| Dad's Diary |
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| Week 32 The Health Update Erika is sleeping OK but her legs and ankles are swelling up (she said it was OK for me to say that). Interestingly, her stomach has definitely taken on a different shape recently. It looks like the baby is in a different position. It's not exactly that the baby has moved down (which I hear does eventually happen), it's more like the baby is now pointing head down. This is good, because at the last ultrasound, the baby was breech (head up). You would think the kid would get dizzy being upside down all the time, though. Maybe their inner ears aren't developed yet. Erika and Ray Flunk Out of Parenthood Class This week we were scheduled for parenthood class (actually, infant care) at the University of Chicago on Monday night. Unfortunately, it didn't exactly work out like we planned. The class was at 6 p.m. so Erika and I left work about 5 p.m. We're both still taking public transportation to work every day so we gave ourselves plenty of time to get to the hospital, or so we thought. This trip would normally take about 30-40 minutes on the bus. About 4:45 on Monday afternoon there was an explosion in a building in downtown Chicago. The cops starting closing down streets, busses were detoured, general chaos and gridlock ensued. To avoid the gridlock, I got on a train, while Erika stuck to the bus plan. The busses crawled and my train was OK, but then I had to connect to another bus, which took forever. In the end, it took us about 90 minutes to get home, and then we still had to get to the hospital. We decided it wouldn't be worth it to go to half a parenthood class and that we would reschedule. However, the implications of this could be ominous. We are now racked with following thoughts: Will we be bad parents? Will these sort of events shadow us? What if we have to pick the kid up from day care and this sort of thing happens? Will our child feel that we are putting our careers before him? As you can see, we're overreacting. What this really showed us is that we'll have to come up with backup plans for all this. Ah, life in the city. Next week: Lucy |