When Cheryl (some of you know her as MsGreene) first asked me to blog about my impressions of the birth of our first child I figured it would be a good chance to offer a dad’s perspective on this amazing experience. I hope this rather long winded, personal account does that…but at a minimum I figured it would help crystallize the experience, so thanks for indulging me.
It took my wife Janet and I almost three years to conceive, so when we got the news in February that we were pregnant, we were pretty well over the moon (well, actually Janet was over the moon, I was more “cautiously optimistic”). My wife loves surprises, so she was adamant that we keep the sex a secret. And we made it through about 50 (or so it seemed) “3D Ultrasounds” without spoiling the surprise.
One of the many pieces of pregnancy wisdom we got was that if it takes you a while to conceive, the powers that be smile down upon you and grant an easy pregnancy. Luckily in our case this panned out (more or less). No morning sickness, no swelling, not really even any tiredness. I kept waiting for those changes but when my wife went into her 9th month still wearing high heels, I figured my worrying was for naught.
There was a little scare at 31 weeks when my wife was overly ambitious while we were moving to our new home, relegating her to modified bed rest every day from 4-8 PM for a total of 6 weeks. That was a tough one because the worrier in me was amplified about a hundredfold…and the worrier occasionally gave way to the nagger: “Don’t lift that!” (my purse isn’t that heavy!), “Shouldn’t you be lying down?” (not unless you brought me a bedpan!). It’s a role I did not relish but we made it through.
