© 2003 Brian Hodges - Please do not remove the copyright from this essay

t's official. Lauren and I are having a baby. Actually, it's been official for about thirteen weeks, but we had to make absolutely certain that every conceivable family member within three generations and six degrees of separation heard the news first. Relatives, especially older ones, tend to be rather touchy about learning these things second-hand over the internet and we didn't want to get ourselves cut out of any wills. So now, everybody knows. And anybody we missed is either poor, or doesn't have a modem.

People keep asking me how it feels to know I'm going to be a dad. To tell you the truth, it's just hitting me, four months after my first anniversary, that I'm married. So you're going to have to give me some time on the baby thing. Maybe after my kid breaks his first window and I give him his first good beating, I'll be ready to comment. Just kidding. I'll be beating my kid way before he's old enough to break windows.

Of course I'm happy and excited, but it's still all so intangible. Probably because everything has been so "academic" thus far. Lauren is studying to become a midwife, so the topic of babies is always coming up. Through abstract and theoretical discussions we had pretty much made every birthing decision one could make before we even started "trying". We're using a midwife instead of a doctor. Check. Wouldn't Lauren be the hypocrite otherwise? We picked out names a long time ago. Check. Lauren's going to deliver at home and has even researched the induction methods she'll use if necessary. Check and check.

Over the last year even the conception was plotted out and planned to the day by charting Lauren's body temperatures! Pretty much the only thing that wasn't academic in this whole process was the actual act of conception itself. Heh heh, BIG CHECK! Nothing academic about that… Sorry Mom and Dad and any parents-in-law who are reading this.

I guess it's also hard to comprehend the whole baby thing because Lauren is only just finishing her first trimester. She doesn't look pregnant. She's been feeling sick a lot, but that's about par for my hypochondriac wife. It's hard to tell whether a vomit or a moan of pain is morning sickness or just Lauren thinking her appendix is bursting again. But boy is she milking this for all it's worth. "Honey can you make me some tea? My uterus hurts. Honey can you rub my back? The baby's weighing me down. Not tonight honey. I'm too tired from growing billions of extra cells." Sometimes I think she just wanted to get pregnant to feel justified being sick all the time.

Even the first ultrasound did nothing to trigger my paternal instincts. I sat there screwing up my face in a vain attempt to stop laughing as I tried to figure out if the big black hole in the middle was the uterus or the cervix. (It was the amniotic sac.) There was a small gray patch amongst all the black, which I deduced was the baby. Just to be cheeky though, I've been telling people that I'm the proud parent of a happy healthy dot.

By the next ultrasound we'll be able to tell if the dot is a boy or a girl, but Lauren doesn't want to know. Miss all-natural childbirth doesn't even want the midwife to yell out "It's a…!" during the birth. She wants us to look down and see it (or not) for ourselves. Personally, I'd like to know what I'm having just so I don't have to keep saying It for another six months. It is just so much more clinical and impersonal than He or She. And yes, I do appreciate the irony that I just referred to my baby as "the dot."

By now my dot has hands, feet, eyes, ears, lungs, a rib cage… and two parents that are very excited to welcome… It. It really is hard to comprehend the fact that I will be an honest to goodness father in about six months. And whenever Lauren stops throwing up for more than ten minutes, we just look at each other in awe. We're having a baby! You hear that relatives? A baby! So stop griping about the fact that you heard the news after Aunt Tilda and just send money!