I mentioned a while back that we're planning on avoiding an all out barrage of primary colours when the little one comes. With perhaps foolish optimism, we're hoping to encourage a sophisticated palette by having toys and baby items made with a variety of subtler colours. I finally decided to look into the actual feasibility of our experiment, and it turns out it might not be such a bad idea after all.

Based on studies, babies actually show interest in a wide range of colours, and are particularly interested in the contrast between multiple colours placed side by side. On the anecdotal front, I've witnessed this with my awesome nephew, Theo, who loves to look at a bee painting that hangs on his awesome parents' wall. Furthermore, babies do not seem to have any preference in terms of primary or secondary colours (so oranges, purples, and greens are in), although they generally don't respond with as much interest to browns and greys. I found it kind of cool that these studies focused primarily on "interest" as their chief indicator of preferences (it feeds into my belief that people are natural learners and only lose this tendency through cultural discouragement as life progresses.)

This colourful knowledge flies in the fact of the traditional wisdom that babies are completely colour blind when they're born and must be coaxed into the realm of sight with bright, simple hues. I'm wondering if the whole idea of "simple" colours is just an adult concept that has no real foundation in the way the undifferentiating baby brain perceives things. Anwyay, it's kind of neat to see things through the eyes of an infant, though, sadly, it's time for me to get back to adult work....

There it is! We did an Ikea run this weekend and picked up the Sundvik Crib, along with a Hemnes dresser, which will double as our change table. As you can see, baby will be in the bedroom with us for the first little while, both for convenience sake and... uh... spatial reasons. While the picture may look a little cozy, we still actually have plenty of room to move around, and there's a large space on the other side of the bed. There's also more space on the side of the room that you can't see, which means we're sailing!

We also picked up our stroller today, a Safety1st Lux Travel System. It's a little big for our very modest apartment, but it's very sturdy and rather spiffy, I must say (brown body, with white, blue and brown retro designs on the canopy). It's satisfying to finally have some of the essentials taken care of. While we still have a lot of smaller things to pick up, it's good to know that if there are any early surprises, at least the baby will have a car seat and somewhere to sleep (the women in Lis's family do tend to have their babies three weeks ahead of their due dates).

Anyway, things continue to be extremely, insanely hectic. Sorry about the patchy posts of late, but it's been go,go,go on the job search front. If you'd like to see what I've been up to in the rest of my life, you can visit my new professional page, which I launched today.

It has been another crazy week. Our cat-baby continues to have kidney troubles, apparently a very common thing for kitties of her age. A lengthy trip to the vet on Wednesday ended making everything feel topsy-turvy for the rest of the week. Hence no posts for a couple of days.

While we were at the vet, Lis commented that she felt she grew another four inches outward overnight. There was definitely a noticeable difference. Every day she says that she can't imagine being able to get any bigger, and yet somehow it keeps miraculously happening. This week we've also noticed this more exaggerated feeling of there being no going back on our kid decision. Obviously we've felt this theoretically for awhile now, but when the pregnancy becomes so visible, it gets harder and harder to forget about what's going on.

One of the biggest psychological effects of this feeling of inevitability is that we've both been able to imagine more vividly exactly what it'll be like to have a little person joining us in a few months. In time, he'll be a little tyke asking us questions about every weird little detail of daily life. I have to say I'm looking forward to that. I want to encourage an explorer of the world. I want him to feel the world is a place of no intellectual limitation. I often feel that learning is a fundamental human activity, every bit as important as eating and sleeping. Think about it: learning is the mechanism by which we go from being totally reliant on others to (mostly) functioning and independent. It always baffles me when learning is discouraged or forgotten after a certain point in people's lives. You think of how absolutely vital it is early on, and you wonder what people could be if they actively became lifetime learners (or at least I wonder about this, but I'm an alien).

Anyway, we're through another week of this crazy adventure. We're coming up on the third trimester in a couple of weeks, which is bonkers. This weekend we're going to buy our crib and a few other baby essentials. Very exciting! It's truly amazing to me that this little imaginary person is going to soon be sharing our abode. It's hard to describe knowing what it's like to have generated this new life-to-be!

I warned her. I said, I don't think you're going to like it when you see it. But she was obsessed. She couldn't shake it from her attention. She sat there staring at the thing for hours one day. Finally it happened, just as I predicted, and just as I predicted, she was totally grossed out by the experience. I've been preparing myself mentally for this for months, I've heard the stories, I've read the blog posts, and yet I still don't feel like I'm quite ready to see it. When you feel it without seeing it, it's kind of interesting and cute, but when she encountered it visually she described it -- not without a clear hint of revulsion -- as "a kind of flesh earthquake."

I'm referring, of course, to the baby moving around under the skin. I know by now Lis has passed out from reading this, so I might as well continue. I know, I know, I'm supposed to be totally enamored of every single aspect of pregnancy from beginning to end. I know I'm supposed to ooh and aww about the miracle of birth at every turn, and be super keen on every surprise and twist and carefree little moment. I know it makes me a terrible father for even saying any of this, but the fact is, you have to admit, in at least some small way, kind of, just a little, it's, you know, a bit weird to see a several-pound living organism moving around inside your skin. That is not an everyday kind of thing, at least not until this point in my life.

Japes aside, there clearly is actually some kind of cultural fear surrounding the idea of the alien organism inside. A long time ago, I posted about going to see Prometheus, and commented on the latent misogyny of the earlier Alien movies. One thing that didn't occur to me when I posted that was the full significance of the scene in the original Alien where the little critter starts moving around and then bursts from one of the characters' chests. The fact that it was a man's chest, and it was an aggressive, toothy female alien that impregnated him, seems, you know, a tad Freudian to me, but I can't quite put my finger on it. However, now I've experienced the template for that scene first hand, and I can see exactly... uh... well... oh, nevermind.

It's all so beautiful. That's what I was going to say. There's nothing odd about any of this. I mean, unless I'm some kind of fearful, old-fashioned macho man, I'm supposed to be commenting on the beauty of the whole thing right now, right? Um, yeah. It was, like, super... special...

We had a visit with one of Lis's mom's friends yesterday, and a few times the topic of help with child-raising came up in the conversation. There are obviously options of paid childcare for people, but what do you do when you need help on the day-to-day? How do you find a group of friends or trusted individuals that can step in when you're feeling overwhelmed or exhausted from all the baby madness? What do you do when you don't feel you can send your kid to formal childcare because you need assistance at a moment's notice?

A lot of people turn to immediate family, but even family members can have their limitations, not just as individuals but because of busy schedules and other factors. So the question is, when you've exhausted your conventional options, what other resources are available? Who else can you turn to?

I think probably a lot of women historically found themselves feeling very isolated when it got to that point. Their partners were not always reliable (and, from what I gather, usually not). In the fifties you might have been able to drop the kids off at the neighbours' place for a few hours, if you were lucky, but the support network was thin. It wasn't until the seventies that ideas like women's groups started to come into consciousness, in both formal and informal ways. For the lucky ones there was a sense of shared, community-based responsibilities, which expressed itself through a ready-made care network. Now I wasn't there, at least not intellectually, so I can only cobble together a picture from what I've heard and read, but I think I was hearing some echoes of that from our Baby Boomer guest yesterday. There was a real sense of reaching out, and to me it seemed incredibly positive. I know for a fact that Lis and I have been and will be relying on whatever help we can get in terms of information, empathy, and care itself. Our people are amazing. To know that there are such amazing folks that are on our side is an immense gift.

By the by, I also had another thought on this topic. The ever popular mommy's groups seem like a largely depoliticized version of women's groups from the seventies, at least as they're represented in the media (again, I've never been to one, so I'm just cobbling it together from what I've heard). Maybe it's just the depoliticization (or obfuscation) of the home space that makes these communities less overtly political these days; it seems like the phenomenon of showing off your baby-as-consumer-object, which I've reflected on previously, may also be a factor, but at the same time the value of shared care and community should not be underestimated, whatever clothes it's wearing.

Anyway, I feel like I may have been unintentionally controversial in posting this, which is weird. Perhaps this suggests that there is still some political force in the idea of banding together around the common cause of raising a child. It brings to mind that Igbo and Yoruba proverb: "It takes a whole village to raise a child." From what I gather there have been some conservative attacks on this idea, but I think for my part, I'm going to stick with the idea that the more aunties and uncles and grandmas and grandpas for little one, the better!

Ha ha, how's that for a creepy title? It's not even that relevant, but it was too good to pass up.

I've been researching the brilliant and talented 20th century writer Macolm Lowry for the past few weeks, and I watched a really stunning 1976 documentary on him yesterday morning (You can view it free here; warning: some highly disturbing imagery). One of the things I didn't know about him was that he lived one messed up childhood. He came from a wealthy British family, which sounds okay, but his mother and various nannies were constantly alternating between psychological and physical abuse towards the poor kid. As a teenager he went to boarding school, and I can just imagine what 1910s British boarding school did to a an already messed up, sensitive and bright young soul.

Why do I digress into this random biographic detail about someone few have ever heard of and even fewer care about? Well, it's because of what happened to him when he was an adult. He married twice. The first time was to an American writer named Jan Gabriel, but their marriage was basically a huge disaster. Malcolm was a bit of a drinker (and by that I mean one of the world's most enthusiastic drinkers ever), and he suffered from bouts of impotence and various other psychological calamities. Gabriel's stated reason for finally leaving him, though, was that he needed a mother rather than a wife. He needed someone to take care of him, and the talented Jan Gabriel had aspirations in other directions.

Malcolm's second marriage was to a woman named Marjorie Bonner, and while she liked a spot of liquor too (and by a spot, I mean a lot), she was more accommodating towards Lowry's needs for care. She helped him cope both with the soul-wrenching writing of Under the Volcano and with the massive success he had afterwards. She helped him when their seaside shack burned to the ground. She took care of him when he was a liquored-up mess and was always understanding of the fact that, while he was a literary genius, he was deeply emotionally scarred from his childhood. She was, I think, what you'd call a saint.

Which finally brings me to today's topic: men children! There has been a ton of media attention towards the phenomenon of men children in the past ten or so years, partly I'm sure due to the aftermath of the post-feminist, sensitive male types that came into adulthood in the nineties. For awhile there, say 1992 to around 2000, there was a movement for men to become more emotionally responsible to their families. Gone were the days of the distant, beslippered, pipe-smoking patriarch. The moment of the new feminist (or at least not blatantly chauvinist) man had arrived.

Then it went away.

I noticed that, starting in the early 2000s, there were more and more representations of adult men again as infantilized idiots who couldn't take care of themselves and didn't really want to. These weren't even an honest throwback to the days of patriarchy. These new men-children were raised by mothers who did everything for them, and they essentially expected their adult partners to step directly into the role as soon as it was vacated by mom. They partied like rock stars. They spent and consumed with childish abandon. Their kids were expected to know more than them when it came to technology and life (Think about that book series: Everything I Needed to Know, I learned in Kindergarten). This is still going on, and it seems to be getting progressively worse.

Anyway, the big difference between men children nowadays, and that sensitive old soul Malcolm Lowry is that he wrote one of the best novels of the twentieth century. I'm sure it was exhausting for Marjorie, but she did also get something back from the deal. She got the knowledge that one of the greatest novels ever would have died in a ditch along with its writer if it wasn't for her. It seems like a lot of women who are married to men-children now only get extra work and divorces when their little dudes go through mid-life crises. If I found myself married to a guy like that, I believe I'd go the way of Jan Gabriel.

As Ryan’s brother-in-law, and father of his nephew; 5-month old, Théodore, I’m happy to write this guest-post. Theo will be about 8 months old when Ryan and Lis welcome their baby into the world, so I’m looking forward to using my experience to help them with any advice they ask for!

Becoming a father involves a lot of learning very quickly. My wife and I had very limited experience with babies before we became parents, but by the time we left the hospital 36 hours after delivery, we were already experts in handling the baby (holding him, handing him back and forth, putting his clothes on, and diaper changing). The little things come easily at times and this really helped build our confidence and any setbacks are mitigated by the fact that new things happen daily and will most likely keep you too busy for introspection.

Once home, I realized that supporting one’s wife while she learns how to breastfeed the baby is nearly a full time job in itself. The first week was a hard one on us, and I recommend any new dad to be sure to have that week off of work. Not only was I needed to care for my baby and wife, but I experienced just as much post-partum blues as my wife did. I was also getting used to the sleep deprivation in those early days, and would have been a blurry mess at work if I’d gone during that first week.

From then on, each stage the baby went through brought both new joys and challenges. Théo slept a lot in the first month, so was easy to take care of, but he was also not able to smile or interact with us. Once he learned to smile, he also went through a colicky period that was very hard to deal with (baby’s cries are at a frequency that penetrates the brain!). At this point, Théo is more interactive, has learned to laugh and coo, but can also be frustrated with his lack of mobility and has his crabby moments for sure.

All baby-parent combinations are very different, so I’m sure there will be lots of unique experiences that Ryan will go through as a father. I just hope that I can provide more than just Théo’s clothing-hand-me-downs for my little nephew. I hope that Ryan and I can relate to each other father-to-father, because there is a lot to celebrate and commiserate about with regard to parenting!

This morning I got up at about 8, and decided that it would be a sensible and enjoyable thing to take a few minutes to sip my coffee, relax, and think about the most efficient and intelligent way to go about my day. This is a little tradition of mine. As soon as I start to feel a little frazzled or stressed, I try to very consciously relax myself and get grounded. It works well.

My ritual this morning was a huge success as usual, as I now feel focused and alert and super ready to be awesome for the day; however, I had a moment of panic this morning when I realized that when the baby comes, this ritual is likely not going to be possible (or at least not nearly as easy and frequent). Lis and I have every intention of tagging out on the baby periodically to keep sane, but what about the morning where we both really need some quiet time alone and there's no option left? At that point will I be so Zen that it simply won't be a factor anymore? How do other people do it?

It's only recently that I've realized how sound-sensitive I am when I'm doing certain kinds of work. When I need to think or write something, I can usually handle some background noise or a bit of wordless music, but I'm sure not going to be able to ignore the chirps and squawks of my super awesome son when he comes along. I recently learned that he's started practicing crying in the womb. Perhaps I was picking up on that this morning. I could subconsciously hear him warming up the pipes in there. The noise is coming.

Anyway, I'm not sure what I can do about any of it. Perhaps we can make a ritual of he and I sitting in bed for awhile and me sort of half paying attention. That could be lovely. Can one daydream when tending to a baby? I'm guessing that I'm going to find out quickly enough. I suppose the wise thing to do is to enjoy such mornings while I know I still have them. It was a lovely morning, and for that I am grateful.

A couple of my friends were recently scoffing at the whole idea of non-pregnant partners referring to pregnancy symptoms as something "we" are experiencing. I totally get it. "We" don't experience stomach pains, restless legs, random bouts of nausea, itchy belly, cankles, etc. She does. So I started wondering why this imaginary symptom-sharing is such a common practice among modern expecting partners.

I'm guessing it has a lot to do with partners trying to feel involved and connected during the pregnancy stage. Obviously a father can do more once the baby is actually born, but staying attuned to different physical symptoms early on helps. I think I tend not to use "we" when talking about specifics of the body, but I don't shy from it when it comes to any other aspect of the pregnancy. It would be somewhat foolish to think that I really have an OBGYN, but it does affect my life when my partner does or doesn't.

I tend to view my pronoun choices as a feminist and egalitarian gesture. It's my way of saying that I am indeed involved in the creation of this child, and I am not going to leave all of the ins and outs for my wife to deal with on her own. Yes, sometimes this can lead to awkward moments where I'm not sure if it's my boobs that hurt or whatever, but it's worth the price of a little awkwardness (and, indeed, having a set of boobs wouldn't be altogether bad in my opinion).

That aside, perhaps it is a rather daring (even foolhardy) endeavour trying to do a pregnancy blog from a father's perspective. Who knows? My reflections are definitely limited in the sense that I can really only guess and speculate what it would be like to have my body affected by carrying a baby around inside. When Lis reads, for example, hilarious blog posts about the effects of itchy nipples on professional life, it introduces scenarios and situations that are just a tad outside of my daily experience. Still, I do think that sometimes people create false distances between themselves to circumvent empathy, and I don't want to do that. All I can do is try to be honest in the way I'm experiencing all of this, and for me that means using "we" when it feels right.

Coming up next week, the Baby Daddy Blog is going to have a guest blogger, Vince, the daring and heroic father of Theo, who I talked about a few weeks back. Have a wonderful weekend all!

I got some good news this week. Baby Daddy Blog is being featured on the BC Parent website. It's great to get this kind of encouragement from third-party sources, because until this point the blog has been largely a quiet little labour of love. I am definitely glad to be creating an archive of my reflections for the baby down the road, but the more people that read now, the more encouraged I am to keep cranking it out.

I also wanted to thank the regular readers of BDB quickly. I know you're out there, and it's great to see that friends and family and perfect strangers are all coming together for the exciting events that have happened and will happen in the next few months.

I don't have a ton to say today, but I did recently come across something kind of interesting while I was reading Malcolm Lowry's October Ferry to Gabriola for some research I'm doing. The book was published posthumously, which meant that the editor had to swoop in and try to piece together an entire novel from a very rough manuscript. This is challenging enough in itself, I'm sure, but in Lowry's case the challenge must have been double. Lowry was a notorious drinker, whose rambling, barely-fictional prose would be a total disaster if not occasionally drawn into focus by moments of lucid, mind-blowing description. He was never exactly known for his sense of organization, as brilliant as he may have been.

What I noticed about the book was that the two main characters, a husband and wife, had a son who sort of came and went in the narrative. It was like Lowry completely forgot the son existed a bunch of times, and then periodically scrambled to bring hm back in. There's no clear indicator where the son is during the novel's main action, for example, though perhaps he has been left in a hospital in Vancouver while the protagonists jaunt off to Gabriola Island to scope out a hovel sufficient for their dreams of living off the grid. Anyway, I just thought it was funny, this disappearing son, and appropriate to the waxing and waning we've experienced with regard to our own experience of late.

Dear son, I promise I won't periodically forget that you exist.