It's Not Amazing, It's Genderiffic

I know something you don't know.

I know something you don't know.

I know something you don't know.

(!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

Seriously, I know something you don't know.

On Tuesday, August 16th, the gender of our twinners was revealed to me and to my wife. The ultrasound tech obviously knows, but she's been sworn to secrecy by the HIPAA monster. She did mention the genders to our OB/GYN out in the hallway while my wife and I were cooing over the ultrasound picture print-outs, but I guess HIPAA doesn't cover release of medical information from ultrasound techs to OB/GYNs.

Of course, if I find out one day that it does, I'm totally suing that bitch.

See, here's the thing about this whole gender issue: Mrs. Apron decided, when we both said that we wanted to find out what the genders of the twins are, that she wanted to keep the information secret from the rest of the world. Well, the rest of the world that gives a sparrow shit. Her reasoning is that she doesn't want us, and, consequently, the twins inundated with a bunch of gender-assigned gacky shit in traditional boy/girl/lemur colors.

And I can understand that, and I can respect that. And so I am understanding that and respecting that by going along with Mrs. Apron and not revealing the genders of our twins until such time as they see fit to enter the glaring spotlights of all those papparazzi camera flashbulbs as they exit my wife's vagina, or stomach, whichever way this thing plays out.

I've got to say, though, watching those two goofballs rolling around inside her womb on that ultrasound screen was pretty amazing. And I don't use that word lightly, or even often, because it has the propensity for being annoying.

"Oh, that Bee-Gee's coverband was UH-MAZE-ING!"

"Whoa, trans-gender Thai prostitute, watching a streaming video of you having sex with that semi-retarded donkey was UH-MAZE-ING!"

"This two-for-one deal on Chobani yogurt at Genuardi's is uh. maze. ing."

That Ron Popeil Flavor-Injector you're always threatening to violate me with?

(Amazing.)

But, really, I suppose any expectant father (of TWINS! GAAHH!!!) is permitted to use the "amazing" word when staring at grainy, blue-tinged representations of his children bumming around inside of their expectant mother.

What are they going to be like?

What are they going to talk like?

What are they going to be into?

What are they going to want on their birthday cakes?

What are they going to think of their Christian friends who go on about Santa Claus?

What are they going to think of... me?

(Not to be a fucking amazing narcissist or anything, but...)

(Oh, God...)

(Sorry.)

I'm already in love, and you know how I know that? I think about them all the time. Sure, sometimes it's more worrying and less thinking, but, one way or the other, they're always on my mind. Always. Constantly.

It's kind of perseverative.

Kind of Aspergian.

I'm sort of like that.

I'm listening to "Comfort" by Deb Talan right now, and that plays frequently enough on my computer to make me wonder if I have Aspergers. I'll bet Pandora does that to lots of people.

Stupid bitch and her fucking hot box.

I suppose that what I'm trying to say is that, yeah, I don't want this to become a Daddy Blog, and I'm pretty sure I said that they day I announced that we were knocked up, but I do want this to be a place to celebrate those two nutter-butters doing somersaults and tumblebumps inside of the woman I adore.

'Cuz, let's face it, this is all pretty fucking amazing.

Snoogle Up Close

Pregnancy, I'm told, does funny things to a woman's body.

"Things just aren't in the right place," my wife is fond of saying. And I suppose I know what she means, but only sympathetically, not empathetically. I can guess what she means, is what I'm saying. Like, there's two babies in there, pushing up against her bladder or whatever, taking up room, being weird and turny and tumbly and shit in there.

They're shitting. in. there.

Gross.

And her breasts are huge-- they're not where they're "supposed to be" either. They're everywhere, actually. Her belly isn't where it's "supposed to be".

Nothing is where it's supposed to be.

This makes things like reaching for a glass in the upper kitchen cupboard tricky for my 5'0" wife, because her belly is round and it goes up against the counter and it gets in her way because, you know, it's not where it's supposed to be. The counter or the belly-- more the belly, though.

Sleeping's kind of a biatch, too-- for my wife and, consequently, for me, too. It's a bit of a shit because, during this time of pregnancy, while the children are all ensconced in amniotic fluid and plasma and Jell-O or whatever it is, we're supposed to be getting all the sleep we're not going to have again for the next fifteen-or-so years.

And yet, at 21 weeks, we're not sleeping.

There was little sleeping in Ireland, because my poor wife is besotted by body parts that aren't where they're supposed to be. If Mrs. Apron could go back in time and star in a Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch, she'd be in the "Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things" because, in her life as a pregnant biddy, things are most definitely on top of other things.

And she can't sleep.

And, consequently, I can't sleep.

So, on the recommendation of several of our friends, we went to Babies R' Us on Friday afternoon to purchase a maternity sleeping implement, called "The Snoogle".

It looks like an enormous tapeworm. Or a big, white, turd.


Don't ya think?

It set us back $64.99 (plus tax) but, hey, I reasoned with myself after spending approximately $3,000 in Ireland, if it helps Mrs. Apron sleep, it's going to more than pay for it on its first night.

And it sure did.

Mrs. Apron passed a snoozeful night's rest on Friday night. I, however, had a terrible and fitful night's sleep. See, I don't know if you can tell from the picture, but this Snoogle is gigantic-- and we have a full-size bed. And we have two dogs-- fortunately one is elderly and arthritic and can't get up on the bed anymore. But the smaller, agile one sure can, and does. So, there's six of us up on this bed:

Mrs. Apron
Molly, the dog
Mr. Apron
Twin A
Twin B
The Snoogle

So, while Mrs. Apron was wrapped around the Snoogle, Molly was pressed up against me, and I was jammed up against the Snoogle. I woke up constantly, which was problematic for me, because I had to work on Saturday, and the alarm was set for 5:15am.

I didn't make it that long.

I woke up at 3:31am, with a bladder so full I'm sure my eyeballs were yellow, so I peed. Then I got back into bed and, eventually, I fell asleep.

And, apparently, it was at some point between that moment and 4:25am when I had sex with my wife's Snoogle.

I wish I could deny it, but there was copious, um, DNA evidence to suggest that's what happened.

I was dreaming about this Jamaican girl, who wasn't really Jamaican, but was a wizard, and, if I had sex with her, she would lose all of her magical powers and become a regular Jamaican, non-Jamaican human or whatever-- and, evidently, I got it into my head that freeing this woman of her wizarding powers was a good thing, so I balled her.

More accurately, I balled my wife's Snoogle.

I never thought of myself as the kind of guy who'd be unfaithful, the idea of cheating on the woman I love more than anyone else in the world is unfathomable to me-- the callous disrespect and disregard for her emotions and for the vows we made to each other on October 22nd, 2006 would be unthinkable to me. And yet, on Friday night, I cheated on her. In our own bed. While she was lying there, in a blissful, heretofore fleeting sleep, only a snoogle away.

Herbie. Rides. Again. (!!!!!!!!)

The sequel's rarely better than the original. That said, everybody likes a triumphal return.

"Herbie Rides Again" isn't a very good movie, in spite of some admirable performances by Ken Berry and dame of stage and film, Helen Hayes. The sparkle and charm of the original movie, though, is gone. The A-list celebs are nowhere to be seen: Dean Jones, Michelle Lee, Buddy Hackett, and David Tomlinson all said, "Thanks, but no thanks," to once again co-starring beside a 1963 Volkswagen Beetle. As sequels go, it's about average, but, much unlike the original, it's nothing special. But there's something about the title that indicates that the film, or at least its namesake, aspires to greatness. There is something valorous that we all like about an underdog getting up to fight again, to shake off dirt and failure that threatens to be permanent, but is really momentary to emerge hopefully victorious.

In 2009, Mrs. Apron and I miscarried, and we were heartbroken. We had told people we were pregnant, and we had told them far too early, and then we had to untell. Fortunately, with most people we knew, we only had to untell them with our eyes. One look at us and they knew. My director of "Pirates of Penzance" knew. We were staging "I am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General" and, when the piano tinkled, I doddered and fuddled appropriately, but, during the downtime, while choreography was hammered out, or choral notes were finessed with the assistant music director, the director, a close friend of mine, watched me. During a break, she took me out in the hall and held me for what seemed like a very long time.

"I love you," Julie said as she ran her hands along my back and I stifled sobs in the hallway. Years ago, she'd lost her son-- all but 19-- in a car accident while he was on his way back to college after winter break. She knew all about loss. It doesn't go away.

"Sometimes," she said to me, "I get in the shower, run the water at full blast, and I just scream and scream and scream."

I never screamed about our miscarriage, not in the shower or anywhere else. That's not to say that I didn't grieve-- it's just not how I grieve, I suppose. I wanted to scream, and rage, and throw things, but I didn't. What I think I might have done, looking back on it, was displace a fair amount of my grief and I probably morphed a significant portion of it into worry and despondency for my wife. In that respect, one might say I didn't exactly "own" the loss, and one could definitely make that argument. And I wouldn't argue.

I think one of my greatest fears is dying before I get a chance to do the things in life at which I will excel. Fortunately, I've acted in a fair number of plays, musicals, and operettas, and I've been appreciated by audience members. I've written a lot that has been seen, and I've written a lot that has never been seen. I've been an efficient friend and confidant to probably enough people, and I've been a loving son and brother. Not gonna lie: as a husband, I think I'm pretty much the shit. The only thing, really, that I haven't had the chance to do that I think I'd be good at is being a father, and so, when the miscarriage happened to us, I think I focused on the fact that I might not get the chance to, well, do that.

Well, this is my sequel.

We're twelve weeks pregnant. And, yeah-- there's two of them in there.


And that's scary, and that's amazing, and that's actually maybe a little dramatic for my taste, which is an admittedly funny thing for a former theatre major to say, but it's overwhelming, almost like I'm pushing the shock-factor a little too hard.

But it's true. There's two.

1

and

2

Come to me, my little love bugs. Let's dim the lights and start the sequel.

The Solitaire Effect

The innocuous-looking GENT-L-KARE plastic specimen container's volume is 4 ounces.

The quantity of the average human's ejaculate is between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. By nautical comparison, the Southern Right Whale unleashes approximately five gallons of seminal fluid in a single mating session. Fortunately, whales do not often need to ejaculate into little plastic specimen containers.

Unfortunately, tomorrow, I do.

Yes, kids, it's another infertility post. If that's not your thing, there's lots of good porn out there that I can't masturbate to until tomorrow morning at approximately 6:30am.

Then, I will race the semen over to the lab (it has to get there in one hour-- I'll be driving like those crazy Gift of Life people with their coolers full of kidneys) and try to make it to work on-time. I've already asked for permission from my supervisor to come in half-an-hour later and work a half-an-hour later.

"Why?" she asked.

"Um, I have an... appointment?" She furrowed her brow at me.

"That early in the morning?"

I hesitated.

"Yes?"

She regarded me quizically. She probably thinks I'm on drugs. Unfortunately, I'm not.

Of course, because I am not medicated, I am obsessing about the details of this little... process.

"I'm scared I'm going to get it everywhere," I complained to my wife, who has already endured several invasive procedures/tests, and was probably the wrong person to complain to.

"Look, you pussy," she said to me, "just as you're about to jit, tilt downward and put the cup right over your dick."

I stared at her.

"Excuse me, are you attempting to give me points on masturbation? That's like Rick Moranis trying to give Kobe Bryant lessons on basketball, or sex with hot chicks."

"Right, sorry," Mrs. Apron said, "I forgot that you invented jerking off."

"No," I replied, "I just minored in it in college."

The funny thing is, because you have to eliminate the sample (whoa-- I sound like Hitler) within an hour of getting it to the lab, I'll be doing this while normal people are getting dressed and ready for work. Maybe they'll be sitting down to a bowl of Cracklin' Oat Bran or Raisin Balls or something, and I'll be cruising the net for porn. Sure, I could involve Mrs. Apron in this endeavor (she volunteered to "help") but, for some reason, I'm opting to do this the old fashioned way. Call it the Solitaire Effect, but this is something I'd prefer to do alone.

Don't ask me why. Anybody who'd give up real, live play from one's cute-n-pert life-mate in favor of masturbation clearly needs psych meds.

I know me, though-- I'm going to be way too nervous and freaked to be any fun, way too disorganized and trembling to involve another person in this madness. I'm scared I'm going to miss the container entirely, forget to close the window shade in the office, spooge on my trousers, not be able to get it up (um, that one's probably irrational) and that I'll crash the car on the way to the lab, that I'll get stopped by the police for speeding and they'll test the contents of the container on the passenger seat next to me thinking it's some kind of new fangled liquid crack.

Of course, the thing I'm most afraid of is that they'll find my semen are all broken, or that they wear funny little moustaches, or that they are deformed, or that they only speak Korean.

My silly little semen. Never called upon to do anything particularly consequential in life except for reduce that nagging, dull heaviness in my ballsack, they will now face the most important splonk of their life: they will be examined, put through the ringer, tested and prodded, and will they measure up?

I don't know. And I'm scared.

But only after placing them inside the sterile GENT-L-KARE container, UPN#00605863492803, will we know the gloopy, gloppity, slippery, slimey truth.

Keep your testes crossed for me, kids.

Soon, I Will Jit in a Cup

And, later that day, I will blog about it.

Because that's the kind of society in which we live, and that's the kind of guy I am. And, fortunately, that's the kind of wife I have-- who will tolerate my exposing explicit and painful components of our lives to you, all-too-perfect strangers-- and not divorce me and/or pelt me in the junk with a tennis ball.

Such an act of junkular violence, obviously, would rather run counter to our procreation mission.

When we miscarried in the autumn of 2009, I innocently thought that we could wait the prescribed three months and just, you know, make it happen again. Turns out that, unlike ordering the "Rooty-Tooty Fresh & Fruity Breakfast," is easier said than done.

On Friday, Mrs. Apron went to a fertility clinic. They have prescribed her hormone medication. They're going to inject dye into her girl parts and take a look to see what shape everything's in. They're going to test her blood.

And, of course, they're going to test my spunk.

I'm not thrilled about this prospect, but I'm trying to be positive and mature about it. As you might imagine, neither comes naturally to me.

Heh-heh. "Comes."

See?

The good thing about the semen analysis is that I get to masturbate into a cup in the comfort of my own home on a Wednesday morning, and then drive it over to this clinic on my way to work. I don't have to do it in the exam room like some creepy bastard, and I don't have to let the scrubs-adorned pony-tailed chippy behind the counter know any of my peculiar pornographic proclivities. Which is nice.

What's going to be weird is that, on Wednesday mornings, my wife is at home. Like, how is this going to work-- logisitically speaking? I'll wake up, get dressed, walk the dogs before they explode all over the place, and then, like... what? Will I be here upstairs jackin' away while she's downstairs eating her "Smart Start"?

I mean, weirdsies.

There was a funny thing in the packet that says, "Occasionally, due to religious reasons, the sample may have to be obtained during intercourse. A special condom designed for this purpose will be provided." My wife read it to me and we laughed. Good ol' Catholics: saving the day with a dose of ice-breaking "Every Sperm is Sacred" comedy once again.

There is, of course, nothing funny-- about Catholics or infertility-- going on here, but I don't know what else to do at this point but be an idiot. Really, it's kind of my default. And thank God Mrs. Apron encouraged me, or at least allowed me, to blog about this.

"You realize that, if I do that," I said to her on Friday afternoon after her appointment, "that I'm going to do it my way, right?"

She smiled at me.

"I wouldn't expect anything less."

"Ha!" I laughed, "or more."

"Exactly."

I want a baby-- a son or a daughter, but not both at once, please-- and I will jit in a cup if it means that we'll be one step closer to the life we've wanted together for a very long time. I'm not in a rush or a hurry, but I am getting a little impatient to get started with this next part of our lives. It's not a contest, or a race, or a anything, really. And it's certainly not a joke. But, sometimes, it's really all I've got.

Well, that, and a hell of a lot of love.

Hi, I'm White Trash

My telephone rang at 11:04pm last night, and, like any neurotic, Jewish worry-wart, it scared the shit out of me. Someone's dead. Or at least bleeding profusely. I had left my telephone upstairs on the bed and my wife and I were watching "Law & Order" downstairs because, now that we have cable, there isn't a moment when "Law & Order" isn't on. And, even though Elliot was shouting at tear-stained Hillary Duff about pictures of her grabbing a man's crotch on her "Face-Space," I distinctly heard the theme from Terry Gilliam's "The Adventures of Baron von Munchausen" blaring out from upstairs.

Tell me there's someone else in the universe with that ringtone.

I raced up the stairs to retrieve my phone and saw that I had just missed a call from my oldest sister. My oldest sister is a world-renowned hypochondriac. Having a younger brother who is an emergency medical technician only makes this condition worse. Every time I visit my parent's house for a quiet family dinner, she is there, in her assigned seat, waiting patiently to accost me with some ridiculous malady that I can diagnose and/or treat. When I enter the dining room, she promptly sticks a rash-covered limb or a misshapen mole or a prominent zit in my face. Most recently, I was greeted by her wide-open mouth displaying a uvula covered in dark blood.

So, naturally, I feared the worst.

Fortunately, this time, she wasn't lying on her kitchen floor in a pool of phlegm or urine. She was calling to gossip about our other sister.

"Did you know she was getting married?" my oldest sister blurted out on the phone.

Actually, I did know, but I had only found out that morning. It will be a civil ceremony, in judge's chambers, sometime during the week of August 10th-14th-- whenever the judge gets a break from mediating traffic court, I guess.

She's marrying the guy she's been seeing for about a year-and-a-half. They guy who impregnated her. The guy who already has a kid from a one-night stand in college. The guy with tattoos all over the parts of his body that the outside world can see. The guy who's a post-man and also a part-time employee at the pizza joint where he's worked since before he could drive a car. The guy who has a baby mama.

My sister is eight-and-a-half months pregnant with this guy's kid. The kid who will be my nephew. When she told me of the impending marriage to the unenthusiastic lothario, who apparently proposed to her while they were sitting on the couch watching TV, my response was,

"Oh. Okay."

I wanted "congratulations" to slip from my lips, but I didn't feel very congratulatory. Besides, the information was presented to me in a very ambivalent way, so that's kind of how I responded. Tone for tone.

My oldest sister, unfortunately, had found out about the impending nuptials from our 84-year-old great-aunt, who lives in Pompano Beach where she takes care of her 92-year-old husband who is suffering from Alzheimers and, consequently, tries to pick up married women in their twenties at the local country club and routinely walks around his condo in nothing but a t-shirt that doesn't cover his dong, as my parents observed when they spent a week there two months ago.

"Is your mom happy about the wedding?" my great-aunt asked my sister.

"Um, what wedding?" my sister asked.

"Oh."

Yeah. It's that kind of a thing.

In conversing with my pregnant middle sister, she also told me to "save the date" for a "beer and hoagie, hey, we got married and had a kid party." She also warned me not to make her beau's family feel "uncomfortable" by wearing a tie to said event. I wanted to ask her if I should not shower for a week or tug on my crotch incessantly at the party in order to make them feel more at home, but I didn't. I've done a lot of growing up since I was fifteen, and I know now that the cheap thrill of engaging my sister with smartass comments is short-lived and only causes familial turmoil.

"Oh. Okay," I said as I put the event into my Treo's calendar.

I don't know how this all happened to our family. Children out of wedlock, baby mama drama, white trash inlaws... it just doesn't seem real to me. But it is. The bulge underneath my sister's shirt tells me that it's very, very real. I know my mother wants my sister to be married before this baby's born, to legitimize the whole thing, but is what's happening here worth legitimizing? What if she doesn't love him?

"Well," my great-aunt opined to my eldest sister over the phone, "after the baby's born, they can just get divorced!"

Yeah. Good idea.

Get Your Goop On: It's Ultrasound Tuesday!

So, my sister and I both had ultrasounds today, for very different reasons.

You might have noticed that I really don't talk about my family much on here (except for my father) and the reason for that is very simple: if they ever found out that the blogosphere was privy to their intimate details, I would promptly and forevermore be missing teeth, testicles, and family dinners.

Privacy is their thing, not so much mine, and so I normally try to respect that. Today, though, I'm not. Fortunately, I don't really think I have to worry so much: my mother only uses a computer at work, my father still uses dial-up, my 31-year-old sister just got an email address six months ago, and my 41-year-old sister strictly uses her computer to research product safety reports, bizarre diets and gossip about washed up celebrities from her youth (e.g., this Saturday I got a very long text message from her about Davey Jones' most recent appearance on an episode of "Spongebob Squarepants.")

My ultrasound was a component of my stress echocardiogram so, obviously, it was an ultrasound of my heart. I was lying down on the exam table naked from the waist up, with one arm propping my head up. It might have looked seductive if I weren't in a doctor's office, if I didn't weigh 136 pounds, and if I didn't have 12 EKG leads and wires stuck all over me.

The ultrasound technician gooped up her doohickey a substance that I can only describe as blue jello cut with seminal fluid-- sorry. She then proceeded to jam and move the goop-slathered device all across my chest. Now, as I mentioned, I'm kind of svelte, and this thin-lipped bitch was shoving her device straight into my sternum and ribs-- not pleasant. So, obviously, as a natural reaction, I was tensing up.

"Can you just relax, please?" she said sharply, "It's really difficult for me to see your heart when you're not relaxed."

Oh, I'm sorry, I wanted to say-- perhaps I would be more relaxed if you shoved a rusty corkscrew and a mango-splitter up my asshole while you're doing that. That's really the only thing missing to put me right at ease.

Crotch.

(Sidebar: I think it's pretty funny that there are still people out there who believe that only caring, empathic people become nurses. The healthcare industry attracts its fair amount of sadists, too. Don't believe me? Become an EMT.)

I don't know how many of you have ever had the opportunity to obtain a cardiac ultrasound, but watching your heart do its thing on that flatscreen GE monitor is really..... um..... disfuckingusting.

Seriously.

My first instinct was to go, "Oh, man-- that's cool" but, after about four seconds of watching it, I was immediately sickened. There's tunnels and caverns and there's shit floating around and goop and blackness and it looks like underwater vegetation or something. I don't know-- maybe you'd be into it. I wasn't.

After the ultrasound, they make you run on the treadmill at varying speeds and incline levels until you're ready to pass out. One of the inclines was so steep I could barely hold onto the fucking grab handles. The fact that they're taking your blood pressure every four minutes doesn't help either. I got heaps of praise and congratulations from the two nurses running the treadmill exercise, for my endurance and for my cardiac performance. Of course, like anyone who's ever been praised after any performance event (yes, even sex) you always wonder if they say that to everyone.

When I left the testing site, I turned my phone back on and there was a voicemail from my 31-year-old sister informing me that the object inside her was officially determined today to be a boy. She was getting gooped on and deviceified at the same time I was, at another facility-- and I'm sure the ultrasound bitch wasn't pressing as hard on her belly as mine was on my sternum.

I called her back immediately and congratulated her.

"Yeah, apparently, from the ultrasound picture we got, he's a pretty well-endowed boy."

Her boyfriend looked at the picture quizically and asked,

"Is that his foot?"

"No, you ass-- that's his dick!" she said.

And it was. There was even an arrow pointing to it that said "Boy."

Apparently, when my sister called my mom to give her the news, my mother reported that there is a family legend concerning the *ahem* proportions of males on her side of the family.

"Wow." I said. "Mommy's a real pig sometimes."

"Yeah," my sister replied. "My kid's definitely gonna be in pornos if it keeps growing at this rate."

"Either that or he'll be doing cock-pushups on exercise videos," I said.

I guess we're all pigs. Healthy pigs, but pigs just the same.