What's in a name, Part Deux

I am listening to a podcast (by the way, how great are podcasts...I love technology) where Mel Kiper and Todd McShay are discussing the NFL draft. They're talking about the Seattle Seahawks' Matt Hasslebeck who, after a 10 years in the NFL, has requested that people call him Matthew. This seems to be the in thing. You no longer have a baby Mike, you've got a baby Michael. Also, friends of ours went with Leo as the full first name for their son, rather than Leonardo with Leo as a nickname, basically the exact opposite of the Matt-Matthew issue. Totally changes the whole baby name dynamic. Yet another thing to throw in the hopper.

Politically incorrect

My wife is beautiful and glowing. Aside from a small belly that looks rather similar to the beer gut I developed my senior year of college, she looks exactly the same. She's still fitting into a relatively large subset of her normal wardrobe, so is having only minor clothing issues. Most importantly, she's content, which makes her lovely and attractive. Now, I know I'm supposed to make similar remarks about how all pregnant women are beautiful and glowing, but I just can't. I mentioned how I'm now seeing pregnant women everywhere and the thing I'm noticing is that women are all over the board while pregnant. Some are tiny at 9 months, some look like they have swallowed a massive beach ball. Some women are beautifully groomed and lovely, some look as though they've never been introduced to the business end of a harbrush. I know I will make no friends in saying this but there you have it. All I know is that I'm a lucky man.

So far.

Trashy magazines

I'm flying to Adelaide at the moment and reading a trashy women's magazine over my wife's shoulder. I would say that 85% of the articles are about women with babies. There are pictures of Elle Macpherson's kids (and a gratuitous semi-clothed picture of the former supermodel, which is what attracted my attention in the first place), a story about an Australian news reader with post partem depression that wanted "crush her daughter's skull" with a silver Tiffany's clock (very descriptive, I thought...love the specificity in the writing) and the expose of the 2 months pregant girl who was skydiving when her parachute didn't open and survived the crash. The lesson here for aspiring journalists, add a reference to a baby in any story and you quadruple the interest of trashy women's magazines.

What's in a name, Part I

Names are tough. I'm going to do a few postings about this because there are so many considerations with new things to think about all the time.

Importantly, some traditional considerations have become no longer applicable. For example, you'd think gender would be a primary driver, but no longer. We dig boy names for girls. Elliot, Darcy, Jim. But then there is the reaction of others. My brother in law Matt hates the boy names for girls and likely hates girl names for boys as well but we haven't discussed it. So, we'd forever have in our minds that Uncle Matt disapproves of the name.

Also, there is the American-Australian cultural differences. When we told one of my best friends Mo that we liked the name Angus (a popular name in Australia), he threatened to call the child "meat" for the rest of his life. Not the reaction we're looking for from our multicultural little tike.

You also need to consider the name associations from your life (Jessica will have a horse face and Kevin will have BO). The visceral reactions of cruel school children are particularly important to us as our child will have the double handicap of being both a redhead (which means 18 years of either being carrot top or fire crotch, couldn't really tell you which scarred me more) and a Beatty (for some reason, Master Beatty is quite damaging to a 15 year old). So, we can't saddle the poor child with some names we love. Charlotte would be a harlot for most of high school and Bart would certainly smell like a fart during grade school.

Names are going to be tricky

Pregnant ladies everywhere

Have there always been this many pregnant people walking around? Has there been some sort of massive surge in fertility recently that hasn't been reported or am I just noticing this more often now. It feels like there are pregnant women eveywhere I turn. Pregnant bellies on the airplane. Pregnant bellies at the beach. Pregnant bellies in the mall. Pregnant bellies at business meetings. Pregnant bellies EVERYWHERE! I feel like I'm about to be overrun with children under 2. Or maybe it's just part of the paranoid neurosis phase that I'm going through.

Sam...

I've decided that I can't call the baby "the baby" any more. It's a bit too impersonal, so I've decided that for the purposes of this blog, I'm calling the baby "Sam". It's gender neutral, it's not on the actual list of potential names and we don't have have an inanimate object with that name (eg, Tommy is our car, Kitty is the kayak...). Done and done.

Technology is crazy

Given the information embargo, we didn't get to share our ultrasound pictures before now. So, I've posted the ultrasound pictures from 12 weeks that we got last week. Just 6 weeks ago, the baby was the size of the finger nail on your pinkie and looked remarkably like a slug. Now, he is the size of a can of soda and has arms and legs. You can see four hemispheres of the brain and joints. My baby has hands (Yeah!) My baby doesn't have wings (Boo, those would be useful given airport security line nowadays). I knew babies grew quickly, but this is ridiculous. It's like he's on baby HGH and creatine. He's the Mark McGuire of babies.

Also, you have to hand it to GE. They may have lost their triple A rating but they do make some crazy technology. That ultrasound machine is amazing. The technician squirts some goo and then holds a paddle against Fiona's tummy and bang, you see baby. No fuss, no muss. Even at 6 weeks, you could see the baby's heart beating. This thing is measuring tenths of millimeters and measuring heartbeats per second. The technician takes a few pictures and hits a button and it shows up on my blackberry. If I ever hit the lottery, I'm buying one for my basement so we can finally prove who's got the bigger cajones, me or my brother.

Technology is completely crazy.

The embargo has been lifted

Until this past Thursday, we have had an information embargo on some big news in our lives. The embargoed information was the Fiona and I are having a baby (I'm not going to do the "we're pregnant" thing. At the end of the day, Fiona's the one who's pregnant. She's the one that's going to be carrying around 10 kilos of water and baby for 9 months while she fights a cold and searches her closet for something that just might fit. I get to do the cool stuff like put together furniture and paint the nursery, all while drinking as much beer as I want. I'm sane enough to respect the right to say "I'm pregnant").

Very exciting news. So exciting in fact that it really makes me want to call every single person I know and tell them just so I can bask in the glow of our shared excitement. People are really pretty amazing when you tell them you're having your first child. There is the obvious mixture of knowing winks from the couples that already have children under 3, who are saying to each other, "thank god we won't be the crankiest ones at the table any more", and the hugs from single friends who are conceptually happy for you but are struggling with the practical impact due to the absence of a personal correllary, and the bizarre conversations with people who find the most relevant thing to say is to tell you about the person they met on the train who's cousin's former roommate is also pregnant. There are those reactions and more, but generally and universally, people are just great. They're genuinely excited and you can see it on their face and hear it in the tone of their voice. It's really wonderful when you can tell that your news makes other people happy.

Well, because of this reaction we've gotten from those that we've told, I wanted to run around and bang on doors and call everyone I knew so that I could tell them our news. That is not terribly practical given that I now live in Australia and a startling number of those people that I wanted to tell don't live anywhere near here. So, I have reverted to this blog, which is an idea that I stole from one of my best friends. During his wife's pregnancy, Eric decided to start a blog mostly to keep up to date those family and friends who were not fortunate enough to be live in the booming metropolis of excitement and enlightenment that is Allentown Pennsylvania. It just so happened that we discovered in reading his blog that Eric's actually quite funny (something very surprising given that I've known him for over 10 years and never realized). He has continued his blog (http://www.babybrof.blogspot.com/) through his son's first year and it is my goal to match his wittiness, if not the frequency of his postings. Tall order I know, but we shall see.

I've never blogged before. How are these supposed to end? Do you sign off? Sum it up with background music? Or do you just stop writing?