{"id":185,"date":"2007-12-09T01:43:17","date_gmt":"2007-12-09T06:43:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.andybox.com\/?p=185"},"modified":"2007-12-09T02:08:12","modified_gmt":"2007-12-09T07:08:12","slug":"what-ive-learned-so-far","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.andybox.com\/?p=185","title":{"rendered":"What I&#8217;ve Learned So Far"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;ve known we are pregnant for almost a week now. I&#8217;ve learned\/confirmed a lot so far, including:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Weird things happen to a woman&#8217;s body when she gets pregnant.<\/strong> I&#8217;d read that women feel &#8220;different&#8221; in ways they can&#8217;t explain. I was hoping MY wife, the brilliant woman that she is, would be able to explain it, but she can&#8217;t. She does, however, have bouts of SuperNose. At a luncheon this week, in a room full of the smells of various cooked meats, she could smell the salad. Apparently salad has a smell. It&#8217;s also amazing how a baby the size of a grain of rice can make a woman so tired AND hungry.<\/li>\n<li><strong>As expected, everyone has their own ideas<\/strong> about what pregnant women should or should not do and theories about how to predict the baby&#8217;s gender or how many babies will emerge. Sample prohbitions include alcohol, exercise, lunch meat, sushi, sex, lifting anything weighing more than 8 ounces, traveling, and getting out of bed altogether. Some people claim multiple births follow your mother&#8217;s side or father&#8217;s side or skip a generation every time. Some say if you&#8217;re carrying low, you&#8217;re having a boy. Many believe that raising a woman&#8217;s arms overhead will wrap the umbillical cord around the baby&#8217;s neck, as if the arm bones and cord were connected somehow. Google <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?q=pregnancy+myths\" target=\"_blank\">pregnancy myths<\/a> and see what you find. Generally all this advice is something the advisor &#8220;heard&#8221; somewhere, or is based on a single instance that the advisor is extrapolating into a Law of Pregnancy. Some of these ideas have medical validity. Many are utter hogwash. The amount of misinformation, and contradictory information from seemingly reputable sources, is amazing. I do my best to smile politely, but I am a skeptic about anything I hear other than your personal experience, which I would LOVE to hear about. I want to be a good BabyDaddy and appreciate help as long as it&#8217;s accurate! Leave comments if you have any advice.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Pretty much everyone, even our friends who can&#8217;t stand children, gets excited when they hear about a new baby on the way.<\/strong> In our case, some of the excitement results from our long journey toward these happy days. But even people who don&#8217;t know how hard it&#8217;s been for us still rejoice. I like to think it&#8217;s because they believe we&#8217;ll be good parents, but the truth is probably much simpler: babies are hope for the future. Imagine a world that had no babies, like in the movie Children of Men that I mentioned several weeks ago. The human race would be maybe 80-100 years from extinction. Through babies, we combine two different lineages into a new life that will (we hope) live on after we have left this world. They are also a clean slate. Despite their inherent propensity toward sin, they still have an innocence that they will never regain. They haven&#8217;t made all the mistakes that we&#8217;ve made or been through the pain we&#8217;ve endured. They also have a tremendous amount of potential. All the &#8220;grownups&#8221; around them wistfully speculate about who they&#8217;ll become, but only God knows for sure. They&#8217;re like Christmas presents that take a lifetime to unwrap. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;ve known we are pregnant for almost a week now. I&#8217;ve learned\/confirmed a lot so far, including: Weird things happen to a woman&#8217;s body when she gets pregnant. I&#8217;d read that women feel &#8220;different&#8221; in ways they can&#8217;t explain. I &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.andybox.com\/?p=185\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.andybox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.andybox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.andybox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.andybox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.andybox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.andybox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.andybox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.andybox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.andybox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}