Thursday, October 14, 2010

How to gag your husband

Okay minds out of the gutter people. Although if you need advice about bondage techniques I might be persuaded to produce a post on the topic. This one's more innocent. So as the impending "sex discovery" appointment is upon us, ideas have been swirling around my head as to how we could surprise our family members. I just think it would be so fun to do something cute, especially for my MIL and SFIL since they are in PA (by the way have I mentioned how I have to Photoshop a family tree extension for our baby book and turn it into a fold-out book? yeah fun stuff, I'll let you know how that goes). When I brought the idea up to Andy, he looked at me like it was the silliest idea in the world. But listen, this is the first grandchild and our first kid. I know that I am never going to have this kind of energy with number two. I already feel guilty about the fact that our first kid will have a bazillion more pictures than our second. It's going to be unequal. But ya know what, number two will get theirs. They will get a year or two there at the end where it is just them and us. They will get the spoiling later on and probably make out a lot better because by then we will have more money (in my head) so I could see traveling being a bigger part of our lives and such. Anyway it will all even out.
So despite the fact that Andy isn't all that interested in my idea, a new opportunity just arose. Here's the deal. I received a call on Monday from my midwife. Apparently the imaging center that she was going to have us go to recently made some pretty major mistakes on one of her patient's ultrasounds and a patient of another midwife she knows. She wanted to give me a heads up and give me the option of going somewhere else. The cost difference between going to a Dr and the imaging center is about double, but I have insurance, which I am pretty sure makes my cost $60 one way or the other. I guess the deal with the imaging center is that they mostly do CAT scans and MRIs, that kind of thing. Since Dr.s normally do ultrasounds in their office the center does very few of them.....which apparently means they suck at them. My midwife used to send her patients to a Dr who was very supportive of home birth and midwifery, but he recently closed his practice and they have been having a hard time finding other Dr.s who are willing to take the risk (i.e. whose malpractice insurance and affiliations allow). Now I already told you that she has a back-up Dr and that is still true, but he doesn't have ultrasound equipment in his office and also uses an imaging center. But recently she found a doctor who was excited about working with her and is willing to do her ultrasounds. So she gave me the option to go to him. It only took me about a second to tell her I would like to. Sure I could keep my appointment at the imaging center, but if there is a chance I would get a bad reading and spend a day or two convinced my baby had some sort of abnormality or I could skip all that and go to the Dr, obviously I am going to choose the latter. Turns out his office is about 4 blocks from my office.
Anyway so I called them today to schedule an appointment and then I cancelled with the imaging center. Here are a couple of the differences I already see between the two. The imaging center told me that I needed to drink 32 ounces of liquid starting an hour before my appointment and then I obviously have to hold it. The Dr. office told me I have to drink 12 ounces starting 45 minutes before my appointment. That is a pretty big difference. I was wondering how I was going to keep from peeing, but now I don't think it will be an issue. I think I will drink around 24, just to be safe. Nugget is sitting pretty far in there I want to do anything I can to improve the odds of getting a good image. Now listen, I am not going to tell you exactly when I have my appointment, mostly because then you will be waiting with baited breath for the post on the announcement and I am probably not going to get to that right away, but also because there is a possibility that they won't be able to see. Nugget could be uncooperative. But I will tell you that it is earlier than the original appointment by at least a couple of days. That means everyone, including Andy since I haven't told him about the new appointment (don't get huffy, he is in class), thinks it is next Friday. That includes all our parents and my friends. So I have an opportunity. I could not only surprise our parents, but I could surprise everyone! No one will be calling to pester me because they don't know. Of course the one obstacle is Andy. Can I keep him quiet for a few days while I get everything together?
Have I mentioned yet that I dubbed Andy "the mental terrorist"? Yeah that is what he is. Starting at or before Thanksgiving he starts his Christmas mind games. He hates waiting until December 25th to find out what he is getting so he will start interrogations right away. If he can't get me to tell him, he will start guessing and then reading my expression. Let me tell you, he is some sort of genius when it comes to guessing. I am not sure that there has been a Christmas in the past 7 years that he hasn't either guessed his major gift, pestered it out of me, or almost ruined it. A couple years ago I thought I was smart. I had bought him a wok and a food chopper thingy. You know that thing you hit knob on the top and the blades rotate around making things itty bitty? I figured there was no way he was going to guess that because he would be expecting more man-oriented stuff, like a jacket or an xbox game. A few weeks before Christmas we were at the grocery store....this was in NY and the grocery store had a pretty extensive cooking/homewares aisle for some reason, it was a pretty fancy grocery store....anyway so we walked down the cooking utensil aisle and he sees a food chopper and grabs it and says 'hey we should get one of these, I have been talking about it forever'. Shit! Think Natalie, how can you get out of this one? So I was like 'yeah we should get one, but not here, it is probably way overpriced'. Saved. Good thing he wasn't scruitinizing my face while I said that because he would have noticed my panic. How on earth could he almost ruin that? I thought I had picked the one christmas gift that he would never be able to ruin, but he almost did.
So yeah, the guy doesn't like surprises. And considering he was calling people the day I got the BFP home test even though I was thinking we should wait until we got the hormone level test back, I am thinking this news will be hard for him to hold in. Our appointment is from 2-3pm and I am assuming by 3:00:20p everyone will know. So now I gotta figure out how to keep him quiet for a couple of days and I have to decide for sure how I want to tell people. I think for the PA parents I will call a florist and have them deliver some flowers. For people here I was thinking about ordering cupcakes, but then I thought it would be fun for me to make them. Plus that way I can eat a couple.....yes that is what I think I will do :).

3 comments:

  1. lol, lots of good options! i want to do something scrabble themed since that's how charlie proposed to me. i agree - this is probably the only time you'll have the energy or time to figure out something fun. I'm sure the grandparents will love the surprise!

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  2. Good luck!! I'm with you...I really wanted to come up with a cool surprise way to tell everyone we were pregnant....have my family over for dinner, etc (it's the first grandchild on my side) but Hubs couldn't wait. It was hard enough waiting until dinner-time to call his family!

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  3. for the cupcakes color the batter pink or blue, that way people have to "dig in" to find out! :)

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