Fascinating stuff

We've been following the poll on this blog to see what gender everyone thinks the baby will be, and this prompted me to look up what the actual ratio of boys to girls is in the US. Turns out the average is 1049 boys born for every 1000 girls. I wonder if this is built in to our genes through evolution? Men historically die earlier, and during the period when evolution played the biggest role in human development (e.g. when mortality directly influenced conception the most) I can imagine this would be even more of a factor. Death from hunting accidents, scouting and territorial disagreements would be more likely back then than they would be in modern-day San Francisco for example.

So I found that figure in this 2006 study. There's a bunch of other really interesting info in there too. For example:

• Since 1990, Tuesday has been the day with the most births in the US, outnumbering Sunday by nearly 2 to 1. In 2006, that day switched to Wednesday. Sunday births have the lowest C-section rates.
• Since 1990, the percentage of mothers who gain either too little or too much weight during pregnancy has increased from 24% up to 32%. I find this to be a disturbing trend and am not sure why it is happening.
• 22% of births are as a result of an induction
• Breech rates are double in women aged 40 compared to women aged 20 (8% to 4%)
• Contrary to the data presented in The Business of Being Born, the presence of midwives at vaginal births has steadily increased since 1991 and is now almost double at 11%. This is not attributable to any increase in home birth rates (which have stayed steady at about 0.6% of all births).
• C-section rate nationwide stands at 31%
• Pre-term births have increased more than 36% since the early 1980s (!!!!)
• The use of forceps or vacuum extraction has halved since 1990.

There's a bunch more stuff in there including info on birth weight, apgar scores and congenital defects.

20 months from now...

We hung out with two 17-month-old kids this weekend: my niece (who I like to playfully call "The Beast" mainly because she isn't) and the fabulously red-headed daughter of friends-of-friends. Seems like that's a pretty kick-ass age.

They walk (for the most part, unless confronted with any kind of step, even if it is just a two-inch micro-step between hallway and kitchen).

They also kind of talk. The Beast seemed quite enamoured with our parrot, which she kept pointing at and saying "bah", presumably for "bird". Excellent effort, toots. Red was also rather vocal, having figured out "Dada" was the correct word for her dad. The Beast on the other hand seems to correlate "Dada" with "man" which my sister and brother-in-law report is uncomfortable for everyone involved!

They listen - you tell them to do (or not do) something and for the most part they will follow instructions.

They also want to touch everything. Red was strangely drawn to my friend's Resident Evil 4 XBox video game box, with its dark images of zombies on the cover. Odd. Meanwhile The Beast has figured out how to call Dada (the real one, not just any man) on her mom's cellphone. She even goes to far as to dig the phone out of my sister's bag.

One other cool thing is that they eat real food. Since K and I are such foodies, we're looking forward to shaping our child's dietary preferences (or at least trying to). The Beast likes vegetables in pasta, despite everyone's best attempts to get her to eat pieces of choc-chip muffin.

Finally, and maybe best of all, they smile and laugh. It was hilarious to pretend to eat one of our parrot's almonds, with the attendant "nom-nom" sound, and have The Beast burst into peals of laughter each time.

We only have to wait 20 months for this sweet-spot of child development. Why, that's just around the corner...

The clear out

I already posted about how we spent a lot of time clearing out the "nursery" over the weekend, but wanted to add a couple of things:

1. The chain of events to clear the room is mind-boggling. Each task requires about four others in order to actually happen. For example, to paint the walls, we needed to get rid of the bookcases. To do that, we needed to box up the books that were contained therein. To do that we had to figure out what was staying and what was going. We also needed to find boxes, which was remarkably difficult. The best suggestion was to go to Beverages & More, which turned out to be the worst because those bastards wanted to charge $1 per box. What is wrong with people? This is San Fran-bloody-cisco, we're supposed to be the best recyclers in the country. In the end we built our own boxes out of the one big box that our new bedroom dresser came in.

2. We managed to kerb a bunch of our furniture, but the futon really required an official Craigslist post and an appointment (mainly because I couldn't be arsed to haul it down the 20 front steps to the sidewalk). So up went the post, "Free Futon in Great Condition". Now, in the past with "free" ads I've put on CL, I've been heavily screwed around. This time I vowed would be different - the thing is free so if you want it, it's on my terms. First call was from a lady who lived an hour away. My resolve immediately crumbled and I agreed to hold it for an hour. In the meantime, I had seven more calls, all from people who could pick it up NOW, dammit. Said lady ends up taking two hours to arrive, and when she does, she is by herself. So after all this I STILL have to haul the thing down to the sidewalk. This was after she attemped to park her beaten up old minivan on the sidewalk by hopping the 6 inch kerb, perpendicular to the street. She nearly took out the front wall of the house. The icing on the cake was that when we finally were ready to shove this bed in her van, THERE WAS ALREADY ANOTHER FUTON IN THERE! "It's okay, I'll put it on the roof" she says. You bloody-well will not, because when someone stops suddenly in front of you on the Bay Bridge, you're going to send my old futon flying through their back window into their kids' heads. Eventually we were able to get both beds in the minivan, which was quite amazing, and K and I were one step closer to an empty soon-to-be-nursery. Who knew that giving things away for free can be such a headache.

The gendered "debate" - an update

N just reported to me that he also had a baby dream last night. The baby was a girl.

Nesting and planning

It's a big busy weekend. On Friday I rented a U-Haul and picked up a rocking chair we bought through Craigslist, and some furniture for our bedroom that will allow us to liberate some storage space that we need in order to clear out the baby's room. The rocking chair was quite the bargain: all hardwood for just $40.

Meanwhile, we continue to work on the room. What had been a spare room / office / music room / library needs to cease being all those things so those functions need to move elsewhere. First up, box up all our books and put them in the basement. When the time comes that we end up buying a house, we'll have more space and the books can come out again. With the books gone, the bookcases could go out on the curb, where they were picked up by someone in less than 45 minutes. You have to love San Francisco sometimes!

The music room aspect is less of an issue. Since I don't teach guitar anymore I really just needed to move one guitar. The rest found new homes, either elsewhere in the house or in my band's studio. A crate of guitar "bits" went in the basement, as did some empty cases.

The spare room simply ceases. As our friends C&C found before their baby was born, trying to retain spare room functionality means you're putting your occasional guests ahead of your own child which is ridiculous. If people want to visit, they'll need to find somewhere else to stay. That means we can sell (or give away) our futon.

Finally, the office functionality will be in flux for a while. The contents of our desk will go in a storage unit that we no longer use thanks to the new furniture from Friday's pickup. The desk itself goes into the basement and will go to the child when they're old enough. After that, it is simply a case of relocating a few other bits and pieces, and then the room will be ready for painting. Not bad, considering that we have 17 weeks to go.

The other thing that came up over the weekend was a discussion of childcare and schools. San Francisco is a notoriously difficult place to raise children. Childcare is insanely expensive ($1600 per month or more), and the public school system places kids by a lottery system. This means your child could end up in a school in a challenging neighborhood. This is in itself wouldn't be a bad thing, but scared (and predominantly white) families don't like this idea and break their backs to put their kids in private schools. As a result, the only kids in public schools are those from low-income families, a situation which tends to make for troubled learning environments where a teacher's first priority is simply maintaining peace in the classroom. This is a self-perpetuating situation. As long as kids from higher-income families go elsewhere, the schools will continue to be undesirable for those very families.

A trip outside SF to visit friends who are themselves expecting a baby took us to a town where these problems don't exist. Schools are better and childcare is at least 50% cheaper. House prices are not ridiculous like in SF and the town has all the charm and amenities that a young family could want. It begs the question: how much are families willing to sacrifice to continue living in San Francisco? And in the end, what are you actually losing if you leave?

"The Business of Being Born"

Last night we watched Ricki Lake's documentary "The Business of Being Born". It has stirred up quite a lot of controversy for its very pro-home/natural birth and anti-hospital/intervention stance.

Basically, the movie talks about how the modern hospital birth is a bad thing. It points out that it is in a hospital's best interest to get the baby out as quickly as possible, and with that goal in mind they make decisions that are not the right ones for the mother. Most significantly they tend to rush into intervention options such as drugs and induction, both of which increase the chances of a Caesarean-section. A C-section is quick, easy and easily billable to the insurance companies. One interviewee in the movie noted that C-section rates spiked at 4pm and 10pm, and hypothesized that this was due to doctors either wanting to get home for dinner or for bed.

We agree with all of this, and my friend Eric, who has two kids, pointed out a very clear cycle that mothers must try to avoid in a hospital delivery:

• Labour is not progressing "fast" enough e.g. cheaply enough for the hospital
  
• Doctor prescribes pitocin (a drug that induces labour contractions)
• Pitocin creates unusually strong contractions
• Strong contractions require pain management
• Pain management (epidural) slows down labour
• More pitocin required
• More drugs, more pitocin, stronger contractions all lead to putting the baby in distress
• C-section

He noted that any interventions (e.g. drugs) set in action a course of events that make it difficult to predict and increase risk - 70% of inductions end in a C-section. Once you're at the hospital, you're on their timeline, and although you can decline any intervention, all it takes is for them to say "the baby is starting to get in distress, we should do XYZ" and the parents will do what they say. The movie made the same point.

However, where the movie's opinion and ours diverge is with the conclusion that the only "real" option is a home birth. Taking Eric's advice and the advice of birthing professionals, it seems that the way around this is to not go to the hospital until you're absolutely ready. This means one full hour of strong contractions, five minutes apart. Then you call the doc. Only then do you go in. By that time, you're well on the way before the hospital timer even starts ticking.

Home birth is simply not what we want. We can weigh the possibility of a "normal" birth going into the progression above in a hospital, versus a home birth going wrong to the point of needing immediate emergency medical attention, and it's clear that the downsides of one (a birth that yields a healthy baby and mother, but does so in an unideal way) far outweigh the other (complete maternal haemmorhage in less than five minutes). Nope, we'll stick with the hospital, but we'll try to be disciplined about when we go in and how we stand up for ourselves against intervention when we get there.

You would think that a movie that primarily deals with the well-being of women and their babies would be lauded by feminist commentators, but that has certainly not been the case. Check out this article from Salon.com's Rebecca Traister, who regularly writes on women's issues. She takes major issue with how the movie portrays a "best" way to deliver, somehow denigrating any birth that doesn't fit that mould. Traister points to a terrific New York Times article that profiles the midwife most prominently featured in the movie, expressing the same concerns about the home birth approach that we have. Traister asks why giving birth should be "a contest about who feels better about themselves or more at one with their bodies", and suggests "not buying into the idea that birthing choices become your earliest parenting gold star or your scarlet letters of birthing shame." Her conclusion is that "all the bellowing [presumably pointing to this movie as an example of such bellowing] on either side only work to make women feel underqualified for motherhood right from the start." That certainly sounds like the words of a feminist, and I'll be the first to agree with her.

The Gender Dream

Folks are quite opinionated regarding predictions of a new child. There are all kinds of gender predictor tools and methodologies, mind you. The best predictor is the old ultrasound (and even that isn't 100%). But N and I have chosen to not find out the gender of our child 'cause well, it really does not matter to us. (Not to mention the fact that we really aren't interesting in the marketing of baby gender items as either pink or blue!)

With that being said, it is exciting to think about who our child will be and a healthy part of that is their gender.

And apparently, lots of other folks near and far to us, are also excited to think about...and predict...the gender of this little sprog. Some dear friends have predicted a boy using the Chinese Gender Chart. She has never been wrong using this method, but anecdotal evidence doesn't support the predictive tool as any more than accurate than guessing (i.e. 50/50 chance of getting it right).

Both families have weighed in - probably using the "wishful thinking" method. N's side is predicting a boy and mine a girl. This is likely due to the fact that there are already boys on my side and a girl on N's side. They like to mix it up.

A classmate predicted a girl based on the way I am carrying (high) and other cohort-mates have weighed in with a similar female call.

My co-workers are heavily leaning girl, as well.

And then there is the "mom dream method". Last night, I had just such a gender dream; the one that shows the gender of the baby to come. Some say that if I dream it is a girl, then it will be a girl and others say if I dream it is a girl, it will be a boy. I dreamt of a little girl, but you can take your pick of how to predict using that information.

Either way, we will be thrilled, of course. And know that you will too. We have added a new poll for your guesses. And please do guess away.

Naming

Here is an awesome website: The Baby Name Wizard

[edit - just noticed that Eric suggested this site in comment to yesterday's post, after I published this post - great minds think alike, it seems!]

It's the online version of the book of the same name, written by a woman named Laura Wittenberg. She has done a huge amount of research, in somewhat of an academic way, to track baby names. There are three key areas of the site:

• Name Mapper, which shows name trends over time tracked on a map of the US. You can rearrange the table based upon population density, income, political affiliation or state profile, so it's easy to find out where a name is popular. For example, you may not want a name that is popular in the South, you might want to avoid a name that is most popular in your own state or you might prefer names that are favoured in states that vote democrat.
  
• Name Voyager, which tracks overall trends of a name over time. It will plot multiple names and goes all the way back to the 1880s. A handy tool to see whether a name is fading from prominence or had its day at some point in the past.
• Namipedia, which is the usual meaning, derivation and alternate forms portal. There is an additional feature here though that allows you to do an advanced search based upon criteria such as syllables, whether the name is a fad, whether it is from Jewish or Muslim cultures or about 15 other choices. Quite useful if you're totally stuck.
  

Although it's extremely interesting, it hasn't really helped us that much, except to kick one girl name to the kerb that turned out to be far more popular than we thought. Most of the names on our lists haven't featured in the SSA top 1000 ever, so can't be tracked on the Baby Name Wizard site. Those that can are all ranked at least 200 or lower, so fall into the category of "statistically irrelevent". But for parents who are looking at a number of conventional names, this would be highly useful.

A big day

Yesterday turned out to be quite a big day. We decided to go to Laguna Seca down near Monterey to watch the Grand-Am sportscar races. This event is usually lightly-attended so we expected a relaxed, relatively cheap day at the racetrack. It would be good practice for when we go to the much more chaotic motorcycle Grand Prix race in July - K would see what it is like to be pregnant at the races.


This is exactly how it all worked out. It was a lovely day, and we exposed the baby to the sounds of racing cars. Get used to it, kid! When my mother was pregnant with me, she had gone to see the Cork International Rally with my dad, which like any spectating at a rally event involves hiking out into the forest to catch the cars race through the stages. This might have been instrumental in making me into such a petrolhead, so K and I are trying the same method for this baby.


So that was "big thing #1".

"Big thing #2" was the fact that we decided to spend the two-hour drive down (and back) going through our list of names. We had about 50 for each gender, so we came up with a rating system and talked our way down the list. It was great fun, and at the end of it we had about ten names for each. Next step would be to cross check them on the Social Security website to make sure they're not too popular (we really don't want our child to have a popular name), and then we can start to sit with the names for a while.

Finally, as we sat on the couch last night, the baby was once again active and K once again tried to have me feel the movement. So far I hadn't been able to feel anything. Last night I did. It was very small, but it was there. What a moment! My first physical connection with my child! Wow. That was "big thing #3".

The logo

It's 2009 - branding matters. Ask any marketing person. In fact you can ask my co-worker who is both in marketing and pregnant, she'll tell you...

So in addition to deciding on a colour scheme for the baby (light blue and orange), we have a logo. Well, we have a guideline at least. We decided a long time ago that this baby's "theme" would be owls. We think it will be cool to have lots of owl-related things surrounding the little one. This is because owls are cute, because we like birds in general (raptors and parrots in particular), because we have a real bird living with us, because there's loads of super-cool owl decals that we want to put on the walls and because owls are cute.

So here's the inspiration:

101 uses for the bump

Well, here's just one use. Ozzie the parrot has found himself a new perch: