I’m baffled at how mankind is still alive!
During the past year I’ve been surprised again and again and how much can go wrong with a pregnancy and how it all of a sudden can go bad! Ofcourse I knew it had it’s risks, I watched E.R like everyone else in the 90’s but still didn’t know it was that much that could go wrong! Not to mention the actual “giving birth” part! I’m a bit scared to even imagine how they did it a thousand year’s ago.
But now that he’s actually out there’s still a few hundred or so defects that won’t show up, like PKU (“phenylketonuria”), I’d never even heard about that before!
And to top all of that – the infant is completely helpless and at mercy of others for a solid 2-3 years atleast! Check the animal kingdom, what other animal needs to protect and feed it’s offspring for that long!? How long does it take for a foal to walk? Hours? Takes a year for a human baby!
It’s really quite amazing how we’re not extinct!!
Now we’re into day 11 of Sam’s life and me and Helena have tried to be as good new parents as we can giving him whatever he wants. It really get’s to you when your son is screaming as loud as he can and you can’t get the milk to cool down fast enough for him. And I’m getting good at changing diapers!
Fortunately for us in Sweden we’re aloud 10 days off from work after having a baby but as of monday I’m a working man again. It’s bitter sweet, I liked being with my son all the time but it’s also liberating being at work when you only have to take care of work.
But before that we’re going to my parents this weekend to unwind a bit 🙂
In case you missed it, on Monday 22nd at 12:20 CET I became a father to Sam Mikael Ström. A healthy 4.3 kilo baby meassuring 55.6 cm in heigh and excellent condition 🙂
Me and Helena are staying some nights at a hotel at the hospital to cool down after this huge event.
Here are some images. Login is “friend” and password is the company I work for.
Here we go again! One more olympic games and once again the media is doing what they can to make us think sweden has a good chance at bringing home some medals. And so far nothing has worked out and they are saying “what tha hell happened!?”. I’m saying “sure they may look good in the pre-olympic events but this is the best of the best!”.
I’d like Sweden to win medals. It’d be a good thing. But I still hate it when the media pushes up the expectations and we fall flat and are left with feelings of disappointment. But not me. Cause I don’t do that anymore 🙂
Go sweden, go, bring home those medals! And if not… well that’s ok too 🙂
And no baby yet, sorry to disappoint!
Me and Helena have gone into “counting down the days”-mode, which right now is down to 2 weeks! It’s going slower and slower now when we know our son can come out at any moment! He’s really kicking her hard in there! We’re also running around trying to predict what we’ll need and buying everything but as always you won’t know what you’ll need until it’s too late!
Meantime we’re warching tons of movies. Weirdest good one yet was the timetraveller’s Wife. Weirdest bad one yet was New York I Love You, even though it had Natalie in it. 2012 was better than I thought, then again I am a big Cusack fan!
No updates must mean everything is going well. Right?
Well pretty well! We’ve taken our first “becoming a parent”-course which was mostly about the delivery and all of that, expect alot more next time. Today we listened to the heartbeat and Helena had all the measurements and samples taken and everything is super fine according to our nurse.
But tomorrow is a big day! Tomorrow we are gonna do a 4d ultrasound so we can actually see the baby’s face and feet kicking and all of that, really excited over that. We did it with her brother’s kid last year and it was exciting enough but not it’s our kid!!! 🙂
Will probably post pictures of it later!
Saw “My Sister’s Keeper” yesterday. I know, it’s a “chick-flic” but it’s Helenas birthday so spending two hours in the movies is the least I could do. I mean, she sat through the latest “Star Trek”-movie and “Tron” for me 🙂
Anyway, the movie is about a all american couple who just wants a normal life with a house and happy kids. All goes well until the daughter get’s leukemia. And with lack of donors they create a tailor made daughter that’s completely compatible in every way and use her to make the sister well. Now she’s grown a bit and at 11 the older sister get’s sick again and they need to transplant the younger sister’s kidney and she says “No, no more” and “lawyers up”. There’s a few sidestories (like the neglected son who goes off to do whatever without anyone caring, or the older sister’s lovestory) but it’s mainly about the family and the parents just trying to do what’s right. I though it was gonna be just an emotional piece of garbage that only chicks could like and one year ago I would probably still feel that afterwards. But instead, now that I’m about 4 months away from becoming a father myself, it was difficult not to get emotional and imagine the pain and the struggle of everyone. Because one of this things it did good was to show the story from everyone’s point of view. Although they did their best to make the mother look like the villain at the same time you knew she wasn’t, she was just doing what she thinks is right. And one thing they also did was to go to the extremes – extreme happiness, extreme sorrow, extreme this and that, they really pushed that. And it was hard not to cry at certain things, like the beach-scene! Only one thing I found off was Thomas Dekker and Sofia Vassilieva as a couple knowing age difference (which was only 5, thought it was more)
If you think you can take an emotional roller coaster ride like that and drop a tear or two then go and see it!
The other day I had a terrible revelation – I’m becoming what I hated 15 years ago!!
Wind the clock back to high school. Things sucked bad for me in most ways and like most teens I questioned “why go on?” and if Knut F. hadn’t stepped in I’m not sure I had. Then I happened to see a little movie called “Pump Up The Volume” that really showed me this is what teenage is all about. I totally recognized so much in that movie it was kinda scary. One of the points of the movie is that all parents just want their kids to be normal and go to school, get educated, find a girlfriend and get a job and be normal. Which is really not what the kids wants. And I remember hating all the parents in the movie that told their kids “just be normal”.
Well folks, last week I said “I just hope our son is normal” and it hit me like a blast from a shotgun what I’d just said! Of course in this case I’m more referring to any birth defects or missing toes or something but I do actually just hope our son is normal and goes to school like a normal kid and gets educated, finds a girlfriend and so on. And it sucks that I feel that. Because it’s still very fresh in my mind the fucked up teen years I had when I was anything but normal. But I should take some comfort in the fact that I’m doing ok regardless!
I think I set some kind of speedrecord! In less than 18 months I went from being hopelessly single to being engaged, having built a house and now expecting a son in late february!!
That’s right – we’re pregnant 🙂
Last august or something we had the “kids or no kids” discussion, with me being pro and she being against. She wasn’t against having a child, she was just very, very much agsinst actually giving birth! But we both kind agreed that “if it happens it’ll happen” but we were both pretty much in agreement that if it didn’t happen we wouldn’t really lose any sleep over it.
But after about 5 or so months without protection we both were silently realising that it wasn’t gonna happen and we were fine with that. We know plenty of couples that have trouble getting pregnant or staying pregnant so we just assumed we weren’t compatible, I had bad swimmers or something. But we never talked about doing anything about it like see a doctor or something.
Then one day, just a few days after they started putting our house together I realised she wasn’t acting like she should “this time of the month” and joked she might be pregnant. One visit to the bathroom later and yeap, we were pregnant!
We had absolutely no idea what to do. We called our respective families and everything like that. That was in June. We did the ultrasound last Friday and everything is totally ok as far as anyone can tell!! So we’re making it official…
I’m gonna be a dad!!… JIKES!!!!!
This may be getting old but I can’t help but to be amazed at how fast this has gone! I mean in the past decades everyone has become aware that we’re slowly killing this planet, but just in the past few years it’s become pretty obvious to anyone how bad it is and now it’s really bad! I invite every person saying this talk about greenhouse-effect is overhyped to come to stockholm now! Sweden is joked to have polar bears on the streets and here we are in april and it’s summer! The sun is shining, it’s 20 degrees and everyone is enjoying an afterwork beer out in the sun. This is so f*cked up. And it may be one reason why my allergies is back so damn hard after 15 years. And it’s a good argument not to have kids today – would you want your kids to inherit what we screwed up ? 🙂
Or to quote Stanley in “The Rock” – “I mean it, honey, the world is being Fed-exed to hell in a hand cart. I really believe anyone even thinking of bringing a child into the world is coldly considering an act of cruelty.”