The Great AFP Debate: How Should You Weigh In?

Unfortunately, pregnancy is harder than just dealing with your wife's nausea, insecurities, and fatigue. Sometimes along the way, you and your wife will have to deal with some seriously important questions.

One of these important decisions comes around the 16th week of pregnancy. It is the decision on whether or not to take the AFP test. AFP stands for Alphafetoprotein, a protein made by your unborn kid and secreted through their liver and then dumped into your wife's blood. The test is a simple blood test that checks for abnormally high or low levels of that protein.
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The Predad Dictionary Part 1: Vagina

As a soon-to-be-dad you will be confronted with some terms that are confusing, strange, and downright-alien. Never fear! Like Frank and Buster of the Koala Brothers, "We"re here to help!" Study them pre-dads. You will be exposed to these terms, and knowledge of them will earn you some serious points with the wife. I am proud to present the first installment of the Predad Dictionary. For this installment, we will concentrate on terms pertaining to the vaginal area. Some of these terms are gruesome but better you hear it from me than discovering it for yourself. Read the rest of this entry »

Going Directly From Work to the Hospital

So
your wife is in the third trimester and both of you are counting down
the days. She may have already started dilating and may already be on
maternity leave. You, on the other hand, need to continue to go to
work, anxiously awaiting the phone call, with the words, "It's time."
on the other end.

That can be really stressful—juggling
concentration at work with concentration on your needy wife and
soon-to-be kid. Guess what? Get used to it. Because once that baby
comes, you will be stressed out about that all the time. But I digress:
that's a different article.

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Back Off! We Just Got Home!

International Adoption often includes traveling to far off countries with upside down time tables. You know what I mean. China for instance is 12 or 13 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time. The good people of your adoption agency understand this. Acclimation is one of the (best) reasons that they schedule a few days in Beijing before you go to your baby’s capital city. If you decide to travel to Korea, Russia, Kazakhstan, the same could easily apply.

While you are spending 2 weeks in China getting to know your new baby, the excitement builds at home. When we went, we literally had a few thousand hits to our blog while we were gone. We also had a gallery on the site and uploaded about 100 pictures while we were overseas. Then the scary thing started to happen. We
started to get emails from family and friends telling us that they were looking forward to seeing us after we got home. They were even proposing dates to do so. The excitement of the moment clearly clouded their thinking as many of these messages mentioned the week that we got home as “good” meeting times. At the
time, even my wife and I did not appreciate the magnitude of the problem. We added additional stress to our situation that we could have prevented with George-Bush-style preemptive measures.

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The Predad Dictionary Part 4: Doctors, Nurses & Specialists

As
a soon-to-be-dad you will be confronted with some terms that are
confusing, strange, and downright-alien. Never fear! Like Frank and
Buster of the Koala Brothers, "We're here to help!" I am proud to
present the fourth installment of the Predad Dictionary. For this
installment, we will concentrate on names of medical staff that you
will come across. These people will be prodding your wife and looking
into their holiest of holy places, make sure you know they are legit.
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The Identity Puzzle – 6 Ideas for Filling in the Pieces

As a member of the international adoption community, nothing burns me up more than a parent who thinks that just because the kid is now under their care and becomes their child, they immediately relinquish their original nationality. “She"s an American now!”

I often wonder if this is the kind of selfishness that leads to tweens and teenagers full of identity crises, senses of loss and resentment. Some people have video cameras and do not use them on their adoption day sighting that they probably will not watch them.  When you become a dad, it is no longer all about you. Your daughter or son will want to watch that video.  You already know that a lot of your soon-to-be son or daughter’s past is a puzzle, you should want to help them fill in as much of that puzzle as possible.  Kids are extremely inquisitive.  Their brains are like little sponges that suck up every drop of knowledge they possibly can.  And they do love to ask questions.