Oh Couvade, You Wiley Bastard
A staple around our house since I’ve been pregnant (which seems like an eternity, yo) happens to be donuts. Most frequently it’s Krispy Kreme, but making the occasional debut are the Enteman’s Chocolate (ahem, PLASTIC) Covered and the sometimes seen Dunkin’ Donuts. We go through about a dozen or so a week nowadays, which seems like a lot, especially considering they’re only passing down one gullet. And, surprise, surprise it’s not mine!
Have I mentioned that The Daver is pregnant, too?
Well, he is. Come on, you know you saw that one coming, especially if you’d heard of Couvade Syndrome before. And shit, he’d probably be carrying this baby to term if he could. He’s just that kind of good guy.
Although some women might be slightly irritated by this phenomenon, I find it somewhat sweet. I mean, if he’s ingesting 12 donuts a week, he can’t exactly raise TOO much of a stink about the McDonald’s caramel sundaes that seem to call my name at odd hours of the day.
He now also shares my irrationally premature nesting instincts.
Over Christmas, he took an unheard of 5 days of vacation time. For Dave (and any of you workaholics out there) this is a huge, huge thing. I had grown extremely accustomed (if not a little bitter) to not seeing my husband during the week, and only seeing him on certain weekends when the moon is full and blue and round. Maybe not precisely how I envisioned my marriage, but then again, I had always envisioned having a wall covered entirely in Velcro, making Velcro suits, and throwing myself against said wall occasionally. What can I say? Fantasy does not always = reality.
And over those 5 days, I got a real glimpse of what having him around all the time would be like. In a word: exhausting. He undertook more house projects in a short amount of time than I have ever seen anyone do, ever, which is a welcome change for us, albeit a bit exhausting.
When we moved here last February, having just been bent over and ass-fucked by the condo fiasco, we didn’t have a whole ton of extra money to throw around to improve this house. We made do with what we had, and in doing so, we completely turned 3 areas in the house into the ‘we just throw crap here’ rooms and shut the door to them.
The Baby’s Room. Painted a sickly shade of pink, we contemplated for 3.5 seconds about making it into a guest room. Which made so little sense as to be absurd: we wanted a baby not house guests. The room then became the ‘cat room.’
Before you start assuming that we have indeed turned into ‘those crazy cat people,’ let me remind you that we foster cats for a local adoption organization. They are not our cats. They will NOT be our cats (no matter WHAT Ben thinks). But for them, it beats the fcuk out of living in a cage.
Once we discovered that I was, indeed, sperminated, the room was painted and the cats were (mostly) evacuated to another part of the house. Then the room became mecca for all of the baby crap that we began to accumulate. Boxes of Ben’s old clothes, a Moses basket, some hand-me-downs from Vacation Wife, and the new baby furniture was all unceremoniously tossed into the room and the door closed.
Although I may be premature in some cases, I do happen to know that sometimes pregnancies have a way of not working out, and wasn”t really willing to start to create a real nursery until the age of viability was reached (i.e. 24 weeks).
Operation Sort-Through-Crap is now partially completed. Goodwill should be having a field day with all of the stuff I’m giving up. Now things just need to be put together so it can actually be an operational room.
The Basement. Going from being squashed into a small condo on the third floor with minimal (I’m being generous here) storage into having a house with three floors can make a person a bit lazy. The laundry room in our basement was quickly turned into crap depository #2. Anything that didn’t go directly into another area was dumped here, never to be seen again.
Over the break, Dave bought, assembled and organized shelves and effectively moved about 90% of the crap off of the floor and into some semblance of organization. Now I just have to go through and throw shit away. I’d have a garage sale if I wasn’t so fucking afraid of them.
Ben’s Playroom, i.e. The Room Off The Kitchen. An initially great idea (‘Hey, let’s put all of Ben’s stuff into this one area, so he can play there!’) turned into ‘Wow! No one ever goes into that room. What a waste of space!’
Dave and Ben dutifully lugged toy after toy into Ben’s room until we were left with a vacant-except-for-the-white-aluminum-Christmas-tree room. I had been contemplating making this an all-seasons tree (change the lights for each holiday!!) or some shit just to leave the room with SOMETHING in it, when the idea of making this a den was raised.
On Monday, off to Addison we trekked to get another insanely large television because The Daver MUST have large televisions and back to Naperville we trudged to pick out another set of couches. Today the couches were delivered, and the room.looks.so.weird.all.furnished.and.shit. All that’s left to do in there is some painting and to mount the TV on the wall. Yes, the TV is a flat panel one. No, I don’t know why.
(I cannot believe I’m going to say this here, now)
I should be pregnant more often, dammit! Eventually the whole house would be decorated, organized and furnished.
[…] suffering once again from Couvade Syndrome. Otherwise known as a sympathetic pregnancy. It happened when I was pregnant with Alex, and his donut consumption may or may not have been responsible for his elevated cholesterol, and […]