Exploding Mamma

I'm not even joking...if this carries on any longer, I'm expecting this to happen to very pregnant fairy any minute! We are now a week overdue and it seems like the fruit of psychology major's loins is trying to set a record for hanging around a womb (maybe I should contact Guinness or Ripley's). When I was at school I read this book called Spring Sonata, by Bernice Rubens, and I reckon my zygote assimilated this knowledge somehow, because the book is about a baby who decides not to come out and ends up writing his memoirs while in-uterus!!! Odd I know, but I can imagine my progeny sticking her little arm out in the middle of the night and snagging a notepad and a Bic and scribbling away while we lament her late arrival!

I know it's nothing to worry about, it's not like she's stopped kicking Kris in the crotch or anything, but I'd really like to meet the little sproglet already...

So the update is as follows...Pregnant fairy is the size of a house and like an oil-tanker needs about three kilometres to turn! The whole bed has become her domain and she regularly uses me as a fulcrum at night to lever herself into a more comfortable position. This maneuvering happens regularly every half hour or so which inevitably leads to a trip to the commode accompanied by different levels of moaning and groaning which results in both the dogs howling in sympathy!

Our Doulla (for those not in the know, a Doulla is kind of like a mid-wife's assistant) came by the other day to give us some pressure point pointers, if you will. I now draw a rising sun on preggie fairy's lower back with a lit charcoal-like pencil which puts her in sort of a coma and makes her sigh a lot. Not quite sure what this does, but apparently she now has little flutters in her belly and I have writer's cramp. She also showed me where the reflexology points are...
Maria (doulla) : "Find the ankle bone, measure four finger widths above it and apply pressure, that's the womb"
Me: "The ankle what?"
SLAP
Me: "ouch!!"
I mean really, how do you locate a 9-month pregnant woman's ankles?? They disappeared sometime during the second trimester! There's just a tree-trunk down there with absolutely no distinction between foot, calf or thigh.

Anyway, despite several sleepless nights filled with contractions, flutters, something-like-period-pains and my unborn digging into her cervix, fairy is still hanging on to her water for dear life.
The next step is going in for an internal examination and I'm still trying to convince her to do a "When Harry met Sally" type orgasm scene just to see the midwife's response!!!

Baby Cooker

Let's just make one thing clear...this is not the pregnant fairy's belly and it ain't Kori's foot, however, the force with which the little bugger manages to kick me in the back makes me think she's going to be a shoe-in for the women's national soccer or rugby teams! As a matter of fact, I'm considering an early sex change op so that she/he/it can make some moolah playing for the Stormers. Watch out Peter Grant!!!

The fairy is not acting very fairy-like lately. She's waddling around like she's been got at by a randy rhinoceros and pretty much every movement illicits a wide variety of grunts and groans. Turning over in bed involves an industrial crane, me moving into the spare-room for 15 minutes and the neighbours peering over the wall to see if everything is ok. The dogs have figured out that they can get away with anything cause mom can't catch them to mete out punishment, I think they're loving it!

Our midwife told us a couple of weeks ago that the little bugger could pop any day now, and the longer it goes on, the more the pressure is building. She dropped down into position, started clawing at the Cervix (according to Pregnant Fairy) and contractions started. However, these symptoms just decided to linger, so the waddler now doubles over in pain every now and then while scrubbing the floors and I have to remind her to get on with it else my supper's not gonna get made!
(Hehe, can you imagine?? I would get my ass kicked royally if I tried that!)
 Every time we think it's gonna happen soon, the little tyke climbs back up and hides behind Kris' lungs and the whole circle of Fafa starts all over again!
 I got woken up last night only to be informed that she is NOT in labour! Why exactly I needed to be woken from my slumber for this little nugget, I have yet to figure out, but I guess that's part of the whole supportive partner thing I've been reading about.

My social life is in the toilet! In the last two weeks, we've missed out on Bingo night, Poker games, soccer and rugby matches and a debauched night at Teazers, to name but a few and if this kid doesn't pop soon, I'm going to be blaming it for the loss of loads of amazing memories! I spent this last weekend figuring out how to install the car seat, much to the dogs' dismay, because this means no car trips for them for a while.

On the positive side, I've now mastered the whole "shaving someone else's legs" technique and I'm pretty good at trimming the "hedge". I've also realized that pregnancy is nature's way of teaching dads/partners how to dry their kids, cause Pregnant Fairy has finally reached the stage where she can no longer reach to dry her legs after bathing. It's either me or a hair-dryer!!!

Sssshhhhhhh......

Yes, you see correctly. Pregnant fairy was telling me to Shush by putting her finger in her ear! What's up with this??? Is her brain going to return to normal once the little alien is ejected? Please, God, can it return to normal.

Ok, I know it's been a while, but it seems like everything is escalating at once. I've been juggling work, mid-wife appointments, Chyro appointments, a car with a broken cambelt, a domestic worker that breaks everything she touches and freak winter rainstorms that flood my whole house. It's been a fun couple of weeks.

Pregnant fairy is doing a great job growing my first-born. Apparently everything is on track and the large amounts of ice-cream being ingested are not detrimental to the little zygote at all, the only side-effect is of course the heightened state of her (she is currently beating Hussain Bolt's 100m time in the womb, running from one side to the other and bouncing off the walls!) It's gotten to the point where I get woken up by tiny little kicks in the small of my back which, I must admit, feel a little creepy at times. It kind of reminds me of the first Alien movie when the creature comes bursting out of Lance Henriksen's chest!!

We have now got the nursery sort of sorted. We have that compactum, changing-station station thing, Kris put up some cool bear-themed hooks above it and I even hauled out the power tools (Lesbines love power tools!) and put up a shelf for her. We bit the bullet and shelled out the dosh for a perambulator (big word, hey?) with the car seat attachment, which was promptly adopted by Eko the cat who now sleeps in the basket at the bottom. We do have a cot, although this is currently residing in Cape Town somewhere but will hopefully find it's way up to Joeys in the not too distant future. So her little room is coming on nicely. We decided against the rocking chair and fitted out the single bed with loads of pillows and stuff for Kris to do feedings etc. However, this single bed miraculously found it's way into our bedroom a couple of weeks ago. When asked about this, pregnant fairy explained that it's for me to sleep on when she starts keeping me awake at night. Sweet sentiment, you say....right! I'm not allowed to sleep anywhere else! So the result of this great plan is that my bedside lamp is now balancing in the middle of the single bed which has been pushed right up against my side of our queen-size bed forcing the bed-side table to be moved to where the laundry basket hangs out! This makes making the bed extremely challenging, getting out of bed almost impossible and just creates a huge space to be filled with anything and everything that previously had nowhere to go. I did a bit of an inventory yesterday and found three towels, two pairs of jean-pant, four shirts, a belt, two caps, five novels in different stages of reading, tummy and stretchmark cream, Eko's lazer toy thingy, two computer cables, an external hard drive and seventeen jelly-beans on said single bed! Clearly this is not the best use of a single bed.

Oh, I must tell you, Kris discovered a new game the other day while lamenting the size of her formerly perky mammary glands. It's called Peek-a-boob, and yes folks, she can literally hide her entire face behind one of those mothers!! Scary.......

Ok, so the pregnant fairy is starting to resemble a pregnant hippo fairy (I'm ducking in advance cause I know something heavy is about to be launched at my noggin!). Life in the Henriksen household is plodding along (waddling along) nicely as we pass the five month stage (I'm still not good at the whole counting in weeks thing! I just don't get it).

Preggie fairy is now visiting the Chiro once a week because apparently her pelvis has tilted forward which could lead to our child coming out of her bum instead of her vag! Ok, maybe not, but the mental image is rather funny... This whole pelvic tilt thing is quite painful and part of the cure is the application of ice packs to the netheryeya. Now this is not much fun for wifey, but loads of fun for me to watch. There's not much worse than having to apply an ice pack between your legs when its so cold outside the heaters have been hauled out of storage! She ends up with rosy heat-filled cheeks from the heater and goosebumps from the waist down...

Kori is growing steadily and making her presence known more and more each day. She's settled in to a perfect upside down position which is apparently great for birth, not so great for mom who has to pee every two minutes cause the kid is elbowing/kicking/head-butting her in the bladder! The pressure on the bladder is also the reason why Kris has to change underwear five times a day. Every time she sneezes or coughs, she has a little accident. I've decided it would be better for all involved if I just bought her incontinence broeks, but she's still vetoing that plan! I don't see the issue myself, I find those broeks very handy when I go to concerts...I mean really, have you ever tried to go to the bathroom at a concert? You miss the whole thing while waiting in line. I say strap on the granny-panties and pee to your heart's content while banging away in the Mosh-pit!

The next big event for us is the annual baby Expo. I must tell you that I am not looking forward to fighting thousands of hormonal pregnant women all trying to get the last jumbo pack of huggies nappies! I've been informed that it doesn't matter that the house, insurance, MY medical aid, the car, pretty much everything can bounce this month as long as we have money for the expo. I'll be re-living my student years by eating two-minute noodles all month (note that it's just me...Kris still gets lamb korma and magnum ice-creams!) and rationing my petrol by freewheeling down every hill to make it last! The fact that said Expo happens before the baby shower doesn't help either...I can just see us at the baby shower going "thanks so much for leaving the tags on, we've already got one of those!" Apparently we didn't plan this very well!

Bed Time (NOT bedtime!!)

So the bed is my happy place. It's my little spot of the world where I can snuggle up in my down duvet (comforter for those who don't use the King's (Queen's?) English!) and forget about all my worries and strife and drift into my subconscious. Not any more!

Before the sproglet came along I used to have running battles with my wife about who actually owned the duvet! Most nights the floor on her side of the bed had more covers than I did and the cat managed to steal the rest from me. I did however manage to steal them back most of the time. Now that she has mount Everest growing on her abdomen, I have absolutely no chance of staying warm...She hangs on to the duvet with a death grip and even the cat has no chance of curling up in a downy nest anymore. I'm at the stage where I hope for the cat to come and snuggle me to keep me warm, but that is usually met with a feline glare that somehow manages to convey "Just try it buddy and you'll see how quick the nails come out"!

Add to this the fact that she (the wife, not the cat) cannot sleep without a gale force wind blowing on her (we have a fan that I could lease out to the Springbok sky-diving team for their formation practices!) and the end result is me shivering and shaking like a cleanly shaved Polar Bear while she rolls herself up in the duvet till only the tip of her nose sticks out! And God help me if I decide to move to the couch or the spare bedroom!!
She will wake up the minute I try and sneak out and best I get my shivering ass back into my ice-block and pretend to like it.

We have developed a little routine at night when we decide to retire. The when-to-go-to-bed decision has also been taken away from me, by the way. There's no more staying up later than the wife. I have to go to bed at the same time as her, because she can't sleep unless she's somehow holding on to me while previously mentioned Mt Everest digs into my back and I have to contort into all sorts of weird and wonderful positions so that she can still spoon! So, if wifey decides she's tired at 7.30pm, that's when I have to go to bed! There are seven year olds who get to stay up later than me!! I have to ask friend's kids what happened on Grey's Anatomy because I'm not allowed to stay up late enough to watch it...
Anyway, back to the routine...So, we get into bed and wifey lies across it so that I can oil all the places she can't reach in order to somehow stem the inevitable flow of stretch marks across the ever-widening expanse that is her belly. Once this is accomplished I end up doing the hugging-the-belly thing that seems to be the only way Lesbian partners and fathers have of sharing in this miracle. This is normally followed by the self-conscious talking-to-said-belly-thing. And this conversation makes no sense to anyone. I'm sure the first thing my child is going to say is "Did you lose every single brain cell when my mother became pregnant??!!" My wife says I should sing to her, but for some or other reason the only song that pops into my head when she says this is "I like big butts and I cannot lie....."

I think I need to invest in a nursery rhyme CD!!

It's a Girl

So I did my online application for a gun licence in preparation of all the horny teenage boys that will be flocking to my door in about 16 years!

Honestly, I really thought it would be a boy. I fully believe that the universe will never give you anything you can't handle, but once again, I was foiled. I have no idea what to do with a girl!! From as far back as I can remember it was always me stealing my brother's toys because I wanted GI Joe, not Barbie... I could kick a ball further, bowl like Alan Donald, shoot a katty, build go-carts, climb trees....basically I was a boy with a vajay-jay! So dealing with a baby boy was gonna be peanuts. I could already see me running up and down the sideline, yelling at his under-10 rugby coach while proudly proclaiming to the world that the left winger was mine! I don't know if that goes down well at ballet class...

I think my main hiccup in all this is the fact that I really don't get women. I do not understand the moods, the double meanings in things, the hidden agenda's, none if it makes sense. I think I was absent the day those were handed out. So am I going to understand this little bundle of pink joy???

Don't get me wrong...I'm not disappointed and won't be one of those parents who raise their girls like boys cause that's what they wanted, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to make some pearler mistakes. As it is, I'm currently stumped as to what to get a friend's one-year-old for her birthday. I don't know what 1 yr-old girls like! I don't even know what 26yr old girls like....ask my wife! It seems like everything I look at in the shops has little flowers and fairies on, so I guess little girls like those, but to me the little dogs and choo-choo trains are so much cuter....

In the meantime, the wife is now on mission Pink. Not that everything is the colour pink, but I believe she is loving the idea of doing the little girly thing. Now she can completely indulge in everything that is lacking in our house (we're not really the girly type of Lesbines.....). I'm pretty sure that I will soon have to haul out the paint rollers and redo the spare room into a little girls' dream environment. The fact that all the tyke is going to be doing in there for the next couple of years is sleep, dribble, throw up and poop, is entirely beside the fact. All my bookshelves are being thrown out, the spare double bed was exchanged for a single so sorry for all the couples who were planning on sleeping over and the whole room has been shifted and moved about so often I keep stubbing my toes on things that weren't there the day before!

Now the discussion moves to what furniture the baby needs. It's a baby...what could it possible need except a place to sleep???
"Should we get a compactum with built-in baby bath?"
"WTF is a compactum??? (envisioning some sort of fold-a-baby-in-half machine)
"It's a chest of drawers with a changing station on top, silly" (she's all calm and sweet right now...it's kind of scary!)

I'm pretty sure my mom never had a changing station. Is it branded and owned by BP or Shell?? Are there attendants or is it self-service?
What happened to changing the nappy on a bed? And why can't the kid be bathed in the bathroom like a normal person?

I have a funny feeling that I'm going to be spending a lot of time outside with the dogs, cause I'm pretty sure they're not going to understand what's going on either!

Anyway those are all the things going through my mind....in the meantime, here's Kori.......

From Itchy to Psycho!

I must firstly admit that I got this pic in an email today, but I couldn't help changing the heading because it pretty much sums up wifey at the moment.
I recently asked her to describe her symptoms to me and a week later I got an email at work that cracked me up!


Nothing fits you (This is true....she has two pairs of pants that fit and they're both pajama bottoms! "You never take me out anymore" is usually answered with "Most restaurants have a no pajama rule, sweetie, eat your pizza!")
Hair sprouts in places even dogs don't have hair (thick black hair) (I checked my dogs, and she's right!)
You're constipated....BADLY (Do I even need to comment on this??)
Your stomach cramps  (In one of my earliest posts I made reference to her mantra, "Feel my tummy!". This is still in effect, only now I have to analyze whether one side is harder than the other, whether the little bump I'm feeling is a head or a butt, feel around and figure out where the little bugger is hiding, etc, etc.)
You fart and burp uncontrollably (Ok, we touched on this in the last post, so no more comments needed. I invested in some serious air freshener and when she's sleeping I stick those pine car air-fresheners in her pajama pants!)
Your breath smells like dead warthog bum (kats words) (This has become quite a serious issue. It basically means whenever she rolls over in bed, I am forced to do the same unless I want to be woken up by the noxious fumes! I'm tempted to put a camera in the bedroom to watch our synchronized turning-over, I'm sure we're so in tune, we could enter the Olympics! Alternatively I could always invest in a gas mask...)
Your ankles swell (Ankle, not ankles....she only has one left. The one on her right foot has completely disappeared and the song has been changed to "the foot-bone's connected to the knee-bone....the knee bone's connected to the thigh-bone....")
Your feet swell (haven't really noticed this one cause the only shoes she wears are "Crocs" and they are pretty much designed for swollen feet!)
Your toes and fingers looks like pork sausages (The upside to this is that she can go out on the prowl again as a single woman because her wedding ring doesn't even fit on her pinkie finger anymore!)
You are constantly snotty (Well at least I'm practicing for when the Zygote arrives!)
You can't reach to shave your sasquatch legs (I'm very lucky that I'm generally a pretty hairless person. I only have to shave once a month and even then it's normally only two or three hairs, so this has been a bit of a culture shock for me. I've been tasked with doing the shaving thing. Let me tell you, there are men out there who would kill to have my wife's leg hairs on their faces! There are teenage boys locking themselves in bathrooms, shaving their downy cheeks three times a day to try and get what my wife has on her legs! I am personally keeping Gillette in business by buying up all the stock of Mach3 razor blades so that I can lean over a bath-tub and rasp away three times a week!)
It looks like you have a second Rastafarian head "down there" because you can't fucking see anything and I'd rather not snip off my clitoris for although I don't use it much right now at some point in my life I would appreciate it if someone could once again show me what an orgasm is. (Ummm, ok....this one might be a little TMI.)
Your boobs grow to gigantic proportions (Once again this symptom is mainly meant to aggravate all the "other halves". There's nothing fun about having your toys upgraded and then being told you can't actually play with them for the next year!)
Your nipples ache and sting and burn constantly (See above.) (No, wait, I actually have more to say on this little matter. Like the "feel my tummy", the "look at my nipples" mantra has joined the fold. I have had to study this part of her anatomy from all sides, top and below! I am pretty sure that if she could turn them inside out, I would have to scrutinize that side of them as well. Despite all the studying and scrutinizing, I have yet to figure out why they ache, sting or burn!)
Your skin goes dry and itches (I have become the master (mistress?) of applying Aqeous Cream. This has now become a daily ritual.)
Your hair goes oily quickly (Must admit, this little puppy has not given me any headaches yet.)
You get new stretchmarks under your armpits??!! (The whole stretchmark issue is a bit of a contentious one. Notice them and you're bound to get punched, don't notice them and you're not paying enough attention! The whole idea that your body is stretching so much that the skin actually splits, is completely alien to me. Surely the all-powerful universe created the body to handle the whole childbirth thing without actually splitting at the seams??)
The existing stretchmarks on your thighs now extend half way up your back (See above, though I'm actually sure there weren't any there to begin with!(Did you see how I slipped that in? I'm pretty sure I just earned some Brownie points with that!)


So there you have it, her symptoms in her own words. See, I'm not making this shit up!!