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In just under a month we should (hopefully) know whether we will be having a boy or a girl, and I cannot wait! I just want to know! I want to get myself ready to be the overprotective Dad to my little girl, or to be the football coach to my little boy. Either way I’ll be more than happy, but I just want to know. I think my mother-in-law put it best when she said ‘If it’s a boy or a girl, it’s what you always wanted’. And I think that’s about right, whether I’m told it’s a boy or a girl, it’ll be perfect.
Lara’s back is still giving her problems, some days it seems to get better, but then the next it’ll be worse than normal. It’s really frustrating for her, but I think it’s just going to be one of those things she’ll have for the whole pregnancy.
She’s also been getting pains in the muscles on her stomach, which she has been describing as growing pains, which kind of makes sense when you think that the baby is half way through doubling in size over a 3 week period – crazy! Grow baby grow!!
Something I’ve noticed about being the man in this whole thing, is that people don’t seem to ask how your feeling. Not everyone, but most people. Now I know Lara is going through a hell of a lot more than me, and it is obviously way more important that she’s ok. But what I mean is people seem to think it’s a 1 person thing, but us guys go through it too, after all we are the ones who have to deal with the mood swings, and they are intense! I just mean that, people seem to forget about the mental side of it, and how we’re dealing with that. They all ask Lara how she is feeling, as in how is the bump, but nobody seems to want to know about how I’m feeling about coming a Dad.
It doesn’t really bother me that much, as i’m pretty sure I’ve never thought too much about how the man is feeling when his partner is expecting. I guess I just don’t want to get left out, and I want people to know that I am involved.
P.S. Baby is now the size of a Turnip… cute
So last week was a pretty quiet one, this week was not. I guess baby was just holding back for a week.
This weeks has seen Lara have her first ‘fluttering’ sensation in her stomach. Which means the baby is moving about in there, and is now big enough for Lara to feel it. If baby takes after his/her Dad, and can’t keep still for much more than 10 minutes at a time, then Lara is in for plenty of fluttering.
When Lara sent me the message telling me about the fluttering, I got a bit of fluttering in my stomach too. The kind you get when you’re really excited. It’s just the thought of our little guy/gal in Lara’s stomach, making a little home for him/herself and getting all comfortable, makes me really excited.
It’s so amazing that Lara is carrying another little human in her own body. Impressive.
Lara also suffered a bit of a low point of pregnancy last week too. Unfortunately when we get the train to work in the morning, it is usually packed and only standing room available, and not much of it. So we were both standing up on Tuesday morning and it was pretty warm on the train. After about 15-20 mins of standing Lara didn’t feel too good. She started to feel very faint and eventually had to kneel down and sit on the floor, it was a pretty scary moment and horrible to see my Lara feeling like this. I tried my best to reassure her, but she was not feeling good at all. Eventually, after about 5 minutes someone decided to offer Lara her seat, something that people should of done straight away! Nobody tried to help! In fact the guy right next to us, instanty put his head down and pretended to be asleep. If I wasn’t so worried about Lara, I would of personally picked him up off the seat myself.
It wasn’t pleasant, but she seems fine now. I think she just needs to take it a bit easier. She knows this though, and is doing a really good job of looking after herself and our litle one.
Also in more baby news, Laras best friend Amy and her Husband Matt had their first child last week. A little boy called Levi, and from the pictures I’ve seen, he is extremely cute (good work guys). So congratulations to them! Tell Levi his friend will be here soon.
Well after last week, this week seemed very uneventful as far as the baby goes. No scans, no waving from the baby, that we could see. But it’s certainly growing, as the bump is growing a lot quicker than I expected.
Lara’s mood swings returned this week, and they are pretty extreme. You could get random giggling at nothing particularly funny, or you could get tears because of a burnt croissant. It really keeps me on my toes, but I’m still pretty rubbish at working out what mood she’ll be in. But as all the baby books say, ‘just let her go with it as some strange things are happening to her body right now.’
She’s still really stugglig with her back, and it’s really giving her some problems, sometimes it seems as though she just can’t get comfortable – not fun for her!
Other than the back, mood swings and that bump she is carrying, things seem pretty normal. Although I do keep day dreaming about playing with my kid. I’m always saying to myself “this time next year…”. Good times!
As you may have guessed from the images above, we had the first scan last week (Tuesday to be exact). My Mum came with us to share the experience, and what an experience it was!
I always thought the first scan would be a pretty cool experience, but it is truly amazing, if you haven’t been through it, it is very difficult to explain just how amazing it is. As soon as I saw the little thing I just wanted him/her to pop out there and then so I could meet him/her properly. It might have been a bit messy and probably not the safest thing for the baby, so I kept that quiet and didn’t suggest it. But seeing its little head, its little legs crossed (it seemed like a pretty chilled out baby) its arms giving us a wave (turns out the baby likes the camera, no idea where he/she gets that from?!) it just all became so real.
It genuinely gets more real with everything we do, we buy the pram, it gets more real, we see a bigger bump, it gets more real, Lara gets very random cravings, it gets more real. But this really, really made it all seem very real, and I just cannot wait to get this little guy/gal out in to the world and get to know him or her. Hurry up 181 days, I want to be a Dad!
I wondered how I would react to the scan, would this be my moment when I jump up and down and scream and shout about how excited I am? Will I get extremely scared when I realise that I’m going to be a Dad? Or worst of all, will I not even be able to make out my baby and feel like the worst Dad ever? Well I reacted by doing the first thing, although I did most of it inside my head, because apparently Hospitals don’t like mad people running and jumping around telling everyone they are going to be a Dad, but that’s what I was doing in my head. I was just so excited. I also got at least a few tears in my eyes, and was literally speechless. I wanted to get as close to the screen as I possibly could, so that I could take in of much as him/her as I could. I just didn’t want it to end. I could have watched that little thing all day. Lara might not have been too happy with that as she had a pretty full bladder and was already struggling.
They also test for the likelihood of your baby having downs syndrome at the first scan, they measure the width of the neck and take blood samples from the Mum (so Lara in our case). They told us that if the baby was high risk, we would get a call within a couple of days, but if it was low risk, we would just be sent a letter. Things like this really scare me, so I had a couple of sleepless nights waiting for the news, but luckily for us, we got a letter through a couple of days a go to say the baby is low risk, and has a 1 in 22,000 chance of having downs syndrome.
So that was the scan, and to be honest, that outweighs everything else that happened last week, but to keep you all up to date, we went baby shopping on Monday with my parents (my Dad really enjoyed this, he really loves going shopping), and we got some baby clothes and accessories, we also got the baby its pram, it’s one of those 3-in-1 prams, that seems to come with everything you could possibly need, until the baby is 1 years old and you have to pay more money to buy even more stuff for them.
Lara’s started to get cravings now, and they seem to be mainly for random American food, so American family, you could be getting a lot of requests over the next 6 months to send over some random food items. I just hope Lara doesn’t wake up in the middle of the night and expect me to track down the nearest store selling Kool Aid or some other random american item.
Our baby will have its first big decision to make next Saturday, as England play USA in the world cup, and he/she needs to decide which country it’s going to side with. It’s a big decision, but not a difficult one, if it wants to back the winner he goes with Dad, if not he can go and lose with Mum/Mom.
I'm a Dad! 
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