{"id":172,"date":"2016-08-17T12:59:17","date_gmt":"2016-08-17T03:29:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beerradar.com.au\/?p=172"},"modified":"2016-08-17T13:01:16","modified_gmt":"2016-08-17T03:31:16","slug":"beer-bubs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beerradar.com.au\/?p=172","title":{"rendered":"Beer & Bubs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Beer & Bubs<\/p>\n

By John Kr\u00fcger<\/p>\n

(First published by SA Kids Magazine in 2010)<\/p>\n

I was originally thinking that I had a good grasp of the whole childbirth concept. I get my wife pregnant, and a certain amount of time later, the exact amount I wasn\u2019t too sure, she has a brief stay in the hospital and calls me to inform me the sex of our new child and when she needs a lift home. It wasn\u2019t until a cousin in law started asking questions that I realised that I was in deep trouble; \u201cWhen\u2019s she due?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cErr July\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cJuly when?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI dunno\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh\u2026 Which hospital is she having the baby in?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cUmm, I dunno. I guess I\u2019d better find out before I have to drop her off.\u201d<\/p>\n

My wife Monique is a very organised person, which I\u2019ve found to be invaluable as well as intriguing. I\u2019m extremely disorganised so I always think we compliment each other remarkably well. Monique has done weeks worth of research, reading articles on the internet and a bucket load of pamphlets she seems to have acquired from the health department. After realising that my knowledge of gestation and childbirth was pretty well equal to that of a primary school child, I decided that brushing up on the basics would be a pretty good idea before the big day.<\/p>\n

Luckily, my managing editor phoned me and asked if I\u2019d be interested in going to a class held in a pub, designed specifically for men called \u201cBeer and Bubs\u201d. To be honest, I probably said yes after the word \u201cbeer\u201d. It could have been \u201cBeer and payroll tax\u201d and I still would have put my hand up. This was the perfect chance to slake my insatiable thirst for Coopers beer and fill-in what would end up being chasms, rather than gaps in my knowledge.<\/p>\n

I arrived at a beautiful back street pub about half an hour early and decided to get a beer or two in before the session started. Before long, there was a small group of young men all wandering aimlessly about like stunned mullets, each with a beer in hand. We were introduced briefly and were seated, taking turns to say how far pregnant our partners were and where we were having the baby. It was then that everyone realised that I had completely no idea. A young Turkish lecturer to my left who\u2019d only moved to Adelaide a few weeks before, had a better grasp of the array of hospitals in our vicinity. The younger looking man to my right had seemed to have already done every natal course known to man, and it did make me wonder what he was doing there in the first place. Over the next few hours we ate schnitzels and watched on as the two women in front of us tag teamed through the evening with a massive amount of information. Sometimes hinting that epidurals and pethidine weren\u2019t their favourite options, and leaning towards more natural alternatives. The main speaker Helen had informed us that she\u2019d already popped out 7 children, so as far as I was concerned, whatever she said had to be pretty solid information. The night definitely wasn\u2019t leaning too far towards \u201chippy radicals\u201d as a friend of mine had pre warned me about. My new Turkish friend and I slowly worked our ways through 2 jugs of beer while franticly scribbling notes. The amount of choices we would have to make before even entering a maternity ward were beginning to be overwhelming. I kept thinking \u201cThank God Monique probably knows about all of this stuff already.\u201d<\/p>\n

As I have a horrible disposition of turning green and verging on vomiting in almost any hospital environment, I hadn\u2019t even decided whether I\u2019d even attend the birth of our first child. Monique seemed to be OK with either option, and commented that there was a favourite pub of mine only 5 minutes walk from the hospital. I asked the group of men before me if they\u2019d all be at the birth and was met with a stone cold silence before one replied \u201cIs it even an option?\u201d I guess they\u2019d already decided or been informed that they wouldn\u2019t be reading a book and having a few quiet ones while they waited for the call.<\/p>\n

Nearing the end of the session, a recently new dad of 6 weeks stood up to give a rather well organised power-point presentation. He used that many sporting references as to his wife\u2019s performance during birth that I still wonder if he dragged her up onto a podium to present a medal or yellow jersey before the first feed.<\/p>\n

Topping the night off was a video on the big screen of an actual birth. The first glimpses of a naked woman subconsciously got our attention, and I\u2019m sure what followed will be painfully etched in our minds no matter how many beers preceded. The amount we learned was gargantuan and directly proportionate to the panic being kept at bay in the backs of our minds. It was amazing, scary and new, and we realised that this was only a glimpse of what was to come.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d still recommend Beer and Bubs, apart from a brain crushing deluge of information, meeting other fathers-to-be made us all realise that we\u2019re not the only ones dealing with this amazing imminent arrival, but deep down, we\u2019re all shitting ourselves to the same degree.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Beer
Beer & Bubs in SA Kids magazine. Illustration by Simon Kneebone<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Beer & Bubs By John Kr\u00fcger (First published by SA Kids Magazine in 2010) I was originally thinking that I had a good grasp of the whole childbirth concept. I get my wife pregnant, and a certain amount of time later, the exact amount I wasn\u2019t too sure, she has a brief stay in the … Continue reading Beer & Bubs<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,11,19,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beer","category-beer-retail","category-parenthood","category-south-australia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerradar.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerradar.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerradar.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerradar.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerradar.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=172"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerradar.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":176,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerradar.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions\/176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerradar.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerradar.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerradar.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}