Pregnancy - the female version of a pissing contest

Okay so weird title to a blog I suppose but let me elaborate on that thought and it will become clear what it is I mean. As a guy, watching your wife/girlfriend go to countless showers is an interesting process. The concept still boggles my mind but I understand that much like a wedding shower they are meant to give the couple/baby a little jump start in their new life.

Great!

However, here is where it gets funny from the husbands perspective - or at least my perspective. Pregnancy is the female version of a pissing contest - no two ways about it. They can deny it until the day they die but it is 100% true... Allow me to explain. As guys, we do this in a variety of ways... Do these sound familiar??

"Got here in 4 hrs 5 minutes and didn't stop at all, shaved 20 minutes off the trip from last year!! Made great time!!!"
or
"Yeah, I musta drank like 40 beers that night. Took home this model and her girlfriend and we yadda yadda yadda..."
or
"Ya shoulda seen it, me against like 10 guys in a fight and I pounded them all... then partied the rest of the night"

You know, the usual "d!ck swinging" that occurs when a group of us guys are together and our friends Jack Daniel's, Jose Cuervo or Anheuser-Busch are being passed around. Generally harmless, always funny and always to be taken with a grain of salt (and lemon and tequila as the case may be..).

Women - forever more cerebral then men - use the "shower" format for their own version of this contest. Showers, or as I later learned any opportunity at all, are when the ladies get to bludgeon the mom-to-be with their tales of the tape, so to speak. To the untrained eye and ear of a guy it could sound like the normal, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, "hen house cluck fest" talk that occurs when women get together in large groups. But, to the trained ear, the normal random chatter is filtered into an onslaught of "anything you can do I can do better".

"48 hours of labour and he came out sideways with shoulder pads on"
"Well, my little one took 4 days to be delivered and was breach, back labour and had a barb wire umbilical cord - 30 lbs 14 oz 32 inches long"
***Thought size didn't matter ladies***
"Please, mine was a week long delivery and then after he was born, in the middle of the night, jumped out of his bassinet and climbed back in!!"

The list gets longer each time. The baby gets heavier & longer and labour time goes from hours to months, and so on. Sounds a lot like when we go fishing ladies, scary to think you're not that different from us eh?? Now having said all of that, some women deserve the opportunity to flex their "uterine muscles". "Ky", as my only example, has every right to brag, in my opinion. A few days prior to giving birth to Brooklyn we went to the hospital thinking it was go time. Turns out - Kidney stones. Nice... Few days later she gave birth and unfortunately had to have some minor surgery to allow Brooklyn to enter this world.

**Sidebar: this is where the whole "extra stitch" joke comes into play - slip the doc a 50, it'll work.... Joking, don't do that...**

Several days after Brooklyn was born, "Ky", while still healing, was back in the hospital with more Kidney stones. Did I mention her labour was 12 hours and most of that was pushing... These are non-embellished stats so I give my wife full props for being tough as friggin' nails. I'd have passed out on push number one I think... So to recap - kidney stones, labour, kidney stones. I believe the term "bring it" comes to mind..

So all I can say is, listen in once in a while fellas, you may hear some interesting and funny "stories" that resemble our version of "the one that got away"....

Cheers.