AND BABY MAKES FOUR

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Here we go again. Yours truly is going to be a father for a second time.

My wife is closing in on the halfway point of this pregnancy, which means that I have not been right about a single thing for the past four-and-a-half months.

I am incredibly excited about adding to our family. Our first child has turned out fairly well, so far as I can tell. She’s two, and I figure there’s not much else we can teach her, so we might as well start fresh.

Ha! Just another little funny from Mr. Mike! And guess how funny Mike is on a regular basis? The answer? Not at all! Like when I used the phrase “a Volkswagen strapped to your belly.” Total number of laughs generated: zero. Total number of almost begging apologies: about 46 trillion.

So my wife is a little emotional these days. That’s expected. She’s a woman, and you know how chicks can be. Ha! Kidding again! You see, I can’t make many jokes around the house these days. Apparently, I’m not nearly as funny as I was about five months ago.

Plenty of people keep asking us if we’re going to find out what we’re having. I assure them it’s a human. Then they further specify that they mean boy or girl. And the answer is, yes, we are going to find out, most likely next week.

I know plenty of folks like to be surprised. And that is 100% your right to do that. And if you feel like you really need to be surprised with the gender of MY child, well, quite frankly, that’s a little creepy.

My wife and I are both in the school of thought that it will be a surprise at five months and it will be a surprise at birth. We found with our first child, and I am pretty sure I speak for both of us when I say we were still pleased with the product we were presented with, despite knowing ahead of time it was a girl.

And speaking of that little girl, man is she in for a surprise. Right now, she thinks it’s great that Mommy’s got a baby in her belly. She is always kissing and hugging Mommy’s belly, and saying, “Hi, baby!” Just wait until Baby reaches for one of her toys. Hugs and kisses are going to be replaced with being stowed in a dresser drawer.

Hopefully, though, our daughter will take on her role as big sister and we won’t have to deal with anything like that. Granted, everybody I talk to has told me horror stories about what their kids did when the second child came. “They go back to the bottle” or “They forget potty training” or “They start a cult and convert the other neighborhood toddlers.”

But fortunately, these are things that will pass. Besides, we have several more months to convince our daughter that the baby in Mommy’s belly, when it does come out to stay with us, needs to be treated very gently, not delivered to the neighbor’s house.

One thing that my wife is very excited about with this pregnancy is that the final months (or as I mistakenly referred to them “The Big Months”) will be over winter. With our first child, The Big Mont…er….the final months were in the summer. It was during that time that my wife became convinced we were living on the planet Mercury, and had no choice but to set our thermostat down to Neptune. (Nice planet work, huh?) I was blue for the better part of the last trimester. This time, I may again suffer the blues (ha!), but at least I can do it by opening the window, thus keeping me from getting a power bill comparable to Barry Bonds’ pharmacy bill.

The next few months should be very exciting to say the least. Adding a new member to the Gibbons clan will bring huge changes, I’m sure. I think we are more prepared for this child than our first. Granted, that’s because most first-time parents – myself included – know as much about parenting as they do about ancient Eskimo cultures. But you learn as you go, and eventually you turn around and realize you’re not so bad at it. Every day teaches you something new. For example, today I learned that Volkswagen jokes are not funny to pregnant women.