I am a man.  I have no business talking about pregnancy, right?  Wrong.  I might not have carried our child around for 9 months, but I have had to pick up the slack in other areas due to our Uterus Alien zapping all of my wife’s strength and sometimes mental capacity!  So I feel I have earned the right to take a stab at why women are pregnant for 9 months.

Quite simply, because that is how long it takes to really be ready for the little bundle of joy that is going to come screaming out of Jesy’s vagina.  Think about it ladies, were any of you ready to have the baby the instant you found out that you were pregnant?  Hell no!  There were gifts to register for, a nursery to set up, all the gifts you registered for need to be put together, the house has to be cleaned 500 times, the entire house needs re-organized, the house needs to be baby-proofed, you need to pick out a pediatrician, you need to take all the baby safety classes and birthing classes and you need to take a tour of the hospital so you know where you are going when you get there.  Not to mention all the showers that you will have and all the ultrasounds and doctor visits that you go to.  Are you sure nine months is really enough time?  Hell, I’m exhausted just thinking about it all!

And yet here I sit, days away from becoming a father and all that seems like a blur to me.  It was all gone in a matter of moments and now THE day is rapidly approaching.  Today just happens to find me in a reflective mood.  So here is my best guess at explaining the genius of God and trying to determine why 9 months?

1st Trimester (Months 1-3)

• Month 1.  You just had that oh shit moment, you peed on a stick and it gave you that news that several mornings of throwing up had been trying to tell you.  Your prego!  Now you get to schedule that first doctor visit to confirm your findings with a higher power than your urinary discharge.  The rest of this month you will be telling your close friends and family.  This is a good opportunity to have fun with your family if you so choose.   For instance, you can go to them and say that you have some good news and some bad news.  The good news is that after years of getting badgered about when we are going to have kids and that we are finally going to have one!  The bad news is that because of all that stress we are getting a divorce…..JUST KIDDING!  I would make sure that you have a very tolerant family before trying that joke.

• Month 2.  You have no energy to do anything.  The new life forming inside you is acting like more of a symbiote and is stealing all your energy.  As an added bonus, it seems like God is punishing you because you can’t seem to stop running to the bathroom to throw up anytime there is a smell or taste you don’t like, which is about every 10 minutes.  You’re mainly still trying to cope with the fact that this is real!  Most of your time is spent hiding the fact that you are pregnant, eating and sleeping, ironic that the first couple months of the baby’s life will be spent in a similar fashion.

• Month 3.  Time to start thinking about the nursery.  What will be the theme?  What will be the colors?  What kind of furniture and what kind of stain will it have?  How will the light from the second window effect the baby as you change them?   All those questions and more!  Fathers get ready, this is the start of having to put together anything that comes in that front door.  Also, if you haven’t already you can get that first ultrasound out-of-the-way.  The first one is pretty special, it’s the first time you get to see that little lima bean growing inside your wife’s stomach.

Trimester (Months 4-6)

• Month 4.  Congrats, your rate of successfully having this baby just dramatically jumped.  You now have a 67% chance that the baby will make it all the way to term now.  It’s like in Monopoly when you get the card that allows you to go straight to GO.  This is also the time you start calling up family and friends and tell them why you haven’t been drinking wine or doing belly flops into the pool.   Your wife is supposed to turn back into a human after spending 3 months as a zombie, but I didn’t see too big of a jump until the third trimester.

• Month 5.  Time to get that important ultrasound to see if you are having a stander or a squatter, a boy or a girl!  And you are at the halfway point now too, man where had the time gone?  Oh that’s right you have slept it away!  Well no more, time to get ready for a wife that will start to get stressed out with everything that still needs to be done.  And if your wife didn’t already have the shopping gene, she will now!  Time to go register!  Men, this will be hell for you, hours upon hours will be spent in a baby mega store like BuyBuyBaby or Babies R Us looking at the same crap over and over trying to decide which you want more, which is safer, which will go with the room better, which one you could assassinate yourself with.  It’s even worse if your wife brings along her best friend, you really start to feel irrelevant.  At any point I think I could have left, walked to a bar, had a couple of drinks and came back and they would have never missed me.  I probably should have.  My advise is to go for an hour at a time.  You will be tempted to register for everything all at once, don’t. You will kill each other and it is so overwhelming.  Take it an hour at a time, and have a list made of things you definitely want before hand.  And my last bit of advise is, do some research on safety before you go and get a general idea of what you want before you go in.  You’re welcome from the hours of fighting, crying and merchandise throwing I just saved you.  Seriously, it can be like a mad house in there, you have been warned.

• Month 6.  Time to get serious, time to find a pediatrician.  Some things to consider; does the Doctor have young kids of their own?  Do they have children with special needs?  How long have they been a doctor and where have they been a doctor for their career?  Does the doctor’s office have a way to keep healthy kids and sick kids separate?  Do they have special times to bring in newborns?  Will the doctor be available around your work schedule?  Happy hunting!  Also, this is a good time to start taking those baby classes at the hospital.  I personally feel a TON better knowing that if something happens to my child I am way more prepared to do something.  Some of the stuff they go over is common sense and some of it you might already have memorized if you have been going to the OB check ups with your wife like I had been doing.  There is a chart about how to breast feed that I have to look at every time we go to the doctors.  Jesy never sees it because it is behind her, but I get to see it every time they are taking her blood pressure, so I had all the techniques on how to breast feed memorized before we even took the class.  That won’t come in that handy since my little man boobs don’t have any milk.  But hopefully I can help ensure that Jesy gets a good latch. Time to start taking baby classes at the hospital.  And lastly, get ready to have your house overrun with baby crap.  It’s about this time that your wife is going to start attending showers and making you clean out the car when she gets home.  Month 5 is the last time your house will be yours.  From now on that is the baby’s house, get used to it.

3rd Trimester (Months 7-9)

• Month 7. It’s getting close to crunch time now.  You are in the final phase and for the first two months of the third trimester your wife will definitely make a return to somewhat normalcy.  Enjoy it while you can, because when that last month hits, she is going to get tired quicker and doing things like taking off her socks has become an ordeal.  The first thing you are going to want to do is clean the house.  Start with organizing all the shower loot you got.  Get it put away and ready for when the baby comes, because God knows you won’t have time when the baby is actually here!  By this time your wife has normally turned into a cleaning machine.  She only stops to empty the vacuum and then starts all over again.  If you have pets (which we do) you will clean almost daily from here on out.  Also, you are going to be making one last trip to the baby store.  It’s time to pick up anything you NEED that was somehow missed on your registry.  My only advice is to make sure you have all your coupons BEFORE you go and fill up your cart, it just makes things easier.  This is also a good month to get a 3D ultrasound.  The baby is pretty developed by this point and it is right before they get all smooshed inside your wife’s belly.  It makes for the best 3D picture.  I was a bit skeptical, especially considering the price, but after I was in the room and got to see my little girl all life-like, it was worth it.  I would have paid double.  It was so cool!  We went to Becoming Mom Spa in Deerfield and they were awesome!

• Month 8.  Your wife is ready to have the baby, NOW.  But there is still some incubating left to do.  The energy level is going to go way down and not just for your wife, but for dads too.  Dads have been busy putting crap together, helping find room for all the baby stuff, doing the work around the house that your wife can’t anymore.  You both are going to be going to bed earlier, taking more naps and waking up tired.  I would say get used to it because I think that is how the next 20 years of your life might be.  At this point the nursery should be done, all registry gifts should be put away and organized and a pediatrician should have been picked out.  If not then get to it future parents, because time is running out!   This is a good time for all fathers-to-be to go around the house on your hands and knees and figure out what a kid could get into and then safety-ize it!  I have yet to do this, so I am a little behind, but it needs to get done.  Plug up outlets, put on corner protectors, all that fun stuff.  If you have pets this task will be challenging, they will want to play with you the entire time.

• Month 9.  The finish line is in site now and it can’t come soon enough.  Your wife is now saying prayers to help motivate the baby to get the hell out!  It’s like a squatter that won’t leave!  The only thing you really have to get done this month is your last ultrasound to get some measurements on your baby.  This is a good and bad thing.  You have not seen your baby since week 21ish or maybe week 28ish if you got a 3D ultrasound, so you are really anxious to see how big they are.  But knowing how big they are is a double-edged sword.  We found out that we might be having a 10 pound baby!  Say what?  Now we are stressed out about Jesy trying to squeeze that basketball of a child out of her vagina.  Wonderful.  On top of that we get to stress about inducing early and a possible c-section.  The biggest problem with a c-section is that Jesy will take longer to recover and if anyone knows Jesy that is a bad thing.  She doesn’t like NOT being on the go, so if we have to go down that path, she is not going to be happy.  But on the bright side this is a month that you can try to take it easy and just try to get ready for when your baby arrives.

And there you have it.  God must have had it right to begin with.  There is no way that any normal set of parents would be ready to have a child in even three months, you need all nine to really be ready.  To have your house ready, to have your mind ready and to have your friends and family ready it will take all nine months and it will just fly by!

Thank you to everyone that helped keep us sane for nine months and helped get us ready.

Special thanks to my mother-in-law and Kat who came over and helped get the house organized, we would not be nearly as ready without your help.