Let me clarify first when this happened - we're talking about first half of 2008 right now. My cousin sent me a msg and said 'congrats on the pregnancy!!'. When I asked him what the hell he was talking about, he pointed me to my blog. :)
For a couple that does not suffer from RPL, there seemed to be a lot less pregnancy milestones. Milestones like the 18 week ultrasound to find out the sex, 37 week full term, due date, etc.
For my wife and I, every week was a milestone. Just 1 more week - every week. Some of the milestones I can remember:
- 7 week (as far as we had made it before)
- First ultrasound where we could see a heartbeat
- When we were transfered from the RFP to a OB/GYN
- When we actually heard the heartbeat
- When I was supposedly able to hear the heartbeat with a stethoscope (I failed horribly at this)
- 18 week ultrasound
- viability for premature babies at 50%, 60%, 70% etc.
- Full term
- Delivery date
At first I was reading "What to expect when you're expecting". Let me tell you... that was quite possibly one of the most depressing reads of my life. It seems every other page is about all the things that can go wrong and there was quite a bit of emphasis put on the doom and gloom. You're wife is expecting! congrats! by the way here's all the things that can go wrong - oh and here's more things that can go wrong!
After nearly replacing all my hope with fear, I stopped reading it. I switched to 2 other ones: "The mother of all pregnancy guides - Canadian Edition" and "Your pregnancy week by week". I can't recall which of the 2 books it came from, but they were both very informative, positive yet still addressed the concerns without making it sound like the human race was doomed from all the things that could go wrong. I do remember my favorite part of YPWBW was at the start of every week, they had a photo of what your baby was supposed to look like.
I never tried to read more than 1 week ahead - I didn't want to be let down incase something went wrong with our pregnancy again. Every week was something new for me, I was always (and still am) amazed about the 'miracle of life' and how much our baby changed week-to-week.
Husbands do get the sympathy pregnancy symptoms. I gained weight, quite a bit of it (relatively speaking anyway). You ladies want to know why men gain weight? It's because you order food and then you can't eat it because of the smell and we end up eating it for you!
I'm going to jump around a bit here to what's on my mind - prenatal class. We signed up for this class that ran weekly for 5-6 weeks. We live on the northern edge of Calgary so we actually went to the class in Airdrie (a small town, sort of like a suburb on the northern edge of Calgary). They showed us things like labour positions, the different stages of it, crying, how to put on diapers, how to give baths, what breastmilk tastes like, signs of PPD, what can we ask for in the hospital, how long after birth before you can have sex again etc. Yep, I really did say "what breastmilk tastes like". Though they didn't tell us that... in one class the instructor asked what we knew about it and I repeated what my father in law said, "tastes like canteloupe juice" (I did later confirm this "myth").
To be straight forward, the pregnancy book my wife got from the health region already had all the information in it. The class simply just repeats what's in the book. So why would you go? The social interaction with the other people in your class. For us, I believe only 1 of our friends had kids so it was hard to find anyone you could relate to.
The pregnancy was pretty much textbook (from a husband's perspective) up until the labour. Despite the pregnancy going so well, I could not help but remember the other 4 we had lost.
Sorry if this seems a bit disjointed I'm writing this on my lunch break. My lunch hour is up - so I will write more later.
