid. Baby has semi-predictable cycles of sleep and wakefulness. My wife's uterus - or meatsack - is now about the size of a basketball.
Over the course of this trimester Baby has quadrupled in size. This has had some dramatic effects on my wife's body. Because her giblets are being compressed up into her rib-cage by her ballooning womb she's been experiencing some shortness of breath and heartburn (acid reflux). Her areolas and nipples have darkened, her breasts have swollen, and her belly button is threatening to invert (umbilical hernia). Her new shape and altered centre of gravity have combined with dizzying hormonal surges to make her heartbreakingly clumsy (slapstick).
Her belly aches as the ligaments stretch and harden to support to the weight of the whole wet enterprise. The accumulation of fluid near her joints causes occasional numbness in her hands or forearm, so now we're Carpal Tunnel Syndrome buddies, she and I. It is becoming harder for her to find comfortable positions in which to sleep, so I keep waking up to her watching Wile E. Coyote cartoons in the middle of the night. "What's up?" I mumble.
"I'm hungry," she says.
In the past three months there have been some changes in our lives.
First of all, my wife decided to stop doing contract work providing in-home therapy for people with brain injuries in favour of a somewhat mindless full-time job as an administrative assistant. We agreed that this was a good idea partly because she was finding driving across our stinky megalopolis all day to be uncomfortable (and occasionally messy) given the powerful nausea she was experiencing at the time, and partly because it better qualified her for fatter maternity benefits from the state.
Human Resources Development Canada will cough up about half of her working wages (up to maximum of $ 1 652.00 per month) for 50 weeks, assuming she has enjoyed those working wages for at least 600 hours prior to delivery. At the end of her 601st hour of work, my wife resigned. This had not been her plan from the beginning, but rather a combined result of the dense ball of loathing she acquired for the mindlessness of her job and some of her jackass co-workers, as well as the nagging back-pain she was experiencing from sitting at a desk all day (which she feared would bloom into the debilitating chronic sciatica her cousin had experienced while pregnant).
Of course, this has caused a shortfall in our budget for the rest of the year, which must somehow be addressed. My wife is convinced that I am altogether too obsessed with the subject of our finances, and I am convinced that I am not nearly obsessed enough. According to various books and websites we've consulted, it is not at all uncommon for expectant fathers to channel all of their baby-related insecurities in to a single polished blade of pointy fiscal anxiety. Knowing that my anxiety is common does not make me feel appreciably less anxious, however.
We are no longer renting a spacious apartment; we now rent a cozy house. The dog is ecstatic. The cats luxuriate in crapping in the wild. Unfortunately, this move took us out of the range of the crack team of birthing specialists that had been poised for my wife's midwifery, and so we had to look for new talent here in the north end of the city. Midwives are fewer and farther between up here so we had some trouble finding anyone with an opening. At last we did manage to secure a new team: the bad news is that they won't supply us with a collapsible heated birthing pool, but the good news is that they lack the undertone of sinister misandry I detected from the lesbian lioness who headed up our first group.
Since having a water-birth is predicated on being wet, we found ourselves trying to shop for a collapsible wading pool in Canada in October (which, needless to say, is considered an "out of season" item). Since we are under thirty we turn to the Internet for the solution to most vexing problems of this kind, and my wife was indeed finally able to place an order with Canadian Tire.
The pool arrived yesterday, and my wife insists that it will fit into the baby's room. I'm pretty sure that this would violate some basic laws of physics. I have suggested that she may have to excrete the little bugger in the livingroom, but she feels this would compromise her plan for the social arrangements for the birthing occasion. "I don't want everyone in the room with me," she explains.
"Everyone who?" I ask.
This is a big question. You see, just about everybody in our respective families has expressed some level of interest in attending the occasion of the birth. For the sake of curbing the chaos, we will have to refuse many of them. Those that are allowed to attend will be divided by my wife into two distinct groups: those whom she is comfortable watching her squeeze a baby out of her yin, and those whom she'd rather wait in the next room and not be treated to that particular spectacle. She wants her mother with her, but isn't sure about mine; she thinks her best-friend should be there, but may want my sister to wait outside. It is a delicate sorting process, with a lot of potential for people to feel left out or snubbed. (What is the protocol for such an occasion, anyway? Should I be keeping hors d'oeuvres on hand? Beer and coolers? Cigars?)
The midwife's padawan-learner showed us some videos of actual water-births so that we could get a feel for what to expect. "You might want to get one of those little scoopy nets from a pet supply store, so that you can scoop debris out of the pool as you go along," she told us.
"Don't worry," says my wife, "we already have a fish."
"Perfect."
The videos themselves were lurid and terrifying amateur works suitable for Ludovico: voluptuous, wet, naked women writhe, moan and scream as they force snot and offal out of their nethers while a crowd of intimates takes photographs and coos encouragement. (Funny aside: my wife asked me why the birthing centre didn't just offer the videos as downloadable clips from their website.)
Ever since then my wife seems preoccupied with how she will comport herself throughout the delivery. She is worried that she will whimper, or simper, or cry in a way that somehow betrays her sense of pride. She is determined to reserve some measure of equanimity. (And who can blame her? If I were facing a similar physical trial, wouldn't I be concerned with my ability to "take it like a man"?) She is a harsh judge of the women she sees on A Baby Story. She thinks most of them are wimps. I assure her of my confidence that she will bear the trial well, while at the same time trying to suggest that some mild woosery is perfectly acceptable given the circumstances.
My wife has expressed concern that we're not playing enough music for Baby. I asked her what she wanted Baby to hear, and she told me she to find something stimulating for a growing neural net, eager to make fresh connections and in search of a template. So, this morning we spent a few hours treating Baby to a complete concert of The Well-Tempered Clavier by Johann Sebastian Bach. In the silence between discs Baby kicked furiously, to be soothed only by the sound of the next track beginning.
Baby still has no name. Both of us continue to procrastinate on this issue. She wants something Latvian; I want something rare but unpretentious. Every few weeks one of us asks "What do you think about the name X?" and the other pauses, considers thoughtfully, then says "I don't like it." Our second glimpse through ultrasound imaging has not clarified Baby's sex, so our naming search space has not much diminished.
...And that's about it. There isn't as much to say about this second trimester as there was about the first. In some superficial ways the pregnancy has become mundane. I have gotten used to the fact that I have a perpetually hungry, swollen wife. We have both been trying to ready ourselves to be parents: listening to advice, recalling our childhood interactions with our own parents (the other day we discussed whether or not we thought being forced to stand in the corner quietly is a suitable penalty box for overzealous tots (we think that it is)), and reading books. Friends and family have donated to us toys, a pram, a bassinet, a car-seat, dozens of tiny little jumpers, and about a thousand miniature bibs featuring Hello Kitty-esque motifs. In just three short months Baby is due to debut in this colder, drier world we larger people inhabit, and to join us as a practitioner of the pulmonary arts. We're both giddy with excitement. We can't wait to meet Baby face to face.
In my last installment in this series I plan to report on our experiences with pre-natal classes, preparing for the home-birth itself, and last but not least, the exciting climax: the big showdown between Baby and the birth canal. When next I write, I'll have an infant in my arms.
(And, very likely, milk barf on my shoulder.)
Posted originally on Kuro5hin.
"I'm being beaten up from the inside!"
That is the sound of my wife gasping in shock after being punched in the pubic bone by our child-in-progress. In the three months since I filed my first report on this beautiful and terrifying process, the foetus temporarily known as Baby has learned to express his or her moment to moment opinion of the world by bludgeoning my wife's uterine wall. Baby now has a fully articulated spectrum of primitive emotions, including pleasure (belly kicking), displeasure (bowel boxing), boredom (spine punching), and existential angst (bladder jabbing).
Baby is well on the way to becoming a fully-fledged birthable infant, and my wife and I are well on the way to becoming fully-fledged parents. We are some two thirds of the way along now, and so it is time again for me to offer up my observations and experiences from the edge of approaching fatherhood: this is my Second Trimester Report.
In the previous article in this series I described how my wife and I were surprised to learn that somebody was being built inside of her, due in part to an incident involving tainted tunafish and an expectorated birth-control pill.
At this point, Baby is about 30 cm tall, weighs nearly a kilogram, and is covered in a fine, downy hair called lanugo. Baby's eyes can now open and close, and Baby may even shield them with a wee hand in reaction to very bright light. Baby can hear our voices, and we have read that Baby can taste traces of my wife's food through the amniotic fluid. Baby has semi-predictable cycles of sleep and wakefulness. My wife's uterus - or meatsack - is now about the size of a basketball.
Over the course of this trimester Baby has quadrupled in size. This has had some dramatic effects on my wife's body. Because her giblets are being compressed up into her rib-cage by her ballooning womb she's been experiencing some shortness of breath and heartburn (acid reflux). Her areolas and nipples have darkened, her breasts have swollen, and her belly button is threatening to invert (umbilical hernia). Her new shape and altered centre of gravity have combined with dizzying hormonal surges to make her heartbreakingly clumsy (slapstick).
Her belly aches as the ligaments stretch and harden to support to the weight of the whole wet enterprise. The accumulation of fluid near her joints causes occasional numbness in her hands or forearm, so now we're Carpal Tunnel Syndrome buddies, she and I. It is becoming harder for her to find comfortable positions in which to sleep, so I keep waking up to her watching Wile E. Coyote cartoons in the middle of the night. "What's up?" I mumble.
"I'm hungry," she says.
In the past three months there have been some changes in our lives.
First of all, my wife decided to stop doing contract work providing in-home therapy for people with brain injuries in favour of a somewhat mindless full-time job as an administrative assistant. We agreed that this was a good idea partly because she was finding driving across our stinky megalopolis all day to be uncomfortable (and occasionally messy) given the powerful nausea she was experiencing at the time, and partly because it better qualified her for fatter maternity benefits from the state.
Human Resources Development Canada will cough up about half of her working wages (up to maximum of $ 1 652.00 per month) for 50 weeks, assuming she has enjoyed those working wages for at least 600 hours prior to delivery. At the end of her 601st hour of work, my wife resigned. This had not been her plan from the beginning, but rather a combined result of the dense ball of loathing she acquired for the mindlessness of her job and some of her jackass co-workers, as well as the nagging back-pain she was experiencing from sitting at a desk all day (which she feared would bloom into the debilitating chronic sciatica her cousin had experienced while pregnant).
Of course, this has caused a shortfall in our budget for the rest of the year, which must somehow be addressed. My wife is convinced that I am altogether too obsessed with the subject of our finances, and I am convinced that I am not nearly obsessed enough. According to various books and websites we've consulted, it is not at all uncommon for expectant fathers to channel all of their baby-related insecurities in to a single polished blade of pointy fiscal anxiety. Knowing that my anxiety is common does not make me feel appreciably less anxious, however.
We are no longer renting a spacious apartment; we now rent a cozy house. The dog is ecstatic. The cats luxuriate in crapping in the wild. Unfortunately, this move took us out of the range of the crack team of birthing specialists that had been poised for my wife's midwifery, and so we had to look for new talent here in the north end of the city. Midwives are fewer and farther between up here so we had some trouble finding anyone with an opening. At last we did manage to secure a new team: the bad news is that they won't supply us with a collapsible heated birthing pool, but the good news is that they lack the undertone of sinister misandry I detected from the lesbian lioness who headed up our first group.
Since having a water-birth is predicated on being wet, we found ourselves trying to shop for a collapsible wading pool in Canada in October (which, needless to say, is considered an "out of season" item). Since we are under thirty we turn to the Internet for the solution to most vexing problems of this kind, and my wife was indeed finally able to place an order with Canadian Tire.
The pool arrived yesterday, and my wife insists that it will fit into the baby's room. I'm pretty sure that this would violate some basic laws of physics. I have suggested that she may have to excrete the little bugger in the livingroom, but she feels this would compromise her plan for the social arrangements for the birthing occasion. "I don't want everyone in the room with me," she explains.
"Everyone who?" I ask.
This is a big question. You see, just about everybody in our respective families has expressed some level of interest in attending the occasion of the birth. For the sake of curbing the chaos, we will have to refuse many of them. Those that are allowed to attend will be divided by my wife into two distinct groups: those whom she is comfortable watching her squeeze a baby out of her yin, and those whom she'd rather wait in the next room and not be treated to that particular spectacle. She wants her mother with her, but isn't sure about mine; she thinks her best-friend should be there, but may want my sister to wait outside. It is a delicate sorting process, with a lot of potential for people to feel left out or snubbed. (What is the protocol for such an occasion, anyway? Should I be keeping hors d'oeuvres on hand? Beer and coolers? Cigars?)
The midwife's padawan-learner showed us some videos of actual water-births so that we could get a feel for what to expect. "You might want to get one of those little scoopy nets from a pet supply store, so that you can scoop debris out of the pool as you go along," she told us.
"Don't worry," says my wife, "we already have a fish."
"Perfect."
The videos themselves were lurid and terrifying amateur works suitable for Ludovico: voluptuous, wet, naked women writhe, moan and scream as they force snot and offal out of their nethers while a crowd of intimates takes photographs and coos encouragement. (Funny aside: my wife asked me why the birthing centre didn't just offer the videos as downloadable clips from their website.)
Ever since then my wife seems preoccupied with how she will comport herself throughout the delivery. She is worried that she will whimper, or simper, or cry in a way that somehow betrays her sense of pride. She is determined to reserve some measure of equanimity. (And who can blame her? If I were facing a similar physical trial, wouldn't I be concerned with my ability to "take it like a man"?) She is a harsh judge of the women she sees on A Baby Story. She thinks most of them are wimps. I assure her of my confidence that she will bear the trial well, while at the same time trying to suggest that some mild woosery is perfectly acceptable given the circumstances.
My wife has expressed concern that we're not playing enough music for Baby. I asked her what she wanted Baby to hear, and she told me she to find something stimulating for a growing neural net, eager to make fresh connections and in search of a template. So, this morning we spent a few hours treating Baby to a complete concert of The Well-Tempered Clavier by Johann Sebastian Bach. In the silence between discs Baby kicked furiously, to be soothed only by the sound of the next track beginning.
Baby still has no name. Both of us continue to procrastinate on this issue. She wants something Latvian; I want something rare but unpretentious. Every few weeks one of us asks "What do you think about the name X?" and the other pauses, considers thoughtfully, then says "I don't like it." Our second glimpse through ultrasound imaging has not clarified Baby's sex, so our naming search space has not much diminished.
...And that's about it. There isn't as much to say about this second trimester as there was about the first. In some superficial ways the pregnancy has become mundane. I have gotten used to the fact that I have a perpetually hungry, swollen wife. We have both been trying to ready ourselves to be parents: listening to advice, recalling our childhood interactions with our own parents (the other day we discussed whether or not we thought being forced to stand in the corner quietly is a suitable penalty box for overzealous tots (we think that it is)), and reading books. Friends and family have donated to us toys, a pram, a bassinet, a car-seat, dozens of tiny little jumpers, and about a thousand miniature bibs featuring Hello Kitty-esque motifs. In just three short months Baby is due to debut in this colder, drier world we larger people inhabit, and to join us as a practitioner of the pulmonary arts. We're both giddy with excitement. We can't wait to meet Baby face to face.
In my last installment in this series I plan to report on our experiences with pre-natal classes, preparing for the home-birth itself, and last but not least, the exciting climax: the big showdown between Baby and the birth canal. When next I write, I'll have an infant in my arms.
(And, very likely, milk barf on my shoulder.)
1/02/2003
FIRST TRIMESTER REPORT
Posted originally on Kuro5hin.
"My meatsack is the size of a grapefruit!"
That is the sound of my wife discovering things about the workings of her uterus (occupied), from one website or another. One of the ways we have of coping with the strangeness of my wife having somebody growing inside of her is to find things about it that make us giggle, and calling her uterus her "meatsack" has somehow ended up on that list. This is not to disparage her uterus, mind you. We're big fans of the uterus. I'm sure that it is among my wife's favourite organs. Goodness knows it can stand a little gentle ribbing. So "meatsack" it is.
That being said, my wife's meatsack is the size of a grapefruit; the person living in there is currently called Baby, and Baby's been baking for almost three months now. This is my First Trimester Report.
Apparently, Baby is about 10 cm tall, and half of that height is Baby's giant head. Baby's still somewhat fish-like face is experimenting with rudimentary sucking motions, and Baby takes the occasional piss for diagnostic purposes. If Baby is a girl, Baby has already grown all of her ova. Baby has taste-buds. There are all sorts of websites crammed with lurid multimedia, if you're interested in drilling down for more detail. They range from encyclopaedia-like articles and illustrated calendars to vehicles for anti-abortionist propaganda.
[ http://pregnancy.about.com ]
[ http://www.justthefacts.org/flash.asp ]
[ http://www.pregnancytoday.com ]
[ http://www.pregnancy.org ]
This pregnancy was planned only in the sense that we vaguely planned to have children one day. In the weeks leading up to our wedding, we both noticed that my normally iron-gutted lover was having trouble keeping crackers down. Next came dizzy spells and pronounced moodiness. Within days, the results of the blood-test were in: get ready for Baby.
She had been taking one of those new-fangled ultra-low dosage birth control pills that also clears up your skin. The commercials for these products are enigmatic works when viewed in Canada (where, for reasons best discussed elsewhere, the law forbids prescription drug companies from identifying what their product actually does without a doctor present to advise the patient): teen nymphettes with supernaturally clear skin hop over abstract obstacles and run around in slow-fast motion with gay men and tell us we don't need to worry anymore.
One thing not featured in the commercial is tainted tunafish.
When my wife ate tainted tunafish, she briefly became a moaning, whiny fountain of vomit. For a day, not even water would stick down. When she had recovered, we tried to be mindful of the fact that she may well have thrown up her birth control pill. That's the night Baby began. Either we were not mindful enough, her innards were storing some of my genome-propagating minions in waiting from a prior encounter, or we were lucky enough to be that small but statistically significant number of people for whom the pill fails.
Many of our friends and relatives seemed shocked and angry that somebody could become pregnant while taking the birth control pill. "It isn't a guarantee," my wife told people. Myself, I preferred to say that the pill is only effective approximately 9999 times out of 10 000 -- therefore, we must have had intercourse at least one thousand times (that's how statistics work, right?). At any rate, we were informed users of the pill and we're not about to start writing angry letters to pharmaceutical companies. We knew the risks.
It should be noted for the purposes of information that, because we did not yet know about Baby, my wife continued to employ the pill for some 5 weeks after conception. Though we had worried that this could have a significant impact on Baby's early development, this does not appear to be the case (especially with the low-dose variety of pill). So, if you end up in the same situation, don't freak out -- some women have ended up taking the pill until nearly the end of their first trimester without any apparent adverse effects. We have been told that it is less dangerous for Baby than taking aspirin.
So, although the upcoming arrival of Baby has put a serious crimp in my wife's plans to pursue her doctorate in neurolinguistics, and has caused me to reschedule (yet again) the production of my next animated short, we were still very pleased to make room for Baby in our lives. From the start, we decided to focus on the positives.
We discussed abortion. Though we both wanted to keep Baby come what may, it seemed like to good idea to make sure we saw eye to eye on the thorny issues anyway. Naturally, we'd talked about the subject before, but the conversation is different when you're talking about "Baby" rather than "a baby".
Neither of us felt like termination was a defensible option in our current situation, since it would amount to nothing more than abusing medical abortion as a form of birth control. Would we consider termination if Baby tested positive for Down's Syndrome? We decided not, after some discussion. Our policy now is that the only circumstance under which we would consider termination would be if my wife's health were to be in serious and immediate jeopardy. This is not a religious or metaphysical consideration as much as a feeling that we are already morally committed to this small thing's life. Whether or not Baby is a "person" or has a soul, we invited Baby to exist (by having sex a lot), and we intend to make good on that invitation (at least until Baby is teenaged). We wouldn't flush a fish down the toilet just because we didn't want it, so why shouldn't Baby have the same kick at the can?
Getting ready for our new lives rides between being daunting and being exhilarating. We are excitedly deciding who will speak what language when to Baby, so that Baby will have our combined competence in English, French and Latvian. We have decided to move out of our apartment and rent a house instead, so that Baby can have a backyard. I have acquired several recordings of crying babies, which I will play through the day when I am working in order to aid my acclimation to a work day of filtering Baby's caterwauling out of my consciousness (a necessity for somebody who works from home). We've ear-marked my wife's iBook as a possible first computer once Baby is ready for such things. We talk about child-proofing my office, and making sure none of our cats sleep on Baby's face. We wonder whether the dog will be jealous.
We are quickly coming to hate the way that everyone and their grandmother is a self-appointed expert in gestation if they've ever been pregnant, stood beside somebody pregnant, or just watched a lot of those Leonart Nilsson documentaries on TV.
For some reason, many mothers suffer from the delusion that their experience is universally applicable. They become sullen if you don't appear to be as enthusiastic and certain about their advice as they are. What is it about our society (or species) that causes crones to descend like vultures to a kill, squawking out as many home-remedies, rumours, anecdotes, nightmares and earnest gems of wisdom as they reasonably can while pausing to breathe? I think I might scream if one more well-meaning dotard tries to get me to acknowledge that we are witnessing a "miracle" before our very eyes. Why do normally intelligent people begin giving advice that boils down to things as nonsensical as telling us not to trust the advice of any established medical authorities, but do take heed of superstitious rumours about how living in the same house as a microwave oven will make your baby retarded.
Of course, doctors can be ridiculous about pregnancy, too. Many of them seem to view pregnancy as some kind of affliction or disease. In the event of a medical crisis, we would surely seek out treatment from a physician -- but pregnancy isn't a medical crisis in and of itself. My wife's body knows what it is doing. When it wants something, it generates a craving (she's been going ga-ga for tomato juice). When it needs more fuel, my wife gets sleepy (conscious brains are high-drain devices, after all). When it needs more fluid, she gets thirsty. Not rocket science.
Planning for the delivery day itself has been interesting, and remarkably easy. Because Ontario is such a midwife-friendly province (they are not all so) and because we live in a big stinky megatropolis, we had no trouble at all finding a conveniently located centre of midwifery. Our crack team of baby specialists is composed of a mature midwife, her padawan-learner, and an auxiliary midwife who we likely will not meet until she's paged to the scene when the dilation of my wife's cervix is complete. They are available to answer our questions at all hours of the day and night. They will facilitate all of our dealings with the hospital, and manage any testing. They will supply us with a collapsible heated birthing tub, to make water-birthing at home as simple as possible. They will visit us at home for two weeks following the delivery, assisting with getting breast feeding on solid footing if such help is necessary. Since midwives are considered primary care providers by the government, we will experience all of this care without laying down a dime. (Thank you, Ontario.)
The emotional planning had been more complex. While we are both very, very happy about the coming of Baby, it would be foolish to ignore the pockets of less enthusiastic feelings entirely. My wife is disappointed that her scholastic career has been interrupted, and she wonders what will happen to her thirst for research once she's been through the thick of some full-time mommying. She thinks about the future, and wonders who she will be other than Baby's mother and my wife.
Myself, I have had to admit to myself the presence of some amount of irrational resentment against Baby. This is partly because Baby caused our honeymoon to be considerably more filled with nausea and discussions of vaginal spotting than I had originally imagined, and considerably less hot sex. I wanted my wife all to myself for a while longer, and I am a little annoyed at Baby for taking that away. The months leading up to the wedding were so chaotic and busy, we hardly got to see one another. I miss her, and was looking forward to a few peaceful months of being focused on one another. Now, everything is about Baby.
Baby is causing a lot of upheaval in our lives, and it won't likely stop for another quarter century.
One thing I do know with fair certainty: Baby will like it here. We are happy people who like to read books, learn and laugh. We live surrounded by plants, purring cats and a dog who is ridiculously enthusiastic about life in general. Our fish don't float. We eat yummy things, and listen to music. We're playful and we enjoy games. We don't smoke cigarettes or chew tobacco. Nobody goes to sleep angry. Petty reservations fade; Baby is welcome.
Posted originally on Kuro5hin.
"My meatsack is the size of a grapefruit!"
That is the sound of my wife discovering things about the workings of her uterus (occupied), from one website or another. One of the ways we have of coping with the strangeness of my wife having somebody growing inside of her is to find things about it that make us giggle, and calling her uterus her "meatsack" has somehow ended up on that list. This is not to disparage her uterus, mind you. We're big fans of the uterus. I'm sure that it is among my wife's favourite organs. Goodness knows it can stand a little gentle ribbing. So "meatsack" it is.
That being said, my wife's meatsack is the size of a grapefruit; the person living in there is currently called Baby, and Baby's been baking for almost three months now. This is my First Trimester Report.
Apparently, Baby is about 10 cm tall, and half of that height is Baby's giant head. Baby's still somewhat fish-like face is experimenting with rudimentary sucking motions, and Baby takes the occasional piss for diagnostic purposes. If Baby is a girl, Baby has already grown all of her ova. Baby has taste-buds. There are all sorts of websites crammed with lurid multimedia, if you're interested in drilling down for more detail. They range from encyclopaedia-like articles and illustrated calendars to vehicles for anti-abortionist propaganda.
[ http://pregnancy.about.com ]
[ http://www.justthefacts.org/flash.asp ]
[ http://www.pregnancytoday.com ]
[ http://www.pregnancy.org ]
This pregnancy was planned only in the sense that we vaguely planned to have children one day. In the weeks leading up to our wedding, we both noticed that my normally iron-gutted lover was having trouble keeping crackers down. Next came dizzy spells and pronounced moodiness. Within days, the results of the blood-test were in: get ready for Baby.
She had been taking one of those new-fangled ultra-low dosage birth control pills that also clears up your skin. The commercials for these products are enigmatic works when viewed in Canada (where, for reasons best discussed elsewhere, the law forbids prescription drug companies from identifying what their product actually does without a doctor present to advise the patient): teen nymphettes with supernaturally clear skin hop over abstract obstacles and run around in slow-fast motion with gay men and tell us we don't need to worry anymore.
One thing not featured in the commercial is tainted tunafish.
When my wife ate tainted tunafish, she briefly became a moaning, whiny fountain of vomit. For a day, not even water would stick down. When she had recovered, we tried to be mindful of the fact that she may well have thrown up her birth control pill. That's the night Baby began. Either we were not mindful enough, her innards were storing some of my genome-propagating minions in waiting from a prior encounter, or we were lucky enough to be that small but statistically significant number of people for whom the pill fails.
Many of our friends and relatives seemed shocked and angry that somebody could become pregnant while taking the birth control pill. "It isn't a guarantee," my wife told people. Myself, I preferred to say that the pill is only effective approximately 9999 times out of 10 000 -- therefore, we must have had intercourse at least one thousand times (that's how statistics work, right?). At any rate, we were informed users of the pill and we're not about to start writing angry letters to pharmaceutical companies. We knew the risks.
It should be noted for the purposes of information that, because we did not yet know about Baby, my wife continued to employ the pill for some 5 weeks after conception. Though we had worried that this could have a significant impact on Baby's early development, this does not appear to be the case (especially with the low-dose variety of pill). So, if you end up in the same situation, don't freak out -- some women have ended up taking the pill until nearly the end of their first trimester without any apparent adverse effects. We have been told that it is less dangerous for Baby than taking aspirin.
So, although the upcoming arrival of Baby has put a serious crimp in my wife's plans to pursue her doctorate in neurolinguistics, and has caused me to reschedule (yet again) the production of my next animated short, we were still very pleased to make room for Baby in our lives. From the start, we decided to focus on the positives.
We discussed abortion. Though we both wanted to keep Baby come what may, it seemed like to good idea to make sure we saw eye to eye on the thorny issues anyway. Naturally, we'd talked about the subject before, but the conversation is different when you're talking about "Baby" rather than "a baby".
Neither of us felt like termination was a defensible option in our current situation, since it would amount to nothing more than abusing medical abortion as a form of birth control. Would we consider termination if Baby tested positive for Down's Syndrome? We decided not, after some discussion. Our policy now is that the only circumstance under which we would consider termination would be if my wife's health were to be in serious and immediate jeopardy. This is not a religious or metaphysical consideration as much as a feeling that we are already morally committed to this small thing's life. Whether or not Baby is a "person" or has a soul, we invited Baby to exist (by having sex a lot), and we intend to make good on that invitation (at least until Baby is teenaged). We wouldn't flush a fish down the toilet just because we didn't want it, so why shouldn't Baby have the same kick at the can?
Getting ready for our new lives rides between being daunting and being exhilarating. We are excitedly deciding who will speak what language when to Baby, so that Baby will have our combined competence in English, French and Latvian. We have decided to move out of our apartment and rent a house instead, so that Baby can have a backyard. I have acquired several recordings of crying babies, which I will play through the day when I am working in order to aid my acclimation to a work day of filtering Baby's caterwauling out of my consciousness (a necessity for somebody who works from home). We've ear-marked my wife's iBook as a possible first computer once Baby is ready for such things. We talk about child-proofing my office, and making sure none of our cats sleep on Baby's face. We wonder whether the dog will be jealous.
We are quickly coming to hate the way that everyone and their grandmother is a self-appointed expert in gestation if they've ever been pregnant, stood beside somebody pregnant, or just watched a lot of those Leonart Nilsson documentaries on TV.
For some reason, many mothers suffer from the delusion that their experience is universally applicable. They become sullen if you don't appear to be as enthusiastic and certain about their advice as they are. What is it about our society (or species) that causes crones to descend like vultures to a kill, squawking out as many home-remedies, rumours, anecdotes, nightmares and earnest gems of wisdom as they reasonably can while pausing to breathe? I think I might scream if one more well-meaning dotard tries to get me to acknowledge that we are witnessing a "miracle" before our very eyes. Why do normally intelligent people begin giving advice that boils down to things as nonsensical as telling us not to trust the advice of any established medical authorities, but do take heed of superstitious rumours about how living in the same house as a microwave oven will make your baby retarded.
Of course, doctors can be ridiculous about pregnancy, too. Many of them seem to view pregnancy as some kind of affliction or disease. In the event of a medical crisis, we would surely seek out treatment from a physician -- but pregnancy isn't a medical crisis in and of itself. My wife's body knows what it is doing. When it wants something, it generates a craving (she's been going ga-ga for tomato juice). When it needs more fuel, my wife gets sleepy (conscious brains are high-drain devices, after all). When it needs more fluid, she gets thirsty. Not rocket science.
Planning for the delivery day itself has been interesting, and remarkably easy. Because Ontario is such a midwife-friendly province (they are not all so) and because we live in a big stinky megatropolis, we had no trouble at all finding a conveniently located centre of midwifery. Our crack team of baby specialists is composed of a mature midwife, her padawan-learner, and an auxiliary midwife who we likely will not meet until she's paged to the scene when the dilation of my wife's cervix is complete. They are available to answer our questions at all hours of the day and night. They will facilitate all of our dealings with the hospital, and manage any testing. They will supply us with a collapsible heated birthing tub, to make water-birthing at home as simple as possible. They will visit us at home for two weeks following the delivery, assisting with getting breast feeding on solid footing if such help is necessary. Since midwives are considered primary care providers by the government, we will experience all of this care without laying down a dime. (Thank you, Ontario.)
The emotional planning had been more complex. While we are both very, very happy about the coming of Baby, it would be foolish to ignore the pockets of less enthusiastic feelings entirely. My wife is disappointed that her scholastic career has been interrupted, and she wonders what will happen to her thirst for research once she's been through the thick of some full-time mommying. She thinks about the future, and wonders who she will be other than Baby's mother and my wife.
Myself, I have had to admit to myself the presence of some amount of irrational resentment against Baby. This is partly because Baby caused our honeymoon to be considerably more filled with nausea and discussions of vaginal spotting than I had originally imagined, and considerably less hot sex. I wanted my wife all to myself for a while longer, and I am a little annoyed at Baby for taking that away. The months leading up to the wedding were so chaotic and busy, we hardly got to see one another. I miss her, and was looking forward to a few peaceful months of being focused on one another. Now, everything is about Baby.
Baby is causing a lot of upheaval in our lives, and it won't likely stop for another quarter century.
One thing I do know with fair certainty: Baby will like it here. We are happy people who like to read books, learn and laugh. We live surrounded by plants, purring cats and a dog who is ridiculously enthusiastic about life in general. Our fish don't float. We eat yummy things, and listen to music. We're playful and we enjoy games. We don't smoke cigarettes or chew tobacco. Nobody goes to sleep angry. Petty reservations fade; Baby is welcome.
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