As most of you know, my wife and I have been expecting our third child any day now. By our calculations, she’s about 12 days overdue.
Being 12 days overdue would alarm a lot of doctors. But we’re not working with a doctor. As with our first two children, we’re planning a home birth supported by a midwife.
Now my wife and I aren’t granola crunching, tree hugging hippie-types – though she had that stretch in her life before we met. But we do tend to live as natural of a life as we can. We eat almost entirely organic foods and free-range meats. We try to stay away from harmful chemicals, not only in foods, but in the other products that touch our lives as well.
We think of ourselves as conscious parent who create structure and set boundaries for our kids, while remembering that their consciousness is important as well. We had planned to breastfeed all our kids until the age of 2 (which is quite normal) but had stop with both our kids because we got pregnant with the next.
So when it comes to pregnancy and birth, we trust the natural gestation and labor process. We welcome modern medicine where it’s needed, but don’t lean on it like a crutch. If we need medical care, we’ll take it. And luckily, with our first two kids, we’ve not.
One thing we haven’t done with any of our pregnancies is get an ultrasound. Ultrasound can tell you many things – from the health to the sex of the growing baby. And it often can tell us with great accuracy what week of the pregnancy we’re in (maybe you can guess what comes next).
Usually, the duration of pregnancy is based on the number of weeks from the woman’s last period (sorry guys). From that we figure that within 14 days of the last period is when that last ovulation took place and likely when we got pregnant.
So considering that we’re a couple of weeks ‘late’ my wife and I sat down with the calendar she keeps of her cycle and decided to look at what could be going on. Without all the intimate detail, it appears we’ve made a mistake in the timing of when we got pregnant.
Now this might sound odd, but it’s less rare that you might think. Even with all the technology of modern medicine doctors frequently get this wrong. One other huge variable is breastfeeding – which throws the woman’s cycle all over the place. While a woman is breastfeeding, she can have cycles of varying lengths and even skip multiple months.
So what does this all mean?
Well, my wife was breastfeeding when we got pregnant. That means she could have easily ovulated later than 14 days. And with other, rather intimate, signs that happened shortly after – and a few weeks later than when we thought we got pregnant – it clearly appears that we miscalculated the date we got pregnant. Which means…
We miscalculated the date we’re due.
Oops. Once we sat down with all the information we had – including what science knows about getting pregnant and gestation – everything fell into place. Now some of the signs we were experiencing during the past few months make sense – as they didn’t before. And some of the physical signs make sense as well – like how engage the baby is to the birth canal.
So it appears our actual due date is during the first week of November, rather than the second week of October – as we thought.
This means, I’m getting back to work until she goes into labor. It also means that I’ll be taking my paternity leave a little later than I thought. So even though Wendy announced that I was officially on paternity leave, I’m actually not. Not her fault. Not really even our fault. Just the way nature has it set up. We just didn’t read the signs correctly.
So you should see me writing a bit more over the next week or so…and then I’ll take my leave.
I’ve tried pretty hard not to be too graphic or give too many personal details about the process. If I’ve gone a little overboard in my descriptions, I’m sorry. And, this is a topic we know a ton about…so I’m happy to share anything I can about this amazing process.
As always, life is an adventure.


I can’t tell you how many calls and emails I get from small business owners who have had a bad experience with their web designer or their marketing coach. It seems so common. Maybe 1 in 3 of the people who contact me do so because they’ve not gotten what they’ve needed from the person they’re working with.
Boy do Liz and I have an interesting conversation going on about relationships.
A short time ago I wrote a post that I titled, 





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