Newstocks

The baby pool

WEEK

35

With only five weeks until Mandy is due, it’s time to start the baby pool.

To enter, provide your answers to the following questions:

1. When will Mandy give birth?
2. What will the weight of the baby be?
3. Will I still be in the delivery room with her – and conscious – when the baby is born?

The person who, in my judgment, gets closest to the correct answers to these three questions will win absolutely nothing other than the satisfaction of being right.

My answers are:

1. At 9am on the 27th September
2. 7lb 10oz
3. Yes, but I will have thrown up at least once.

Good luck!

Effing off the genie

WEEK

35

The other evening Mandy came home and told me that we needed to sort out the nursery. That night.

She told me that the large, cumbersome, impossibly heavy wooden bed currently in the nursery was to be swapped with the smaller one in the guest bedroom, so there was more room for the rest of the nursery furniture. The crib, changing table and two sets of drawers were to be moved into position too. Her parents would be round after dinner to assist

After a mind-mashingly dull day at the office there’s nothing I enjoy more than spending the evening lugging furniture around the house. However, I’ve learned that arguing with a pregnant woman with her mind made up is extremely unwise. So when her parents arrived, we set to it.

The first step was to dismantle the bed in the nursery so we could move it. This required me to unscrew parts of the heavy wooden frame. This would have been fine had my mother-in-law had not decided to tell me how to do it. Here’s a tip for all women out there: never tell a man with a screwdriver in his hand what to do. Seriously. It’s really quite annoying.

By the time we’d switched the two beds it was getting late and I was tired and disagreeable. So it wasn’t the best of times for Mandy to decide that she wanted to see the nursery furniture in every possible permutation so she could decide which she liked best. I became even more frustrated when I realised that she was doing it without taking into account the location of the diaper genie, which was still in its box in the cupboard. So I decided it was time I got it out.

Assembling the genie seemed simple enough – the plastic top just needed to be snapped on to the plastic base. I looked at the instructions, then at the genie, then back at the instructions again. Line up the two tabs at the front… fine… then press down on the top until it clicks into place. I could see how it should go, but the top seemed too small. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the tab at the back of the lid over the rim of the base. Every time I pressed down, the plastic made an unpleasant squealing that suggested the whole thing was about to snap.

“Aaaargh. God. Damn. F…”

I was mad as hell, but my in-laws were in the room watching me in amusement. Naturally, this just made me angrier.

“FUCKING diaper genie,” I yelled in exasperation.

Damn. Really need to work on my language before the baby arrives.

Tattoo watch: Week 35

WEEK

35

Well, we’re now nearing the end of week 35, and Mandy’s belly just keeps getting bigger. The tattoo is now 5.1cm across, up 0.3 cm from a couple of weeks ago. That's an increase of 1.3 cm, or 34%, from its starting size of 3.8 cm.

Her belly is now sufficiently large that some normally simple tasks have become more difficult. She can’t bend down to pick things up off the floor without a lot of huffing and puffing, and it’s now awkward for her to balance a tray on her knees when eating dinner in front of the TV.

This evening, for the first time, she asked me if I’d take the nail polish off her toes. Fortunately I managed to persuade her that her toes still look fine. I suspect that I’ve only postponed the inevitable for a day or two, though.

Out with the old

WEEK

34

Yesterday we finally sold our old Nissan March.

We only got $3,000 for it in the end, a lot less than we were hoping for. But with the transfer test scheduled to run out this week and our new car due to arrive by the end of the month, we had to let it go.

It’s times like this when Bermuda’s one-car-per-household restriction is particularly annoying. It would have been nice to have been able to hang on to the March for a little longer, in the hope of being able to get a bit more for it, without this preventing us from taking delivery of our new car. Now we’re without a car until the new one arrives and HWP and TCD complete the paperwork.

We’ve been told that the ship it’s on is due to arrive on Friday, so if all goes smoothly we should get the car sometime next week. Once it's here, I can continue the baby preparations by installing the car seat in the back and sticking a couple of plastic bags in the glove compartment. However, recently we’ve had enough things fail to arrive when promised (the changing table we ordered from Gibbons Company and a new shower we ordered from BAC) to know that nothing is guaranteed.

In the meantime, I’m taking the bus to and from work. I still don’t trust other drivers (or myself) enough to learn to ride a scooter. Even when the new car arrives, though, I’ll only have the use of it until the baby is born, then I’ll be back on the bus again.

Thank God for noise-cancelling headphones, that’s all I can say.

What not to read when you're expecting

WEEK

34

Before Mandy got pregnant, I thought I'd devour pregnancy and childcare books when she finally did. So far, however, I’ve read almost nothing. The other morning I decided it was time to remedy that, and picked up a copy of ‘The contented little baby book’ by British childcare guru Gina Ford to read on the bus in to work.

By the time I got to Hamilton, I was thoroughly depressed. There seemed so much to learn about parenting, and Ms. Ford was very insistent about how things should be done. Did we really have to buy blackout curtains for the nursery? Should we have bought a regular steam bottle steriliser instead of one that goes in the microwave?

Later that day I was having an IM conversation with a friend of mine who is a paediatrician in the UK. I was telling him how overwhelming all the advice seemed.

“Don't worry about getting ready,” he said. “Mandy's mum is around and she knows what to do. Don't take what books say as fact, all babies are different and your baby will tell you what you need to do, not the book.”

Then he added: “Hope you’re not reading Gina Ford. Burn it if you are - she is Satan.”

I burst out laughing and told him what book had made me so depressed. I asked why he hated her.

“She's too strict. You have no life. Loads of mothers are depressed following her. Babies don't have a routine so young. You never wake a baby to feed it - let him/her sleep and she'll wake up when ready. With a baby you can still go out, have dinner out, etc. With Ford you are too restricted. May work for some babies but if it did they'd probably be easy to handle anyway.”

People seem to either love or loathe Ms. Ford. I'm definitely in the latter category. Not only do I find her tone shrill and hectoring, but the woman seems to be a humourless bitch too. Ms. Ford has spent the last six months trying to have every uncomplimentary comment about her removed from the popular parenting website Mumsnet. One particularly funny quip suggested that Ms. Ford "straps babies to rockets and fires them into south Lebanon". According to Ms. Ford, however, this was "a serious and very offensive libel". At one point her lawyers even asked Mumsnet’s hosting service to remove the site.

This was the final straw for me. Everything about Ms. Ford rubs me the wrong way. I’d like nothing better than to strap her and her books onto a rocket and fire them into Lebanon.