Move along, nothing to see here

Just a quick update to report that all is well with me, the baby, and Mum-to-be. Less than a month to go now until the big day and things are coming along nicely here - we have everything we need except a cot (which won't arrive until early November thanks to a manufacturer stuff-up), the room that I am sitting in at the moment is well on the way to becoming a child's bedroom, and all of our pre-natal classes and the like are done.

Really, it would be good if the next month or so would go just a little bit faster - I'm looking forward to being a Dad and I'm also hanging out for the Federal Election.

Kick, kick

Exciting news: the other night, I was finally able to feel the baby kicking by placing my hand fairly firmly on my wife's belly. That was quite cool :)

Not long to go now, and still so much to do - as evidenced by the fact that I'm sitting here typing this in the room that I should be busily turning into their bedroom, but it remains for the time being a cross between study and shitpile. Sounds like a job for this weekend, then.

Stand in awe of Renovation Man

Yes indeed, I am pleased to announce that yesterday, just before lunchtime, I finished repainting my deck. And it only took me four months, including all of the weekends when I decided there were better things to do with my life, the incident on Anzac Day where I ran out of paint with only a couple of metres of the railing left to go, and repainting over the part of the railing that I thought would look good with a colour change (it would have, if it had turned out grey like on the paint chart rather than purple like in reality).

Four months...that's pathetic.

This, though, leads me to a broader philosophical debate that I mentioned to the good wife last night - in the five and a bit months I have left before our baby is born, should I spend the time getting a whole bunch of stuff done around the house, or should I rip into life with reckless abandon and do all the fun stuff now that I might not be able to do later? On the one hand, I will probably have far more time at home in the future on weekends and so on with a new baby and will probably be looking for ways to occupy myself, which might finally lead to me having a decent garden and all the broken things being fixed. So I might as well go out now, go driving, go go-karting, take off to somewhere interesting on five minutes' notice, read some good books, etc. On the other hand, I might be so busy with a new baby that there won't be time for doing anything else around the house so I should get stuck in right now.

(If there is plenty of time to spare after the baby's born...I wonder if I will have enough time and money to start on a project car? Hmm...)

In any case, the baby's room will need to be sorted out and repainted relatively soon. Given that it is currently being used as a sort of study, you can imagine how full of crap it actually is and how much of it is about to end up in my garage. But I can promise you one thing - given my history with colour changing around the house (the super-vivid blue bathroom and purple deck railing), I won't be changing the colour of anything. I will go and find the square on the colour chart that most closely matches 'bought in bulk new house grey' that the walls were painted in back in 1994....and paint them that colour again.

Photo Day

So our baby had its first picture taken the other day, by ultrasound. I was surprised to see how much detail there actually was – I was fully expecting to see some sort of grainy blob wherein the ultrasound operator would point out various features and I’d nod along pretending to have seen it, but secretly not being able to tell which end was which. But no, there was a clearly visible head, and two arms and legs, and some finger movement was visible, and you could even see a rather well formed spinal column and all. The best bit, though, was the little heartbeat which I thought exceptionally cool.

The good news is that everything seems to be in order, and we are not having twins or triplets.

I did try to work out if it is a boy or a girl. Let me just say that I saw no evidence to suggest that we are having a boy. Apparently, though, my efforts to work it out were pointless as it all looks pretty much the same at this early stage. We aren’t planning to find out before their actual birth, but I thought, hey, if I can figure it out from here then good for me, and I’ll keep my findings to myself.

Stubborn, though, just like Mum and Dad. They had found a comfortable position, and they were sticking with it. Nothing at all would convince them to move around so they could have their picture taken from the other side. A household with two stubborn parents and a stubborn child, what could possibly go wrong?

I was thinking, though, that when they are born I will be turning 27 myself, and realistically, when they are older, they will have no memory of me that has me at anything younger than about 30 to 32. And it’s really odd to think that they will have no idea what I was like as a kid, what I was like as a teenager, what Mum and Dad did before they were born, or anything like that. In fact, those things hadn’t occurred to me about my own parents until recently – you just sort of assume that your parents were always the way they are now, and not that they might have been different before you were born, and have different views to the ones they hold now, and do different things on a weekend and so on.

But no, your parents were probably people just like you once. Does that mean you’ll turn into them?

I once read somewhere that you’ve turned into your Dad when you set aside a stick specifically for stirring paint with.

I have several of those already. Does that mean I’m now even more like my Dad than my Dad is?