Jethro is born May 28, 2008

There is a long story, but I’m too tired.

Photos will hopefully do for now.

Holy crap! May 22, 2008

It is now less than one week until I have to take on official fatherhood duties.

27 May.

We need to rock up at the hospital at 6am, and since we’ve done the pre-admission thing, go straight to the maternity ward. See that, maternity ward. I wasn’t kidding — there is not ward for the fatherly people. They have to share, and be completely marginalised.
Ok, that’s a complete exaggeration. Fathers are actually highly encouraged to get involved as much as they are comfortable with in the process. Perhaps a little too encouraged. They might want me to cut the umbilical cord, and I’m not sure I can deal with that. Anyway, I just resent the sexism of it all.

Back to the process: so we check in, and then we go off to the theatre. I get to scrub up and everything. It’s like I can pretend to be a dysfunctional surgeon for a couple of hours — dysfunctional because I don’t intend to be anywhere near that slicing and dicing scalpel thing. I’ll focus on Angie, who will be half-paralised by the spinal block at that point. Isn’t medical technology charming?

One of my main concerns during the procedure is that my child is born, and I am immediately overwhelmed by the amount of blood involved. This would be embarassing, inconvenient, stupid, annoying, disappointing. Especially since nothing is actually happening to me. I’m not getting cut open. I’m not getting born. I’m just standing there passively observing the whole affair, and I fear that I may not even be able to do that with much success. This is why I intend to focus on my Angie’s beautiful face. I’ll stare deeply into it and I will remain conscious.
The drawback is that I may miss the exact moment that Jethro is pulled into the atmosphere. What’s a squeamish guy to do?

More things follow on after that, but I’m not going to go into the details of what is supposed to happen. I think I’ll relate these things in the near future, when they have happened.

Basically, I’m just feeling a little overwhelmed by this all of a sudden. Once we get through the whole birth thing, we need to bring this small helpless child home. There are no hospital staff at home to help. My mother is coming through, and I’m sure she’s going to be a deitysend (we are non-denominational around here), but ultimately she’ll go home too. Then what? Then Angie and I have to keep the small child fed, cleaned, and in a general state of good health.
When we first got Bean (our maltese poodle), she was six weeks old. We stepped on her several times before a) we learned to remember she was probably underfoot b) she learned to recognise that a safe following distance was required when padding around after the giant, all-providing human deity-creatures.

How many times are we going to step on Jethro before we realise he’s probably underfoot? Sure, we’d have to keep him on the floor the whole time for that to happen, but I wasn’t being literal.

No-one likes a smartass.

Photo-electric furry molasses May 4, 2008

The Nursery May 4, 2008

It’s where we grow young plants and seedlings.

And also small children.

The room is mostly sorted out, although there are a few items outstanding. The letters for the name on the door were supplied by the baby-shower gathering, which happened last weekend. Some pics from that event are provided by Gaby.

Since Angie argues that most of those photos are terrible depictions of herself, I present this one of her that she claims to quite like.