[00:00:02] Hello and welcome to what I'm going to call an emergency edition of the Daddy O podcast. This is a last minute recording, and I'm your host, Rob Burnett. And you just have me today. My first solo pod. So the reason why I am podcasting and putting this in your feeds is it's our due date. Brad is unfortunately sick, so I'm sitting here on my due date and no baby yet. And so this is obviously a big part of the journey. We've come a long way to get here and I wanted to make sure, in keeping with our goals for this podcast, which is mostly to document our dad journey, I didn't want to let this day pass without recording.
[00:00:41] And so first things first, what's a due date?
[00:00:47] It's a really interesting thing to get to a date where your baby is supposed to arrive and have them not arrive yet. It feels like it should all be happening today, but obviously nature doesn't work on our time schedule and the baby's fine and having a good time and he'll come in his due time. But man, the waiting is hard.
[00:01:06] So for any dads out there who maybe have a pregnant wife or partner and are wondering and have the due date fixed in their head, just know that it's an estimation.
[00:01:19] I think they set our due date at like the twelve week scan, and they did it by kind of measuring what at that time was a very small fetus. And so these things are, to my mind, slightly, maybe a little scientific, but also a little bit of guesswork. And so it has been updated. The due date hasn't been updated since then. So I always thought that was interesting. And now as I sit here on our due date, I feel extra kind of like dubious of the process. Right. He's going to come at some point, but it's hard to know and it's hard to put all our eggs on this date.
[00:01:55] And then also we always know that the due date is kind of the middle point on what is otherwise a bell curve about when the baby can do. And so really it's this two week window. So we have just as much chance of him coming this week, this coming week as we had last week. And so, in fact, a little bit more because he's a boy and he's a first child, so they tend to come a little later. So we really are just waiting.
[00:02:21] But I don't know if I have any really deep insights here other than knowing that it's a very od experience to know. We spoke on the last pod about how going from not being a parent to a parent is a shift change. And I'm just kind of sitting here on my hands waiting for this massive change in my life to occur and it's a bit unknown when it's going to happen.
[00:02:46] That being said, I think it's important to cover some things that are more than just my ramblings on this pod. So I think one of the things that we've noticed and an anecdote from today is that the last couple of days, the kind of watching and waiting has been amplified and the anxiety has been amplified. Up until this point, the baby's been good. We've had a very smooth pregnancy and it feels like we're right there at the end and it feels like now we want to lay eyes on him. So one thing, I'll tell a story that happened this morning about 05:00 a.m. Laura woke up and said, I don't think he's moving very much. And our baby's been a very moving, very active baby in the womb. And we went back to bed and we were fine with it. And then we woke up again around seven or 730 and said, oh, you know what? He's really. Usually he wakes me up and usually he's moving a lot. And one of the things our midwives always told us was kind of beware of decreased fetal movement.
[00:03:48] And so we spent some time in bed, kind of wondering, what should we do? And eventually, here in the UK, there's a service called the maternity Assessment unit in the local hospital. And we called them up and they had us come in and the lovely midwives there shout out to them, they took really good care of us. They got us right in.
[00:04:06] And we spent about 2 hours with a break in between having our baby continuously monitored. They hook up two little probes to mom's belly and start recording the fetal heart rate and things like that. And we had to do it for an hour. And things weren't perfect. They were good, but not perfect. So they had us go eat a little something, take a break for about 45 minutes and then come back and do it again. And at that point, he passed with flying colors. So that was a big relief for mom and I. We were a little nervous. I think part of us knew that it was new parent jitters. So we've been joking that this was our first frantic trip to the hospital as nervous parents. And we did it before he's even born. And I think the lesson I've learned is that as you get to those due date, there's no doubt that the emotions and the nerves get amplified in a way I wasn't quite expecting. I expected to feel less nervous coming into the delivery about the baby itself. The delivery and labor has its own set of nerves. But I expected to feel like at this point, the baby's good. He made it this far, he's robust, he'll be fine. But I find myself much more worried about him than I expected to be. I think there's a big feeling that we're just right there. I want to see him, want to get him out. And so I think being aware of that is something that I'm learning. And then the second thing is it's a good lesson to learn, which is it was still the right thing to do for us to call and to go get things checked.
[00:05:49] The lesson someone could draw from this is, oh, don't worry, you're overreacting. But the amount of comfort and calm Laura and I got out of walking out of the appointment with doctors seal of approval, saying, no, he's good, he's healthy, massively helpful. And Laura and I are keenly aware that hopefully this next week she'll go into labor. Otherwise she'll be induced, which is fine, but we'd like to go into labor on our own.
[00:06:17] And when you're nervous about your baby, it's really hard. Our understanding of labor is that oxytocin and calm is what gets us ready to go. And instead we've got a lot of anxiety and nerves, which is telling the oh, things aren't safe. We need to hold.
[00:06:37] So, you know, one thing Laura's been doing is nesting and kind of building the cave. So to says, she talks about having these intense feelings of kind of wanting to nest and wanting to kind of protect the cave and hide and kind of hunker down and so giving ourselves peace of mind so that we can then go out and do that, I think has really been really helpful. So anyone out there who's worried, call.
[00:07:04] Very useful.
[00:07:09] Well, this is a short pod, but I think I'm going to leave it there without Brad. I'm not going to do dad wins. Dad fails. And our win is that our baby's still healthy and our fail is that he isn't here yet. Hopefully there'll be at least one more pod here soon, hopefully with either heading into induction or on the flip side after the birth. But thank you all for listening. If there's anything you want to see, hear, read. Email
[email protected]. Please like and subscribe and follow us. We're trying to build something here, and we hope you enjoy it. Thanks, everybody.
[00:07:51] Bye.
