To any dads on the forum – has anyone else’s wife / partner turned into a complete moron when they were pregnant?

My wife is unbearable at the moment – can’t wait until the baby is out. Hoping slightly more normal service will resume then.

No, my wife was lovely and is an avid reader of this forum.

I think it’s referred to as baby-brain.

Mine just sleeps constantly at the moment. Not too much more mad than usual!

can’t wait until the baby is out. Hoping slightly more normal service will resume then.

Erm, good luck with that.

You have to appreciate that she has been taken over by another being and for the duration things will be very different. Also afterwards the new normal may be different….

Still anyway congratulations!

the good news is she won’t ever be the same woman again. You like cycling right?

😀 toasty

Yes mines a complete moron, never happy about anything..and no reasoning.

Hold on, thinking about it being pregnant isn’t a factor. 🙂

Thanks for all the quick replies. When I say normal service I was thinking about being less moody and obstructive.

Obviously the baby is going to change everything in a big way.

At the moment I wish she was asleep more!

No, my wife was lovely and is an avid reader of this forum.

What he means to say is that I was lovely during pregnancy, and continue to be lovely. ISN’T THAT RIGHT, DEAR?

In all seriousness, I got off pretty lightly – I didn’t suffer with the tiredness and sickness a lot of women do, worked until two weeks before my due date. I did learn a completely new meaning to SPD though, heh. 🙁

Congratulations, btw.

Hoping slightly more normal service will resume then.

Hahahahhaha, it’ll all just be sleep deprived as well!

It’s all good fun though 🙂

Weirdly, my Wife was probably more reasoned and ‘normal’ while pregnant.

Unfortunately that only lasted for 9 months….

No. Mine was very good and felt with the stress too. Top tip. Use the pregnancy to have as much sex as possible.

Good luck with that…………….

For me it took about 7 years.
We’re good friends now however.

I don’t have a pregnant partner but I can speak on their behalf having been pregnant many times.

It’s horrendous being taken over by hormones at the best of times but the monthly fun pales into insignificance compared to 9 months of hormones.

The first sign I get of being pregnant is an overwhelming urge to push my partner away from me – this results in me being quite awful and almost wanting completely out of the relationship.

I recognised this as a pattern after pregnancy no 3 – so it then became something I’d worry about if I ever got in that mindset.

After that passes I tend to get the tiredness – a horrible tiredness that you wake up and it never leaves until you andre asleep. The more kids you have the worse this gets as you are unable to take naps as easily.

Then the sickness kicks in again not what you need when you and trying to function normally, and it can be a struggle to be reasonable

The sickness passes and you get bigger and start to get the baby brain which can make work a nightmare of you have to retain a lot of information. I always get to the point I feel I need key purse and phone attached to me at all times – like small kids gloves,as I would always forget one.

Then you are at the delightful stage of huge where you can struggle to feel attractive, intelligent, desired or even just an individual.

Your belly becomes public property for anyone who fancies a quick pat/feel and you start to waddle.

Soon labour with all its pain comes along to save you from exploding

When you weigh it all up – it’s a good job we are awash with hormones that make it seem perfect sense to be going through it all for the end result – or it would never happen! If they make you a bit wappy in the process I would say it’s a minor adverse side effect 😉

Maybe run her a bath or make her a hot chocolate and count your blessings

Use the pregnancy to have as much sex as possible.

yeah, ^ that. Just tell her you’re going biking or something 😉

Emergency Edit:

Ouch, big yim – condolences for what little that’s worth. That is horrible news. Best wishes to you both.

(more great timing from scaredypants.com)

My darling wife was pretty good being as we were rebuilding a house whilst she was pregnant. Did loads of work on it on maternity leave including up the scaffold which I got told off for letting her do! You fry and stop a majorly hormonal woman doing anything at that point.

The best bit of baby brain was when she managed to drive in to a parked car, in a space with nothing else around it. Just drove straight at it and hit it! Other than that it was the complete inability to say the colour of anything correctly (blue things were green for some reason and no pattern to anything else).

Ten years on back to as near normal as she was before all the sleep deprivation and complete lack of time to do anything kicked off.

Best of luck.

My wife is unbearable at the moment – can’t wait until the baby is out. Hoping slightly more normal service will resume then.

you are joking, right?

My wife hasn’t even had any sickness at any point so I think she’s had a reasonable pregnancy. I get that it’s hard work and all that, but she does seem to have milked it! Maybe I’m not as patient / sympathetic as I thought…

Looking forward to the baby arriving now and just getting on with being a dad.

My wife got way more sleep after sproglet turned up than beforehand. It may only have been in four hour slots maximum, but she could sleep in more then one position, move around easily, not have to go to the loo every half hour…

I think pregnancy effect different women very differently, some have a much harder time than others. (Or it seems like that from the outside looking in) but at the end of the day every one has different things they find tough / easy / painful / annoying. And some people are just tougher than others! Take all those variables and it’s difficult to get a typical experience.

Oh boy, sounds like the OP’s first.

Wife’s like a moron? Welcome to your life in a few month’s time.

Sleep? What’s that?… 🙂

Yes it’s the first….always thought we’d have two children but I’m not so sure right now! The wife hasn’t spoken to me since about 8pm last night.

Despite telling me I’m getting fat (I had a shoulder op in September which made any kind of exercise hard for a while), I then get grief if I do any exercise because I’m not spending enough time with her. She also wanted a dog at the start of the year so I conceded and bought one. Apparently I spend too much time with the dog. Can’t win at the moment!

I’ve been pretty lucky, was expecting her to find it much harder. She has the odd moment of baby brain which has provided some comedy moments, awful heart burn, can’t sleep properly and snores like an pneumatic drill but no proper morning sickness etc. She does snap a fair bit but her hormones are running wild to it’s hardly surprising, at the end of hte day she’s taking one for hte team so I think you have to suck it up.

The one thing she’s found hard is the number of twunts (see this thread for examples 😆 ) who delight in scaremongering and saying how awful it’s going to be when the baby arrives. Really gets her down, and makes me pretty irritated. luckily we’ve had quite a few friends who have young children who have had really positive experiences and say the moaning is over the top. Everyone’s different though so will wait and see.

my wife had a physically easy pregnancy. No sickness to speak of and she looked great. Her emotions on the other hand were hit very hard. In her case she worried about everything. I wasn’t allowed in the loft in case something happened to me. She also behaved as if everything I did was going to harm our unborn bundle of joy. It sounds like your wife is perhaps feeling that she may be abandoned.

Adjustablewench mentioned being taken over by hormones. They really do take over and there is no negotiating with them. By you or by your wife. I wish you all the best and hope you enjoy being a dad, but have to go as a 4 month old human has been handed to me and he is very demanding.

Can’t win at the moment!

In that case, you might as well get told off for doing something you enjoy. Get out on the bike, before you turn into a contributor to the ‘can’t ride my bike because of the baby’ thread…

PS Congrats, OP. It’s epic. First 12 hours are amazing, then it’s boring and carp for 4 months, then it’s epic again.

Never disagree with a pregnant lady, you cannot win. Just imagine that someone has a gun to your head. Eventually you will be set free, but in the meantime, do whatever they tell you to do without question.

I have thought that about biking etc. I’m getting told off anyway so may as well have some fun!

Already getting grief for the car I’ve ordered as a company car. I was looking at estates as I actually quite like them aside from the practicality for family stuff. Wifey said estates are ugly – don’t get one. So I’ve ordered a Jag XE saloon – so excited about getting it. Now being told off for buying an impractical car!! I figure I’ll just get a roof box- maybe I can put the wife in it to keep her quiet on long journeys lol.

But really, I’m looking forward to the baby coming now. Been so much build up to it with antenatal classes etc.

Mostly extra sleep time needed in our household. More sleep, more food, all works out. Still having quite an active time 24weeks in running and riding, slower certainly, but it keeps us both sane.

I think we’ve only had two moments of total mental break down – luckily my wife is quite logical and it’s not been hard to point out she’s being irrational – then figure out why – then move on. The joys of two scientists in the same house 🙂

MrsMomo is 35 weeks pregnant and as yet no less rational than pre-pregnancy. A little more forgetful is all.

She isn’t keen on me being too far away from home just in case MiniMomo makes a break for freedom so has put a bit of a stop on me getting out on the MTB, but has encouraged me to spend more time on the roadie to make up for it.

Hmmmn. Hang tough fella.

Frankly, you’ll have to lump it.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that things ‘won’t go back to normal’ after the kid is born. She is going to be a different person forever.

How she will be, its hard to say, but certainly for the first year after she will be really tired, irritable, short with you in all likelihood. That’s the best case scenario.

You can probably stuff the mountain-biking. I was in your situation last summer and asked the crowd for advice – they said you’re riding is going to take a massive knock. I didn’t believe them at the time. They were right.

Best of luck with it. Having a kid itself is great it lots of ways, but is like being handcuffed to a bipolar person – one minutes hypermanic and happy, next depressed and upset.

Alex

Can’t win at the moment!

So don’t even try. Just smile and agree remembering that she’s not gone mad, she’s pregnant. My daughter was born on Monday and I’m very glad to have my wife back, all be it in new mum mode.

Oh, and ordering the jag with a baby and a dog was a daft idea so she’s got that one right.

That was really good insight, thanks for posting that Adjustablewench!

In fairness on the Jag front she actually said she liked the car until just after I’d ordered it. Given the dog is a small fluffy one and the baby is going to be small then I don’t see a huge issue. It’s a decent size 4 door saloon with a good size boot.

The wife was often irritable and snappy with me before pregnancy – now it’s just on steroids no matter what I do.

I’m not actually the kind of person who is off mountain biking all the time anyway. Maybe once a month at. Eat at this time of year and maybe once a fortnight in the summer, so I don’t foresee a problem with that. I’ve knocked hockey on the head for the current season too, so I can e around for the wife / the baby a lot.

Equally it’s not going to be healthy for either of us to be in top of each other / spend every waking hour with the baby so we do. We’d done time to do personal things. I’ve already said im happy to take the dog and the baby out on my own once they can be bottle fed so she can do her own thing sometimes. I don’t think I’m being too unreasonable.

My wife is unbearable at the moment – can’t wait until the baby is out. Hoping slightly more normal service will resume then.

probably already been said but

hahahahahahahahahahahahaha good luck with that

Can’t stand the ‘hormones’ argument as an excuse for crappy female behavior…and yet us blokes seem to let it slide, funnily enough it doesn’t seem to work both ways and if a man is aggressive, violent and wants to hump everything in sight due to testosterone we’re being unreasonable….you can’t have it both ways ladies….we were born with brains that can think and reason and will if you put your mind to it override ‘hormones’ so stop acting like idiots (men and women) and blaming ‘hormones’….pathetic.