Its a...OUTIE!

4-27-07
Well we are half way through the pregnancy and all is well. Annie can eat almost anything and does, like last night. We went to the ball game and she ate half a bag of kettle corn popcorn. It was a really big bag, I have no photo proof of this so I’m sure she will dispute it. Now that Annie is bigger bellied (BB) she needs to actually wear gulp maternity wear. Yesterday as I opened the mailbox I was delighted to see that included in the junk mail was a clothing catalog called Mother Wear. Annie threw it away before I could fully explore the BB wear inside. From what I saw most BB women are on docks by the bay and always seem to be looking into the distance. This is most likely because they are thinking about the future.
One of the most exciting things about Annie and her BB status is that she might, just might grow an outie belly button. We can only hope. I’ve been doing a bit of outie research to find out the cost and social benefits of having an outie.
According to Herodotus the first true outie was recorded in the 5th century. Herodotus writes that “Now it happened that this Candaules was in love with his own wife; and not only so, but thought her the fairest woman in the whole world including her gorgeous outie belly button. This fancy had strange consequences. There was in his bodyguard a man whom he specially favoured, Gyges, the son of Dascylus he with the hairy testicles. All affairs of greatest moment were entrusted by Candaules to this person, and to him he was wont to extol the surpassing beauty of his wife. So matters went on for a while. At length, one day, Candaules, who was fated to end ill, thus addressed his follower: "I see thou dost not credit what I tell thee of my lady's gorgeous outie belly button; but come now, since men's ears are less credulous than their eyes, contrive some means whereby thou mayst behold her gorgeous outie belly button." At this the other loudly exclaimed, saying, "What most unwise speech is this, master, which thou hast uttered? Wouldst thou have me behold my mistress when she is showing her gorgeous outie belly button? Bethink thee that a woman, with her clothes, puts off her bashfulness. Our fathers, in time past, distinguished right and wrong plainly enough, and it is our wisdom to submit to be taught by them. There is an old saying, 'Let each look on his own gorgeous outie belly button.' I hold thy wife for the fairest of all womankind. Only, I beseech thee, ask me not to do wickedly and gaze upon her gorgeous outie belly button."
Herodotus goes on to write that though the outie was know it was not the social norm. He also makes a brief reference to Cleopatra's voluptuous outie.
The next pertinent reference to the outie is that of Henry the 5ths. The well know belly historian Semus McMustus writes in his 1957 treaties The Belly Button and Society that “…Henry had an outie that would end arguments and start them. “ He goes on to note that he had “…no less than 27 belly button cleaners and 4 belly button artist to document the protrusion which he had names Otis.” I find this case to be of most interest because of the fact that Henry was a leader of men and women and the children of these men and women. To command the legions of Italy and have such an outie or if you will permit me to use the formal Otis in reference to his belly button. Then later the French write often of the outie which they refer to in their casual snobbish way Le Belly Boootton.

The outie next “pops up” in popular culture and firmly entrenches itself in our hearts when in Winnie the Pooh episode 234 Thy Name is Winnie , Winnie is seen to sport a firm yet dapper outie. This is most likely in response to the 1941 Trenton World Fair. Winnies outie is not without its controversy, many skeptics think that the outie is being mistaken for a small erection. They hold up as evidence what Winnie does with his outie to Eeyore in episode 237 Eeyore drops the soap. I imagine that this debate will continue, you be the judge.


So as you can see we would be blessed if Annie can achieve outie status. More to come.

What to eat during pregnancy?

You know, I realized this past weekend that my pregnancy nutrition would be seriously lacking if Ben wasn't around. He went away to San Francisco and I had to fend for myself... it was peanut butter and honey sandwiches, cereal and leftovers the whole weekend. When Ben is around I eat so well. He has done all of this research on foods I should be eating during my pregnancy to make our child healthy and intelligent. Each week he goes through our Cooking Light cookbook and creates a list for grocery store and then the whole week I eat these wonderfully prepared meals. For instance, Monday Ben made Fish curry and thai rice... last night he made spinach fettucine with bacon... all delicious and full of things I am supposed to consume. I am certainly not the only one being "actively" pregnant. Ben has made a huge effort to play the active partner/father role and I am so lucky. I do like peanut butter sandwiches, though...

Pregnancy Craving...

Annie's appetite has grown

19 weeks and 2 days...

Ben and I had our ultrasound on Monday. Ben's description of the ultrasound below is pretty accurate - especially the part about me putting my foot in a bucket. So, I'll spare repeating the details. The ultrasound photos below are of 'malachi'! It is healthy, has a full tummy (as you can see in the second picture - the dark blob inthe middle of his/her belly) and all the parts moved during the ultrasound. In 5 days I will be half way done with pregnancy!

Below Ben talks about the grocery store check out bagger that told me we are having a girl. I told my friend who just had a little girl and she laughed and said that the same man bagged her groceries and told her she was having a girl. I am thinking about sending all of the women in my birthing class to the grocery store to see if he always predicts girls or if he is really psychic... or... PSYCHO!

Anyhooo, I don't have a ton to report on this blog. Ben and I are buzzing from the ultrasound. It was amazing to see all of that detail and everything moved. The baby actually looked at us which was a bit creepy because it looked like an alien skeleton. It has been punching and kicking a ton these past few days. I think it will be a long second half of the pregnancy with lots of internal bruising as this giant grows. I believe it is a giant because I was a 9 lb baby, my sister was an 11 lb baby and Ben was an 11 lb baby. So, I am not expecting any mercy from this one... my sister did mention that if I wanted a smaller baby to just start smoking.

I will keep you all posted on the progress!

Malachi at 19 weeks!

Baby Radar

4/17/06
I’ve been grinning for the past two days because Annie and I went and had our second ultra sound. Baby radar. It was really cool! So let me fill you in on what
happened. We headed out to the doctors office and what do you know I forgot my coffee, so we went back and got my coffee. Last time we went to this office we sat and waited for a long time, so rather than read the latest issue of pregnancy today I thought I would sip coffee. What’s neat about the office is that just about everyone that is in the place is doing the same thing namely baby radar. As each couple disappears into the back rooms of the office another emerges clutching cute little baby pictures. Our first baby radar photos were very much like radar images of a giant squid but we loved them anyhow. I had been told by two other pregnant people that this second go at the B.R. would be just the same, we would have no clue as to what we were looking at. So we went in with low expectations. Once Annie had the correct safety equipment on, goggles etc, and her hand was in a bucket of cold water to help with the transverse photo optical massaging connectivity we were ready to go. The images were great! We could see all the parts and then little malachi started moving. He she had a full stomach and all the tests came out in great!

So then she says, “Ok I’m moving down towards the butt do you guys want to know what it is….?” Over the past week two of our friends found out what they were having and one friend had a baby, so everyone was in the know, why shouldn’t we be. Annie said no. And now that the Ultra was so yesterday I’m glad we don’t know. Although the technician might of slipped up, When she started the ‘sounding’ she said “oh look at him.” I also saw a wiener but that might have been many other things. Then right afterwards we went to the grocery store and as we were checking out the bagger turned to Annie and said “You know it is a girl, right?” So according the bagger at the grocery store and my mother we are having a Girl….The plot thickens…

Bens version of events.....

These posts were written awhile ago but that does not mean that they are not very very important.
3/16/07
Being pregnant is a big deal, I mean it’s going to change you life, right? I guess its not as much the pregnancy but the after pregnancy that changes your life. So I think of the pregnancy as the nine months of pre life changing. The time you get to spend think about life changing. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me first introduce My-self and my wife. Annie is the wife and I’m Ben the husband. We have been pregnant for about 15 weeks.
This brings me to one of the first points of pregnancy that I noticed. I found it really strange to tell people about the pregnancy, not because of it but more how to tell people. I would often hear people say “We are pregnant” in referring to the husband and wife. I have to say right now that I do not feel very pregnant, for the following reasons but not limited to these reasons (new ones arise all the time); I do not have strange food aversions like say to oriental food, I do not spontaneously vomit, my moods are pretty even, I do not need new cloths because my body is morphing, I’m not receiving all sorts of books in the mail about being pregnant, and I am not growing a living beer belly. I think the husband becomes more of sounding board for the pregnancy. As husbands we get to watch our wives be pregnant. I think the whole “we” in the pregnancy was made up to satisfy some politically correct pregnancy equation. I personally feel like if I say “we” that I am trying to claim some of the insane bravery and credit that Annie has to go through to create our offspring. As the husband I am not that physically effected and need I point out I can still have a beer! More on that later, I got to tell you about our friend who decide not to drink in solidarity with his wife, yeah that lasted a long time. So here is how I often stumble through the pregnancy conversation.
Me: “Hey guess what we I mean Annie and I-I mean Annie is pregnant…” and then it goes into the standard responses slightly differing if you are telling a woman or man.
But once again I’m getting ahead of myself. One of the coolest moments is when you think your wife might be pregnant. By the way I’m going to be using wife not significant other because in my case it is my wife who is pregnant. I carry no moral baggage about being unwed and having a child it’s just easier in my case to stick with the Husband Wife equation. Onward, as I was saying Annie and I first suspected she was pregnant while on vacation in Indonesia. If I remember correctly we were at a local honey stand and Annie was way past her period. I was getting excited, no not in that way, and I think that Annie was getting a bit nervous, when she went off to the bathroom. She came back and said that she didn’t think she was pregnant because and I quote “I just had a tea colored pee” this usual is the precursor to Annie’s period. I was crushed. I had sort of convinced myself that we were going to have a child and was even coming up with names for the group of cells.
So a few days went by and the period never came. Fast-forward to a beautiful resort in Kuta, Bali and we decide that if Annie is going to have fancy drinks with umbrellas we first must confirm that she is not pregnant. So we headed off to a local drug store, in one of the most fantastic malls I have ever seen. The Indonesians really like their malls. So we are in the drug store and I have this really uncomfortable feeling, like I’m trying to buy porn or condoms. Annie tentatively approaches an employee and asks if they sell pregnancy tests. He loudly says yes and pulls one out then motions to a female employee to come over and show us how it works. Not a letter of English on the box and surprisingly, other than a nice little illustration of a one legged lady who’s genitals are cut in half peeing one her hand, no instructions. I was having that feeling of buying tampons and they need to do a price check, which has never happened to me but from all the ads and movies I’ve seen involving this scenario it must happen often.
It is strange because as much as having a baby is a natural and good thing for a couple to be going through both Annie and I had the same feeling of somehow doing something illegal by asking for this pregnancy test. As if a pregnancy is a top-secret project, hence project Malachi-I’ll get to that later. Maybe there should be vending machines for these test, maybe there are. So anyhow the kind lady showed us that two lines means pregnant and one line means rum drink with bananas and umbrellas sprouting form it. This surprised me, the line indicating positive and negative not the drink, I was assuming there would be a positive sign etc… I thought that the plus sign was a universal symbol.
Here I must note that I am really happy that Annie has a great memory because about ten steps out of the drug store I forgot which was positive and negative. I don’t think we could have gone back in we would have had to find another drug store. As if we went back to the same one they would freak out “YOU ARE PREGNAT AGAIN!!!!” We went back to the hotel and Annie snapped off one of her legs and peed on her hand, per the instructions. She came out pretty quickly and yep “WE” were pregnant. I had a beer Annie had an ice tea.
3/19/07
So once you know that you are pregnant then you have to spend the next 12 weeks pretending that you are not. I call this stage the “Annie has giardia stage” because that’s what we told everyone that asked why Annie didn’t want a glass of wine. Or she was really inexplicitly tired. She must have been on a serious antibiotics regiment. Normal humans would respond “oh yeah you shouldn’t drink on antibiotics.” While our peace corps friends would just say “So…?” Once you are able to tell people about the pregnancy they all say “Oh I knew, that one time when…” followed by some tale about when they “knew “ you were pregnant. The truth is they had no idea.
So anyhow you are not meant to tell people that you are pregnant until the 12th week in the very unfortunate chance that your wife might have a miscarriage. This happens and is sad and the truth is that I thought and worried about it a lot. Once I thought that I was going to be a dad I really started making plans. Annie and I spent these few weeks with a secret making plans that we could not share with anyone else. This is frustrating so we decided to tell people.
So what do you do, well phone up the parents, but who first. We didn’t want one side to know before the other. Luckily with the aid of modern technology we each have our own cell phone. Back in the day they must of sent messengers at the same moment hoping that they had similarly tuned horses. I head off to one room and Annie another and we make the calls. Coming back together to switch phones and parents. Lost of congratulations and words of encouragement. I believe that Annie’s mom said she was this close to having a “talk” with here about her responsibilities as a woman if she hadn’t reproduced within the year. Oh and of course both sides claimed to already know!
We then spent the next week telling all the friends and relatives. These conversations, for me, get very tiring, kind of like those conversation you have in elementary school after summer break. You know that after telling the tenth person that you went to camp for the tenth time it starts to get a bit repetitive. Annie would go into long detail of people’s reaction and then turn to me and say “What did so and so say about it?” Almost everyone says the same thing so I’ve condensed it to save time. I would respond “They were excited.” This is not good enough for Annie. “What else did they say?” she would beg of me. “Um…They were excited.” She has stopped asking me.
So now everyone knows the secret is out…what’s next? Morning sickness!

18 weeks and 5 Days

Ben and I discovered we were pregnant in Kuta, Indonesia on the island of Bali. We were staying at the Santika Beach Resort waiting for our friends, Amanda and Tyler, to arrive. We purchased an Indonesian over the counter pregnancy test called "Sensitiv". I had never taken a test before and the directions were in Indonesian... so, I followed the pictures and, luckily, the ladies at the store had pointed at one picture of potential results and repeated "yes, yes" so, I was fairly confident which symbol was positive.

Ben tried to help me decide the proper procedure and we decided that standing askew with the test in my urine flow would do the trick. I remember yelling from the bathroom, "I am now standing askew!" I don't think either of us actually thought we were pregnant... we were wrong. We went swimming in the pool with the swim-up bar and I remember swimming having a mixture of thoughts including knowing that my life would never be the same, surprise that I was actually able to do it and damn I can't celebrate with a pina colada! I've spent so long trying NOT to be pregnant and it is quite a drastic and immediate transition to being pregnant.

Anyhooo, the subsequent 3.5 months SUCKED. I threw up daily for a period of time and then sporadically... I am now 15 days without vomiting and 10 pounds heavier. I haven't had any alcohol since the first week of January and Thursday April 12 was the first day that I actually looked at my belly and admired it. The "morning" sickness (there is nothing "morning" about it) was so miserable that I had difficulty admiring the changes my body has been experiencing and I pretty much viewed my belly as the source of all bad feelings. Now, instead of praying this will be over fast I am starting to be entertained by my growing, hairy belly, feeling kicks and enjoying our child's protest when I exercise.

Photo: Annie's Belly