The babies

I’ve been trying to reflect back so far with my blogs. Nearly finished the first Trimester (there’s three of those) and a lot happens in that sort of time (three months). My precious few blogs thus far have been filler. Maybe I will be forever behind the now, chasing the present experience like a shadow.

But for this one the present is worth leaving our past narrative (there is a seven week story worth telling -- in due course) to look at today, in the course of this mysteriously simple working.

At eleven weeks our little watery stone has fingernails.
It swallows and kicks. It’s major organs -- liver, kidneys, intestines, brain (brain) and lungs -- all function and apparently the spine can be seen (tho I haven't seen it).

The e-mails we get sent out, that Sicily signed us up to, says:

“That's quite impressive for someone who's only the size of a lipstick case. That will change soon; within the next few weeks, your featherweight child should double in size. You may notice your clothes getting tighter”

Which kinda bums me out because I don’t clothes shop too well. Of course I know that really refers to the pregnant mothers but it’s known for intending fathers to also gain weight. Gordon Churchill talks about the anthropological and scientific concept of the Couvade syndrome. Ultimately it is the intending father’s sympathetic experience of the mother’s pregnancy that has definite physiological and psychological manifestations. The science meaning refers to studies of pregnant lab rats and how the male rat acts, which comes to mimicking symptoms and all sorts of weird changes in their chemicals.

In Anthropological terms he talks about certain tribes where the fathers do certain ritualistic actions involving things like solitude and fasts in preparation for the birth of their child. In one tribe in PNG the father is shown how to deliver the first child by a female midwife and from then on in, every birth after, the father acts as the midwife.