Foliage

Over the past few years, ET has become accustomed to being, let’s say, ‘looked at’ quite a lot.

As embarrassing as such events always were, she has always been brave and willing, not to mention she always ensured everything was well maintained.

Of course, as they are wont to do, time and circumstance take their toll.

Keeping things in order down there while heavily pregnant seems to be about as easy as trimming the fringe on an nervous monkey while blindfolded.

As a result, nature has taken its course, and reclaimed the territory previously tamed by the hand of man. This in itself isn’t an issue, it’s a matter of personal taste even, it can be worn as a symbol of one’s German-ness, or as a badge to signify membership of the 1970’s pornographic motion picture society fan club.

What is an issue of course, is modesty. Not to mention the fact the poor child would be in serious danger of strangulation when it pokes its wee head through my wife’s great life-giving portal. We’d need a team of Australian bush firefighters in the delivery room to clear the child a path to safety.

So, partly because I am the greatest spouse that ever existed, and partly because she ordered me to, I gifted her a session at her favourite massage, beauty and Enya’s-greatest-hits-playing parlour.

There she would avail of the ‘Mama Massage’ for women about to blow, something not to be confused with the ‘Big Mama Massage’ available up the road in Amsterdam for men about to blow. More importantly, the session is to include a certain amount of personal foliage landscaping, where the good ladies of the establishment in question would don protective eyewear, then hack and battle their way through the excess undergrowth of the most Amazonian of undercarriages.

I was admiring this mental image, as you do, when another one bossed its way into my frontal lobe. What would the scene be like, if my heavily pregnant and amnioticly blessed wife’s waters should break right there and then?

Some poor beauty college graduate, herself wearing only the finest of cosmetics, would be half way through her masterpiece, sawing and waxing, hacking and trimming, when all of a sudden she gets a face full of foetaljuice.

Assuming she knows how to swim, would she finish the job? Would the gift voucher remain valid? Would the half cleared emergency exit be deemed a fire hazard and force the hospital to opt for a C-section?

Would this child ever just get out here already?

3 weeks, 2 days.

Join the masses of the weird and wonderful, if you haven't pinned your pink or blues to the mast, do so here.

Pool party

It is time.

No, not for her crotch to explode and spray human shrapnel everywhere, but it’s time for a pool.

A pool which will decide who is the wisest amongst us all. You tell me how you think things will pan out, and I’ll eventually tell you who the smartest bugger in town is. Maybe.

Today is 3 weeks and 5 days to the official due date of February 17th. ET is five feet tall. The baby has measured ahead ever so slightly on in all areas so far except for leg length. As for possible inducing or delaying factors; she occasionally eats Thai or Indian, doesn’t often stand on her head, and any sexual advances on my part would certainly be greeted by the blow of a bedside lamp to the jugular.

The bump is very much concentrated around her, er, belly.

That should be more than enough for you to go on, a complicated system of weighted scoring and points allocation will be applied to the values you assign to each of the following.

Gender:
Date of Birth:
Time of Birth:
Weight:
Length:

Stick them in the comments, and the winner will win my everlasting respect and the envy of all useless guessers everywhere.

You have, let's say, 1 week-ish , go on, go.

Commie bastards

Today’s word of the day is; Kraamzorg.

It’s not a planet from an episode of Battlestar Gallactica that you missed.

Neither is it the battle cry of a borderline extinct sub-Saharan tribe of bushmen warriors, nor is it a brand of industrial weed killer.

I can’t guarantee you that it will never be the name of a Geldof child, but I can tell you what it is in the here and now.

Kraamzorg is the Dutch system of after-birth care for mother and child.

It begins when the mother and child return home after the birth. A nurse comes to your house daily for a week or so, to tend to the recovering mother, help with every single aspect of the first days with a new baby, perform light housework of cooking, cleaning , & laundry, and if necessary, tend to other children in the home.

When you return home with your bundle of joy or red faced screaming rage, give them a call, and a nurse will be on your doorstep, in your kitchen, wiping your new child’s arse, and peering between your wife’s legs –all within an hour.

The cost of the care in an average case(49 hours) is over two thousand euro, with even the most basic of insurance cover paying more than 90% of that. This means that the actual cost of a week’s care and guidance to new parents would be somewhere between one and two hundred euro.

Damn you socialist communist sympathising bastards for robbing us of the freedom to pay through the anus for quality health services and just providing it for us. Damn you to hell.

All this was relayed to us last Monday when the Kraamzorg came to our house to get introduced. She sat at our kitchen table gulping coffee and walking us through all the details. Being a firm believer in the adage that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is, I waited for the downside to come.

It came.

It seems our bed is too low.

In order for the nurse to carry out her duties, she needs the bed to be about 70 cm high. All manner of tricks were devised to avoid having to do it but there is no escaping the fact we need to find an extra 30cm of bed height from somewhere.

It was then that she gave us the details of where we could get the ‘klossen’ (bed raisers) for free.

Damn you backward universal health care system for thinking of everything, robbing us of the freedom to freak out over every detail. Damn you to hell.

4 weeks exactly.