So why have I been talking about cribs lately? If you haven’t guessed, we’re expecting. In fact, as our family gets ready for the new arrival, I have some information I would like to share with you men out there about the miracle of pregnancy.
One of the most fascinating aspects of pregnancy is how the coming baby will affect the dreams of both you and your wife.
Heading into the third trimester, your wife’s nesting instinct will kick into high gear. Her dreams will be consumed with repainting the house, cleaning the blinds, deciding where to put the crib, etc. Don’t be surprised if you wake up at 3 a.m. to your wife tapping you on the shoulder to tell you that she just realized the changing table should not go right next to the crib because one is pine and the other is simulated maple.
Meanwhile, your dreams, as the husband, will turn darker. You can expect to have dreams such as these: (1) A diesel locomotive drives through your living room. (2) You stand by helpless as aliens try to drown a moose they’ve abducted in gelatin. (3) Above your house hovers an experimental aircraft made up of helicopter blades mounted on a speedboat with a jet engine strapped to the back.
Are these dreams brought on by the anxiety of becoming a new father? No, they are not. These dreams are triggered by the horrendous snoring coming out of your pregnant wife.
That’s right. Science tells us that as your wife’s body prepares itself for childbirth, elevated estrogen levels increase mucus production and cause swelling in the mucous membranes of the nasal passages. To boil down this medical mumbo jumbo to English, this means that as your wife is peacefully dreaming of rearranging the living room furniture, you will be dreaming of someone operating a broken vacuum cleaner three inches from your face.
A constant anxiety for new parents is how exposure to chemicals or other things in the environment might have an effect on the growing fetus. The good news is, this anxiety lessens considerably with your second child. When my wife was pregnant with our first child, Joe, we would ask questions of the obstetrician such as, “How can Mint Milanos affect the growing fetus? Should we be worried?”
My wife and I were incredibly careful when expecting Joe, but regardless, something happened during the development of his brain. As a result, he has a crippling dietary limitation whereby he refuses to eat any kind of fruit unless it has been pureed, combined with apple juice concentrate, and flattened into “FruitStrips®” that cost approximately $576 per ounce.
This leads me to an important question for those of you expecting for the second time: How should you talk with your pre-existing child about the new baby on the way?
A friend told my wife and I that we shouldn’t tell Joe too early in the pregnancy about the baby sibling growing inside his mom. “Little kids can’t really understand the concept of something like that, since it can’t be seen or touched,” she explained.
With all due respect to our friend, this is spectacularly wrong advice.
The fact is, small children are all too capable of believing in things they can’t see or touch. Tell a child there’s such a thing as – SPOILER ALERT – Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or justice for celebrity criminal defendants, and they will believe you. Kids are comically easy to deceive.
As easy as it is to persuade Joe of some things, I cannot, no matter how hard I try, get Joe to believe that there could be anything edible on the inside of a pineapple. Even when you cut the thing open and eat a piece.
“A pineapple could hurt me, Daddy.”
In fact, the only time Joe may have started to doubt that we were telling the truth about there being a baby inside Mom is when we took him to see the ultrasound. We thought it would be a great way to help him feel involved in the pregnancy.
He was incredibly excited. For about five seconds. After that, he realized that the ultrasound was about the worst television show in the history of the world.
“Do you see the bone, Joe?”
“Um, maybe. Sure.”
“There! Do you see the baby’s nose?”
“Oh, yeah, I see it,” Joe offered patronizingly. “You want to play cars with me now, Daddy? I say, let’s play cars.”
“How about you wait patiently for another 10 minutes. If you can do that, I won’t try to make you eat a strawberry for the rest of the day.”
“Hmmm. Well, okay, Daddy.”
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