Wij zijn in blije verwachting or, put another way, we’re expecting a baby! Sarah is pregnant.
This is something we had been postponing for a while now, as both Sarah and I had been ready to have children for some time.
For one thing, I didn’t want Sarah to have to deal with American ante-natal medical care, which places too much emphasis on technology and not enough on nature and the woman’s body. The high Caesarian section and episiotomy rates alone are enough to scare one away from obstetrical care in the US. Add to that the lack of midwifery in hospitals and I lose all faith in the medical system here.
The situation is much better back in The Netherlands, where home births are the norm and midwifery is standard practice, so it seemed sensible to wait another year and reap the full benefits of the Dutch healthcare system.
Secondly, I didn’t want to have to deal with citizenship issues. If the child is born here, it will automatically be a US citizen and I will have to take steps to acquire the Dutch nationality for the child. What a hassle.
On the other hand, what if one or both of us turned out to have some kind of fertility problem? What if there was no problem to be found, but it just took us a year? Wouldn’t we be sorry if we waited, only to find out we were going to have to wait even longer?
The urge to have a baby was already very strong, so we reasoned we should just start trying and see what happened. It would probably take a while, in any case. Only if she got pregnant very quickly would we end up having the baby in the US, and what were the chances of that?
Well, we were wrong. Sarah got pregnant on the first attempt and the baby is due on 18th May 2005.