A parent's journey #1 - Conception
2024-07-27
My wife and I had wanted a kid for a while now. We wanted to be properly settled down for it to happen. We wanted our move to the US to be effective, to celebrate our weeding, to have bought a house and to rely on a stable job with health insurance. These things take time.
It's now September 2023, we both have made a few steps in our 30s already, and we're finally ready. The plan went as planned. The checklist has each item check. We can welcome a new little member in our loving family.
When she stops her birth control, we have no idea how long it will take. I'm actually quite worried. I know that for some couples it can take a couple of years, even without any major issue. I also know that miscarriage is unfortunately fairly common. And if this were to happen, then the clock could be ticking more than we thought, since we want multiple children. I think that for once, I was more anxious than my wife about hypothetical problems ahead.
My worries were quickly lifted when the pregnancy test turned out to be positive after our second ovulation period attempt, in October. It was kind of a surreal moment. It was exciting. This baby idea became quite real, but also distant and still hard to really comprehend. Regardless, the 9 months clock started ticking at that point.
I won't talk much about the pregnancy itself, because I wasn't the one directly affected, and I don't want to put words into my wife's mouth. For most of the time, the only major change for me is that I was not drinking any alcohol either in support and had to take over multiple projects around the house. Other than that, it went as one would expect: she felt pretty sick in the first trimester, the second trimester was quite good except some hip pain and trouble to sleep, and the third trimester was increasingly miserable.
From the beginning, we went to see a midwives care center. We had an appointment there once a month, and a little more at the end of the pregnancy. I didn't really have any opinion about what provider to choose, my only requirement was to give birth in a hospital. You never know what could happen with a first baby. And I'm glad I did, but that's a story for another time. So with this center, we didn't know which midwife was going to deliver our baby. They take 12h shifts at the hospital, and you get who's there. So it's recommended to meet most of them during the 9 month's appointments.
At 2 month, in December, we did a genetic test. It's actually pretty cool, because they're now able to do it from the mother's blood, which is also carrying pieces of the baby's DNA. They no longer need to take anything from the womb, which was always risky. And this test can also give the baby's sex. So we learn at that point that we were expecting a little boy!
I kind of wanted a boy first, so I was really happy about that news. My wife was the other way around. She wasn't unhappy, but she needed some time to digest the news, and probably shift some of their projections. I think that's mostly what happens in your mind during pregnancy: you imagine a lot of things about what the future could be. Learning the sex is just another step into making the whole thing real in your mind.
Another important thing that can happen at that point, is that you can decide for a name. You could obviously already have a name picked out for both sexes, but finding one is hard enough. Or at least it's supposed to be, because for us, it went quite well actually. Our main requirement, besides liking it, is that we wanted a name that would sound very similar in both English and my native language. We had a bunch a girl names in our list, probably because a lot of them ending in "A" sound make it easier, but not much on the boy's side. And yet, we found one that we liked quickly. It wasn't a definitive choice, but we started to call him that. And the more we used it, the more we liked it. And that's how we named our baby. We kept the name from everybody until birth. It created some suspense, and avoided any comment.
For the purpose of this capsule, I'm going to call my son Bobby. That's not the name we really picked.
The rest of the pregnancy was pretty uneventful. Thankfully, my wife didn't have any medical complications. We got one ultrasound with images in January, when he was still very tiny. By May, I started to slightly panic seeing how the house projects were nowhere near done. So I started to basically do double shift: day of work as software engineer, then almost another day as a contractor in the house + weekends to finish the kitchen and the baby's bedroom. It all worked out.
Then we reached the due date in early July, the house were ready, we were ready, we just needed the baby and my wife's uterus to be ready as well. That's the next chapter of this series.