Just for kicks

Here is an approximation of what is going on inside Ariane's belly now:


That baby kicks like nothing else. According to the book, if a baby is kicking about ten times every two hours while the mother is lying down and feeling for movement we can consider that to be normal activity. Our baby kicks - seriously - two or three times a minute when Ariane is lying down. And I am talking big kicks. I've tried to get video so you could see some movement, but I haven't gotten any yet. There's still time, though.

We're fairly confident of the following: she will be loud, she will break things. I also am under the impression that she'll be athletic, like her mother was. I'll push her to take on mankind's greatest athletic endeavor: Global Guts.


And when she wins that piece of the Agro Crag, you better believe I'm going to ride those coattails of athletic glory like Richard Williams. I'll claim it was all me, then irresponsibly blow through the millions she'll certainly earn in endorsements (we can name everyone who ever won Global Guts, right? hint: purple never won) so she won't have a chance to be self-destructive with it. Just looking out for my daughter.

Well, this is new

I can now pinpoint the exact hour when I feel like I permanently grew up: between 1:00 and 2:00 PM CST on 21 January 2009. I honestly feel like being informed that I would be having a daughter did that. I think having a son would have been different. Why? For one, I don't think it's socially acceptable to teach little girls that farts are funny (hint: they are!). Also, I would love to spend the next ten years playing with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures - literally, love. The Ninja Turtles are awesome, and if your favorite is anyone but Donatello you suck. If your favorite is actually Leonardo we can't ever be friends because you are obviously an incredibly boring person. Go back to eating your plain oatmeal and drinking pulp-free orange juice from concentrate. It would be dangerously, dangerously, dangerously easy to revert back to being an actual boy if I were going to spend the next ten years surrounded by dinosaurs, Transformers, and whatever today's equivalent of He-Man is. Mostly having a boy would be all the justification I needed to buy a Wii or Xbox, but not for myself, oh no! For the improved hand-eye coordination and educational opportunities it presents to a son.


Sadly (luckily?) this is not my fate. I won't easily get sucked into little girl things. There's going to be lots of pretending going on. I mean, how am I supposed to enjoy these tea parties when we aren't even going to have actual tea. It's all make believe. Nope. I'm going to be staying all growed up over here, because little girls are a totally different creature. I can't imagine what it's like to be a child who doesn't want to memorize dinosaur names, kick bad guys' faces in, and blow up aliens on your NES. Instead it's going to be Barbies and playing house and whatever things little girls like doing... maybe gambling, like I said I don't know the first thing about what little girls enjoy.


One very promising development follows, though: I know for a fact that little girls love to play with other people's hair because little girls are scary social. Maybe - just maybe - this is all the justification I need to be allowed to grow the sweet afro and stupidly long beard I've been hoping to grow for the lulz. Everything is OK if done for lulz. Ariane can't deny me that when it's for lulz and our little girl's benefit, right? Right?



Update (5:28 PM): I just realized that this is the second post already in which I have stressed the hilarity of farts and the importance of understanding that. God, I am such a hack. A month in and I already am reusing material. Expect straight up suckage from here on out (not that this blogge hasn't been bogged down with an extreme amount of suck already).

Pregnancy: Completely bizarre, kind of yucky

This is the absolute most important book I have flipped through in a looooooooong time. Every time we have a question, it is answered in this book. Certainly that is to be expected, because 1000 questions is a lot, obviously. However, even in some cases when we don't have a question, but there is something that's just a little bit off from normal, well we look the topic up in the index and sure enough it is covered, in exactly the form the question would have been phrased had we actually bothered to phrase it. It just does not miss. Honestly, it answers too much. I had never heard the word "episiotomy" before I cracked this open, and now I can never unhear it. Have I mentioned I have issues with medical procedures that aren't pills or shots? I cannot stress enough how eerily accurate this book is. It would give Nostradamus a boner, except he would take an entire quatrain to describe it, and it wouldn't be clear what he was talking about, maybe his boner, maybe space travel, maybe Yahtzee.


Honestly, I don't know why the History Channel doesn't devote as much programming as they do to Dr. Thurston as they do to Nostradamus. If not him, can we at least get rid of the Nostradamus garbage and replace it with some more "Universe" programming with Michio Kaku, author of such head-scratchers as Hyperspace, Neil deGrasse Tyson, author of such uplifting spirituals as Death by Black Hole, and Stephen Hawking, who (as we all know) is made of Legos?


There are obvious changes, morning sickness early on, being extremely tired for a few weeks, aches and pains and so forth. Some things have been bizarre. For example, Ariane never really snored. Once every couple of weeks I'd have to nudge her, but then it would end. Now? Every night, almost every way she can lie. This is normal for pregnant women, according to the book. I never would have guessed that. Never. The most bizarre, I think, is that her gums bleed. Every time she flosses. Severely. The first time it happened, she asked me if I had any idea what happened, which I naturally didn't, so she went and opened her book. Initially, I scoffed, said there's no way that the two are related, and it's not going to be in that book. And of course I was wrong. Pregnancy increases blood flow to soft tissue, which makes gums bleed more.

It's not like I needed more to add to the list of "Reasons I am happy to be a guy." Severely bloody gums ranks somewhere above being able to scratch my balls in public without thinking twice. But I mention this now because it nicely sets up this story from last night. I was in the shower, minding my own bidness, carefully doing my weekly shave, when Ariane walked in to floss and brush. (On a side note, she flosses after she brushes which I am opposed to 100%.) As she was flossing she mentioned that she was amazed how much blood there was. It went exactly like this (which actually happened):

Ariane: There is so much blood it's unbelievable!
Me: I know.
Ariane: You should look at this.
Me: That's OK. I've seen it before. It's a lot. I know.
Ariane: [pulls back shower curtain, spits heaping mouthful of blood and saliva onto the bottom of the tub] See what I mean?
Me: Thanks for that.

How many more months?

Edit (8:58 PM): Ariane spazzed and corrected me on her floss/brush order. That's right, spazzed. She gets one correction per post, so the claim of spazzing out will forever stand.

Ye Olde Historye of Faðerhoode

A note on the title: Today's post contains the letter eth, alternatively referred to as "The letter that prevents you from knowing how to pronounce the name of the newest Sigur Rós album." It's sound is a voiced dental fricative, i.e. "th" in "this" but not "thin."

I am trying to bring back eth and thorn because they are the coolest letters this side of X and K. If you enjoy the letter C, please leave my blog like now. It's the coccyx of the alphabet. There's probably a reason that coccyx has three C's.

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Perchance you have noticed the sub-head of the Kinderbloggen page. I have oh-so unoriginally subtitled this "I hope this baby comes with an instruction manual." My research so far has come from reading Big Daddy Drew's old blog. Humorous? Yes. Helpful? Uh... no. Here is what I know about babies:

1. I now know I am not infertile. Technically this is not about the general subject of babies per se, but makes me want to high five everyone I see.


2. I know that babies can breathe while swallowing. Yes, I'm jealous. Extremely. Think of how much more Tex-Mex I could down if I didn't have to waste time waiting for my lungs to fill with "life-giving, precious oxygen." This gaseous molecule is OVERRATED, I say!)

3. ???

4. Profit.



Everything else I do not know. I don't know how often they eat, poop, sleep, when they start talking, when they start walking, at what age they become scared of clowns (instinctive?), at what age they are capable of developing an irrational hatred for an institute of higher learning that I voluntarily chose not to attend, literally nothing. If there's one thing I don't like, it's not knowing something, except of course that which I do not know that I do not know. Oh, I'm sorry, did I just blow your mind?

I do like flowcharts and instructions, but I find reasonable doubt that my baby will provide these. Damn it, baby, already disappointing me in utero!
*author rocks out to Heart Shaped Box*

At least I have the opportunity to read books and go to classes. While in those classes or reading those books, I can put on my glasses instead of my contacts, put on my "I are a very serious students" face, and nod seriously, knowingly, even if on the inside I will find everything mind-blowing. ("Babies need love and attention? Why are they so demanding? Next thing you know they'll want to be fed regularly.) It's probably been this way for first-time fathers since we evolved from tarsiers*. How did people do it when they didn't have these resources? How did they do it when they couldn't call a doctor at 3:00 am? These are serious questions, by the way. I'm sure babies are resilient, but it can't be so much guess and check, right? Besides, even if you're doing it right, they'll still cry.

This is how I would have reacted in yon olden tymes, while holding my huge axe. (Interesting note: People had a surplus of letters back then, except for U's, which hadn't been invented by Ben Franklin yet. This surplus existed because their banks hadn't failed. Medieval banks served as depositories for two things: money, which no one actually had because they were all serfs, even the kings, and letters. Consider yourself edumacated.)

And somehow we as a species have managed to progress to this stage where I am "writing" this "blogge post" on a "platform" that exists somewhere in the ether, physically stored in bits of electrical current and charge in silicon and copper. How bizarre. Of course, we are a species that has managed to make "Deal or No Deal" (a.k.a. "Blurt Out a Random Number Because You Are Incapable of Mentally Computing Simple Odds and May Not Actually Even Be Aware of That Concept!") a hit.



We as a species are so screwed, but I feel better about my relative capacity to parent. Plus I'm ecstatic because that moran won a dollar (American, though!).

*may not be factually correct, I am not a biologist.