he last month or so has been slow. Like really SLOOOOW. We have just been counting down (slowly) the days till baby Hammie’s arrival and so you could imagine the excitement we felt as we approached week 39. Week after week, patiently seeing her grow, checking on mummy’s health at the doctor’s office built up on our anticipation. I even took extra leave to make sure this time around I HAVE ENOUGH TIME FOR THE BABY. And so I pushed forward my leave by a week and took a whopping total of 5 weeks for my paternity. 5 weeks – 25 work days in total.
Today I am already day 4 with no signs of baby. Actually there were signs…we just didn’t know those were “fake signs”. Yes there are some variations of false labour (which we are now learning rather painfully) which can happen and inexperienced parents may think its a sign of real labour.
Inexperienced parents like ourselves who are going through the “contraction route” the first time and being totally noobs about it (that’s how we discovered prodromal contractions!)
And so the days are going by. We are getting restless. Actually more so me because between addressing adhoc queries on my phone, I am feeling this sense of edginess that “damn did I just waste time by taking extra leave?” And while the leave was supposed to be on me spending time with the boy, it has been more like me doing my own thing (and in the process “wasting my own time” and guilt tripping myself over Yakuza and Far Cry 5!) and just being even more short fused with the little one which all culminated in the wifey breaking down and feeling helpless.
Sigh.
I really did wish the baby would come earlier, like by this week if possible just so I would have more time with her and for the family. As I shared with the wifey yesterday, a day she’s late is a day I am losing from my leave and in some ways, wasting my leave in the process.
And while that is true “to some degree’, I also feel its a very selfish way of looking at it. These things after all are so unpredictable (another topic for another day) and so while as much as possible we want to be in control of things, the truth of the matter is, pregnancy and delivery are some things that we just can’t predict at the end of the day.
And so we wait. I wait with a proverbial thumb sucked in as I haughtily check my mental watch every 5 seconds to impatiently count the number of hours passed, the duration that this baby is taking to come.
Its becoming torturous in some ways – much like earlier on this year/late last year when we just went through that period of hormonal injections while hoping each month would be “the month” that she would finally conceived.
Alas, our time is not God’s time. Our ways are not His ways. We just have to wait on the divine clock to strike and just pray and wait. It will happen. Its just a matter of when.
