I'm a soon-to-be non-gestational, non-biological, non-adoptive mother. In short, I'm a lesbian and my wife is pregnant... this is my blog following documenting our journey.
Sunday is a pretty good day for people watching, and my favourite pastime has now got a new logistical spin. Basically, when it comes to the practicalities of bringing a small person into this world, my wife and I aren’t sweating the small stuff. Look, we took five years of IVF clinics and private consultations and plane rides and sperm donors and operations and general chaos to get to the point that we are at now. So things like the day-to-day practicalities haven’t quite caught up yet. We have a friend who is due a month before us, and all they need is the baby monitor. We, on the other hand, have a Barbapapa lamp we fished out of a skip and a book about a giraffe. We have loads of time… but still, we’ve started to think that we might need a pushchair. So in the sun, we sat on the shores of a rather big lake in Switzerland, watching the people promenade whilst paying close attention to the buggies that went by. This has taught us a few important facts – ...
Next week we are going to visit some nursery schools. I wasn't expecting this to happen at all, or at the very least quite so soon, but it seems that a shortage of spaces in the local area means that you've got to get your kid's name down on a list before they've even got a name... This has also flagged the issue of what we do post birth in regards to childcare and maternity leave. The plan was that one of us would stay at home full time, but recent promotions and retraining make that pretty unlikely to happen. To cap it off, my wife will have only 16-weeks off for maternity leave. And I'll have exactly nada, nothing, zip. In Switzerland, there is no legal requirement for paternity leave. My company offers a discretionary couple of days, but I am yet to find out whether that'll be extended to me. I honestly doubt it, and have no legal leg to stand on to get a day off even for the birth. It is completely possible that I'll be asked to make up the ti...
Why blog anonymously? Sure, no one has anyone has asked me that, because, you know, writing anonymously… but still, I thought I would address it. This answer is probably three fold, but to be honest the first and foremost reason is consent. Okay, what do I mean by that? Well, I mean I don’t have the foetus’ consent to write anything about it at the moment. I don’t have consent to post pictures, or to discuss anything that might lead to future small person being identifiable. And you know, the internet is kinda forever in some regard so as a prospective (protective) parent that feels safer to me. So yeah, consent can’t be given by Cletus (the foetus), so that defaults to me as future parent. And I don’t want to put up baby pictures or intimate details – I don’t think that is right (see my point above on the internet being forever). The other mother isn’t so keen on it either. But let’s get this clear, if you are the kind of parent who posts your sproglet up ...
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