Looking For Suggestions

Being a typical man, Mrs Geek takes care of a large percentage of our Christmas shopping, and as much as I enjoy going shopping with her for Christmas presents I am usually only really responsible for presents for My Best Friend and Mrs Geek.

Now I am not suggesting that I have usually bought everything before December, but I usually have very specific ideas of what the highlights will include. But this year I have not come up with anything and I am beginning to panic.

Due to the aforementioned tightness of budget in our house, last year and this we have given ourselves very strict spending limits. Now last year I cheated and used the reward vouchers that I receive for spending on my credit card, but that was after saving them for 4 years, they will not stretch so far this year.

Cheating like this did leave quite a disparity between her pile and mine, but that really does suit both of us, because I know it sounds like something you tell children, but I really do prefer to give than receive.

So I am looking for inspiration.

Now being that Mrs Geek rarely reads the blog if not forced into it, and I certain she never reads the comments, I feel fairly confident that she wont find out, at least until after Christmas. So does anyone have any Ideas?

Baby update No Baby Update

OK so we still have no baby. And after yesterdays appointment with the midwife, Mrs Geek is now only 1 day overdue…?

How does that work … well when we originally worked out when the baby was due we got it to be the 11^th of June, but when we had the scan they told us that based on it’s measurements it was going to be the 6^th. Yesterday the midwife overruled this and reset it back to the 11^th.

Now it doesn’t actually change the fact that the baby isn’t here, it does however increase the window of opportunity for a home birth, before they start wanting us to go in for an induction.

The midwife also informed her that she was dilated by 2” and that all was ready to go, we just needed to wait for the contractions to start.

Getting Tetchy

As you may have guessed, We Still Have No News!, and Mrs Geek is getting a little Tetchy.

I know that people mean well and they ask her “Still not had the baby?” … but really is it not somewhat self evident. My suggestion was that she tell the that she had got used to the bad posture, so she had taken to carrying her purse in her blouse … but to her credit she has refrained from sarcasm.

Yesterday my daughter resorted praying to ask god if it was a boy or a girl. I expect she also put in a request to sway the outcome when we were not listening, anything to get the upper hand on her brother who has not thought of that one yet.

The good news is that he has mitigated the possibility of it being a girl in that it would make us “Just like the Simpsons” … Now there’s an aspiration 🙂 I don’t think my daughter has worked out an upside to it being a boy yet… We’ll cross that bridge if and when …

Today Mrs Geek was booked in for a “Membrane Sweep”, which sounds just delightful (I am trying really hard not to think about what that is)… but it is supposed to be very effective in reducing the chances of requiring an induction.

I think she has also decided that it is funny to call me on my mobile. This causes much amusement at work as my office is almost always silent, which means that when ever my phone goes off, everyone turns to me and watches as I hurry trying to answer the phone and not to panic.

Sunny Sundays = River Days

First things first … still no news on Baby #3 … still being limited to Braxton Hicks.

The plan on Sunday was gardening. I will declare now that I defiantly do not have “Green Fingers”. My approach to gardening is for Mrs Geek to point at which bush or hedge she wants me to attack cut back and let the battle commence.

And digging. I am good at digging (having removed silly amounts of soil from both of my last to houses, it was one of the requirements of this house that I did not need to do so again)

However, after about 5 minutes of battle, I decided that it was way to hot to be working in the garden and that we should high tail it to go play in a river.

Over the past few weeks, any hint of sun has found us trekking down to one river or another. Thankfully we live about 5 minutes from the Ribble Valley and the Forest of Bowland. So we made our way to Dinckley and we spent the day swimming in the River Ribble. Well, me and the kids did, Mrs Geek sat on the river bank holding the fort and looking radiant.

I don’t know how we would while away the sunny Sundays if it were not for my children’s obsession with water.

We ended up leaving at 4pm in order to get them to their swimming lessons. I’m sure the logic to that is in there somewhere 🙂

Alas, Mrs Geek did not forget about the garden, so that is how I ended up spending Sunday evening digging up bushes and trimming hedges (I must be a real hit with the neighbours).

Stork Watch

Wow … shooting for 3 in just over 24 hours (It’ll never last)

Today, as you may or may not know, is The Day. According to both scans, the baby is due today.

It would, however, appear that somebody forgot to tell the baby. Or it is already imitating it’s big-brother with the “Just a minute … I’ll be right there” approach to time keeping (I have no idea where they get that from).

Now for me this is not a big deal. Don’t get me wrong, I am looking forward to seeing the baby and I am curious to find out if it is a boy or a girl, but I am actually very calm about it and if anything I am enjoying the last few days of seeing my beautiful wife carrying my unborn child for the last time (She soundly assures me that this is our last).

Mrs Geek however is in rather a confused state of mind. Firstly there is the fact that she wants the baby to come when it is good and ready and not before as the plan is to have a natural home-birth, and this has required us to get to 38 weeks before they recommend home-birthing as an option.

Well 38 weeks came and went so all is well, but now the other end of the window is in sight, in that the doctors advise that if the baby has not arrived within 2 weeks of the due date, then it is time to be induced. Again this is not part of the plan.

But yesterday my attention was brought to a third strand to my darling wife’s thought streams, in that she is actually getting rather nervous about the actually delivery. Call me niaeve but this is not something I had expected. This from the woman that delivered our last child with not so much as a whiff of gas and air.

Again, I don’t want you to think I am stupid, of course I know it stings a bit (ok … that was sarcasm before I get abuse from anyone lacking a Y chromosome), but being a man I quite obviously did not experience it. This coupled with the fact that she has shown no sign of concern before, and if anything had been rather matter of fact about the whole home-birth thing, now took me somewhat off guard.

What am I expected to say about it. How can I, as a man, reassure a woman that has had two children that she has nothing to worry about when it comes to labour? …

That’s right … I resorted to sarcasm … and so, in the spirit of using my blog to send personal messages … for that my Beautiful Wife I Am Really Sorry.

On a mitigating note, we may have resolved the issue of picking names. It was solved the way I could have predicted it would have been right from the start. Mrs Geek kept settling on names that I agreed with right up until the end when all of a sudden, there were some entirely new names in the frame, to which I have resigned myself (actually I quite like them, but she will change them again if she finds that out) … however I am sure that if the baby does not come sometime soon, we will only be left with Fifi Trixibell or Rufus Tiger!

This Happy Amnesia

On friday I got to feel the new baby kicking for the first time.

Mrs Geek has been able to feel it for a couple of weeks now, but she is a little closer to the action.

Feeling your baby kick for the first time is wonderful, truly an experience to be savoured and I will admit to both of us sitting there for quite a while in quiet rapture.

However I am also aware that a good friend of ours, who is currently due any day now, has been complaining for a couple of months, that she is being kicked and elbowed and generally abused from the inside. So when does it turn from this quiet and charming miracle change into a cut scene from alien with this creature trying to escape from your body by kicking its way through your ribcage.

The more interesting thing is that this is not our first. So you would think that Mrs Geek would be a little more apprehensive, but she seems blissfully unaware of what is in store, even labour seems to have been quite charming when looked at through the misty rose tinted vail of 4 years. What is it about pregnancy that causes such an effective amnesia?

I am sure if I could bottle it there would be a market for it somewhere.

What a lovely way of sayin’ how much you love me

When we found out that we were having our first baby, Little Miss Arts Student (Now Mrs Geek) was still in her final year of university, and I was living at the opposite end of the country for my job. Now I am not a person that pays much time to regrets, but this is one of my biggest regrets in life. It meant that I missed much of the day to day changes of the early stages of the pregnancy.

Fast forward a couple of years and we decide that we will try for a new baby also. Well as a red blooded young (ish) man having watched far too much TV on how difficult it was to get pregnant (Only Fools and Horses and the film Maybe Baby were my chief sources of information) I must admit I really was looking forward to the trying, only to find that we had achieved the goal within the first month. Bugger!Horay!.

However I got to experience my wife’s pregnancy from start to finish. Now I will say it now and I will try not to repeat it too much in any manner that can be used in evidence but my wife is beautiful. I see people thinking all too often, and have to admit it myself, she is a good way out of my league. However she was foolish enough or drunk enough or more likely both to fall for me so who am I to grumble.

But on top of this, and as cheesy as it sounds, when pregnant she glows. Not in the old ready brek kind of way you understand, but she just seems to have something very magical about her. It is bizarre. I don’t want it to sound like a fetish or anything creepy, it really isn’t anything course like that, it is just that some how between the nausea and the fatigue, she radiates something that I can not describe in anything other than gushy nonsense. Alas she married a crass rugby playing physicist rather than an artsy fartsy poet (proof by example), and so I again find myself falling short of what she deserves.

So fast forward another three years and the topic of having another child comes up for serious discussion. I would be lying if I told you that the thought of not seeing her pregnant again did not enter into my thought process when we were deciding whether to have another baby. Now don’t get me wrong I want another baby, but watching my wife blossom and go through this journey all over again also went a good way to sweeten the deal.

The thing is that this is one more than we had originally planned, I know that she does not like the idea of saying “no more”, and I believe that any sign that I might be willing to have more will one day be used against me, but that way lies people carriers and bankruptcy. So how do I convince myself that enough is enough and that I have been lucky to have witnessed this miracle twice (if not thrice).

Looking inside the bump

Today marked the beginning of Week 20 and as if to mark the day we went in for the Second Scan. There is something really cool about going for the ultra-sound. I will admit, probably better for me than Mrs Geek, as I got to watch the whole time while the technician took all the measurements.

The image is incredible, you can see the hands and feet, you could to count the vertebrae if you had the inclination (and the time). However for some reason they only have 2D Scans with a very limited depth of vision. Why. I get that this is the NHS, but they could charge £10 for a DVD of their session and the machine would pay for itself.

I digress, As much as I may bitch and moan, it was a great experience. So here is a picture of inside the Bump.

Our secret little shame

The last post brought-up a shameful secret hidden in Mrs Geek’s past. Not so long ago I unearthed a shameful yet unfortunately not illegal neglect shown in Mrs Geek’s upbringing that at first, I admit, I had great difficulty in accepting as being true.

Now, I understand that being a girl and all she was into Cindy and Care Bears and all that, and she was more likely to watch the abomination that was Shera whereas I got the brilliance that was He-Man.

But tell me, how does one go through life, 30 years, having never watched a Star Wars movie. Not one! To have watched Toy Story 2 where the evil emperor Zurg tells Buzz 2 “I am your father” and to watch others around you laughing … I tell you somebody should be held accountable. Thankfully as a caring husband I have put this right, but there is more …

Upon further investigation, alas it would seem our shameful story does not stop here. It would appear that the following mandatory viewing has also been callously missed

The entire James Bond Archive

The Indiana Jones Trilogy

Reservoir Dogs

Terminator and Terminator 2

Citizen Kane

All the Monty Python’s

Blade Runner

The worst thing is that the poor girl does not realise that there is anything to be ashamed of. Don’t worry, although this may he a heavy burden, when I married her I agreed to “For better or for worse” so I will not hold it against her. After all she is the victim in this whole affair.

My only worry is that there are other items of mandatory viewing that I may have complacently overlooked. Feel free to point out anything that you believe should be mandatory watching list.

Sometimes a dad isn’t so tough

This whole blogging experience is rather weird. I know that it is me choosing what I post, but to be honest, I have been saying what is on my mind, rather than thinking too much about the image that I am presenting.

So far I seem to be exposing rather more of my “touchy feely” side than I would probably ever allow into the open in a normal conversation.

Yesterday, I spent the day at the wedding of one of Mrs Geek best friends. Now don’t get me wrong, I like to consider the bride and groom my friends, but if I were being honest I there in my capacity as “Partner” to the invitee.

This being said, I found myself welling up at certain points. What is happening to me, I am sure I used to be a “Bloke”. What’s more I have to confess that I was not entirely surprised.

I absolutely LOVE weddings! One of the things I love best about wedding photography is that I get to go to more weddings. I know it would not be original to say that my wedding day was the happiest day of my life, but clichés usually become clichés because they are so true. Along with the birth of my two children, I can’t conceive being happier.

But they do bring out my feminine side. And it would appear that my feminine side is a blubbering little girl.

It is only since getting married myself that I have found them difficult to maintain my masculinity. Before that I was an entirely unconfused young man.

There are a few bits that got me emotional; there was the fact that the Groom was the emotional type also. Seeing struggle with what I will admit was a great speech, brought it back to me. I wish I could lay claim to it being the speech that was my downfall. I fell at the vows, now this was not me reciting vows from memory, I was repeating what the priest had prompted, or at least I was attempting to whilst trying not to cry.

But a new development has entered the last few weddings that I have been to. I am now father to a little girl. Seeing the father of the bride, trying to hold it together while he “gives his daughter away”. Now I get that this is a long way away, being that she is 4, but I can feel the confused cocktail of pain and happiness that hew is going through. As much as he may deliriously be happy for her, there are other emotions there too. The overwhelming pride of the person she has become. And then there is the pain of facing the fact that she is not his little girl any more, and that as much as she may love you, you are no longer the number 1 man in her life.

I love my daughter to pieces, and I hope that when she grows up, she finds a wonderful partner, but even the fact her age does give me a while to come up with my speech, I am still not sure that I will be quite ready for her big day.

Heaven help me if the next one is a girl too.