Advice for fathers-to-be: CALM THE F$%# DOWN, MAN!
Men do all sorts of weird things in this situation. They panic, call 911, run away, you name it. My wife knows a woman whose husband immediately ran to get a bag of frozen peas from the freezer, because he remembered something about frozen peas from pregnancy class – all while neglecting his pregnant wife who was trying to get down the stairs during repeated contractions.
True fact: almost NO babies are born in taxi cabs, buses and malls. Check the local birth announcements and see. With a few rare exceptions, babies are pretty slow to make that short journey down that happy highway and out of the womb.
July Voting Incentive NOW UP!!!
It’s July, and that means Puck’s pulling out ALL the stops by giving you a voting incentive that has everything you ever wanted! And when we say everything, we mean EVERYTHING!
CLICK HERE TO VOTE FOR PUCK!!!
I don’t think that Colin and Puck have the money to pay upfront in cash to have their baby circumcised if it’s a boy.
I’m not sure they have the money to pay for a donut at Timmys…
Everyone has money for a donut at Timmy’s. Or everyone can pretend for as long as it takes to make the purchase. That’s the beauty of Timmy’s.
Maybe they can circumcise the donut.
I’m not going to question the logistics of this in a forum like this. But I want to.
Yeah, let’s say no on that front.
Where’s the other half of each baby born, then?
Seems rather gruesome!
The other half is born in the hospital. The two are then fused to form the Sword of Power.
+1 for he man reference.
What can I say? I have a thing for furry loincloths.
Do I sense inspiration for a voting incentive?
(assuming of course this hasn’t already been done in the years since this comic posted; I’m still catching up)
I think a He-Man voting incentive would be only for an audience of me and me alone. 96% of my readership wouldn’t even know who He-Man was if it weren’t for Robot Chicken.
By the power of Greyskull! I HAVE THE POWER!
I was born on 4-4-1980. I grew up on He-Man. Between Xmas and birthdays I had all the toys and vehicles. That and Voltron. GI Joe, he was a real American hero, so you Canadians wouldn’t know about that.
Hey, we loved G.I. Joe too. America is for EVERYONE. But you’re pretty close to my age, meaning you’ll likely get all of my ancient cultural jokes.
“With a few rare exceptions, babies are pretty slow to make that short journey down that happy highway and out of the womb.”
Especially a first pregnancy.
Yep. My wife’s first pregnancy was about eight hours from water breaking to birth, and that felt agonizingly long and slow to me, but then I’ve heard tales from co-workers who were in labour for twenty-two hours or something crazy like that, and I realized that the first one was actually relatively fast.
…73 hours without an epidural. Thanks Mom.
73 hours? You’re a horrible, horrible baby.
From what I hear, I was a time consuming pain in the ass, while my sister was done really, really quickly. Not too sure why.
It follows no logical pattern.
Mine took about four house, two months too early. I came out looking like I’d been in a car wreck, and everyone in the family was too afraid to touch me, except for my grandmothers.
Sounds … stressful for those who were not you.
I am having flashbacks to my wife’s pregnancy.
I’m guessing that’s a bad thing.
So the fiction police will break down your door if you don’t have a pregnant woman’s water break before the contractions start but they’re fine with the reality of spending hours or even days at a hospital waiting for the baby to actually be born? That seems arbitrary.
And who was it that wanted the second half of the voting incentive? I get the first half but the rest doesn’t work the same way without turning into an internet gross out video.
Fiction police are arbitrary, fickle law enforcers. And I felt the two halves of the voting incentive were yin and yang: you know, something for the ladies, something for the guys. And combined, very gross!
The longer the labor lasts, the greater the humor potential, therefore a short labor and quick birth would be more likely to draw the ire of the fiction police.
My brother freaked out as much as Collin is when his first kid was born. He had been living with my dad at the time, and his then girlfriend’s water broke, and my brother was running around like that episode of Perfect Strangers where Larry and Balki’s kids were about to pop. You know, that “Hello doctor, baby is coming!” scene.
And the bad thing was that the water broke at midnight, and my nephew was born about 12-14 hours later. And the story my dad told me about the first day the kid was home? Hilarious, but not appropriate in a public place.
Yeah, that’s another thing that totally marks this whole Puck labour thing as fiction: the fact that her water broke NOT AROUND MIDNIGHT. Almost all labours seem to start at a time planned to maximize sleep loss.
The funny thing was that my dad was getting ready for work at the time (he was a bread driver at the time), and he was like “Calm down. She’s not going to give birth in the car.”
And my dad, who has fathered three children (two of which are still around. Older brother died shortly after childhood.) was right.
Trust the dad, man.
That’s the baby starting early on the campaign to turn mommy and daddy into sleep-deprived zombies.
Well, someone’s gotta get on that job. Can’t have well-rested parents walking about now, can we?
I remember being calmer than my wife. And surprisingly, I was grateful that she never snapped me up during labor for wanting food. Got lucky I guess…
Great colors as always, man.
The colors are currently driving me crazy. The work I do in Draw never transfers clearly to JPEG. This is close, but STILL looks not exactly like the file does in Draw. Drives me crazy. You’d think exporting a file would be easy, but apparently not.
5 hours from first contraction to birth for me and my wife.. Not that bad 🙂 But I am very glad I am not then one that has to carry it and push it out at the end (of the pregnancy).
Be glad. Be very, very glad.
the weirdest thing of all is the first thing most new mothers say when they first see their mates after that birth.
it’s usually something along the lines of… “can’t wait for the next one.”
unbelievable, but true.
I have noted something too. When the father watches his wife give birth, the next child is at least three years in coming. If he doesn’t, two years… at most.
Well, it might have something to do with vantage. As a guy, I can report that it’s hard to recover from that visual. Though recover one does, eventually.
Yes, Colin. Yes, the movies do indeed lie. 😀
Only in the best of ways.
A word of advice if and when you have a family keep it small.
A mistake my brother made. Between his exgirlfriend and his wife, he is responsible for five kids, one of which is his wife’s with another man (before they married, don’t worry.)
His exgirlfriend has four of her own, which includes my brother and three others, one or two of which is with her now husband.
This is why I got a vasectomy. There are already plenty of kids to carry on my family name that I don’t need to contribute, and I don’t really have any desire to clean up poop outside of any janitorial job I have.
Smart man.
Good advice.
Why? Many western country’s birth rates are declining to the point that they are literally depopulating themselves out of existence. Greece has already reached the “point of no return”, a birth rate so low that no nation in history has recovered from it. Other countries are not that far behind. Whole cultures may vanish unless people start having more babies.
While we certainly don’t want Cultures to vanish (well, maybe we ARE better off without Aztecs), when anyone says we need more people I must ask why ?
And how many will be enough ? And will they have jobs ? Every Taxi, Bus, and Truck Driver will be unemployed within two decades if Google has anything to do about it.
I know we don’t want to get into a long winded, controversial discussion in a Web Comic devoted to the lighter side.
And if this Gecko deletes this post, I understand.
I just ask you to consider how many human beings do YOU think we need ? Is there any limit ?
Do they deliver (food) to the maternity ward?
Well, I’m sure some enterprising pizza delivery man could try, but they usually have those maternity wards sealed up pretty tight. There’s usually a locked door and a Ratched-type nurse who guards the door. Most mat wards forbid lots of people/things from entering, including foodstuffs, children (seriously), weaponry, and other such contraband.
I think the general idea is that whatever a woman eats during labor is likely to wind up being barfed up anyway (or if you need to go in for an emergency C-section), but I just looked into this online, and it seems that this a pretty argued point in maternity circles. Many hospitals still insist on no food during labor (and it seems their rationale is mostly ‘It’s always been done this way, so why change now?’) but many mothers-to-be are challenging that.
My wife said that the bowl of cornflakes she had directly after giving birth was the tastiest, most satisfying food she’d ever eaten. Everything tastes better when you’re starving.
That’s a hospital thing that they don’t let you eat if they need to operate. That’s what they told me when they stitched up my thumb back in high school. I had to wait until 9pm before I could eat, since the injury happened at track practice, about an hour before practice ended, and I was hungry.
What irritated me was that it was just stitches, just in my hand, and I wasn’t even allowed even a candy bar from the vending machine until they released me.
what would they have even done had they caught you eating a candy bar?
Note to self: always get the ambulance to swing through a fast food drive-thru on the way to the hospital.
This totally sucks for the mommy to be! Especially if labor lasts for any length of time. I had killer heart burn after not being able to eat for 23 hours. But basically they have that policy in place so if a patient has to be taken into surgery and under general anesthetic they don’t aspirate aka vomit while under and it goes in the lungs causing even bigger problems. I understand why this policy exists but boy does it suck when you have to deal with it directly.
It sucks. But this labour won’t run TOO long. After all, I have to get the kid out within the next ten strips, or the readership will kill me.
Personally I think that the reason people have large families is they feel that they have to prove something.
I would agree, based on my brother and his wife.
That food and surgery thing makes sense if you work in a hospital (I was a ‘environmental specialist’… a janitor). Believe it of not, making a blanket rule like that makes it easier for the staff. They don’t have to decide which ‘surgery’ is too minor or which is major enough. If it’s a surgery (like stitching a thumb), it’s a surgery and thus qualifies.
You’d be amazed at the arguments (if it weren’t a blanket policy) and the times I had to clean up after (if the policy were ignored). Yes, people DO vomit even when the surgery is minor.
That … sucks. And it does make sense. I read that pro-food people say the chance of an emergency C-section is only 2%, so why make most women needlessly suffer, but that doesn’t really jive with my personal experience. I work in an office with about eight women, and TWO of them have had emergency C-sections. I know of many others too, so I think the number’s a bit higher than 2%. And I think the food needs to stay at home.
2% overall. Some environments/locations have as high as 60%, while others have a couple “0” after the decimal point in percentage.
To me, it sounds like a ‘faction’ (a number just said because it sounds good). In the hospital I worked in, the number was around 40% (and I got THAT from the maternity nurses when they were eating lunch).
40% sounds about right to me in the world I live in. I’m sure when you factor in highly populated places like Africa where hospitals are a rarity, the percentage lowers.
I believe that eventually girls and women worldwide will get so fed up with never finding Mr.Right that they’ll reproduce themselves.
This strip and all the comments have made for a very interesting Sunday morning read… You guys surprise me every time.
And Daphne’s shirt in the voting incentive is brilliant.
Hey, you’re the first to comment on that shirt! I was particularly proud of that one and thought it was hilarious, but no one seemed to notice. So you noticing makes me happy.
Not sure if hilarious is the term I would’ve used but I still like the shirt! Would having them hold hands be a little over-the-top?
That might have been a nice touch, actually.
Awww… since I’m two years late I don’t get to see the joke. 🙁
It currently shows Phoebe as WW.
All the incentives 2014 and earlier are available in a PDF collection in the store for $5 if you want to see it. There’s a bunch of good ones, actually.
He may have gotten things wrong, but at least he got her to the hospital in one piece and on time. That’s worth some credit, surely? ^^
You’re right. There are men who have done worse.
Puck gets better with each update keep up the good work.
Thanks, man. I’m trying to keep it from sliding into garbage.
A friend of mine, she only have 30 minutes (and less) between the water broke and the baby!!! And she keep her hand between her legs in case of an emergency exit 🙂
On my wife’s second pregnancy, the doctors broke her water when she arrived at the hospital. (She’d been fully dilated since the day before, which is weird.) It might have been only thirty minutes after that my daughter came out. Sometimes it happens fast.
And no joke on this one. One of my work mates was pregnant. She went to the hospital to deliver and they sent her home. Needless to say, she popped half way home. Man, was her husband pissed!
You don’t want to be cleaning amniotic fluid out of the interior of a car. When a woman’s had seven children, she knows a bit more about it than any two bit doctor.
And, yes, the baby was delivered in the car… on the side of the road.
The classiest way to be born!
Hey, what do want? Doctors that know something? You, my friend, have unrealistic expectations.
How about modeling characters in Puck after your wife and children.
Well, that would be kind of weird, because Puck already sort of resembles my wife. So I’d have a character that kind of looked like Puck, but wasn’t Puck. Which would be weird.
I’ve been driving a cab for over six years and I’ve only met one driver who had a fare give birth in his car. Driving 80 mph to avoid said occurance, is much more common.
There you go. You poor, poor cabbies. I really do feel for you guys.
Ex-cabbie. Only 80? That’s what a horn, emergency flashers, and a set of lungs that can drown out a jet engine are for. I think I arrived at the hospital before she actually got pregnant. Plus made a big tip! 😀
Yeah Colin, movies lie, all right. what else would you expect from Hollywood? After all, it’s a city-wide sub-culture that exists on the careers & lives of people who *manufacture FANTASIES & sell them!*
And they do a magnificent job, man. MAGNIFICENT.
I love Puck’s facial expression on the last panel (also, in the other ones!). She manages to be both totally relaxed and short of exploding at the same time. If I did not think she was totally hot already, I’d do so right now.
There’s an odd lack of urgency to the early stages of many deliveries. It’s frustrating more than terrifying at that stage. The terror comes later.
That’s good to know. If I ever get a chance to be a father, I’ll see if I can remember that.
GET A SNACK ON THE WAY TO THE HOSPITAL!
[HER a snack, duh!]
And yeah, I’ve been running into the Movies Lie thing rather a lot the last few years. Not in the same way, of course.
Any examples of movie lies?
That ferreting skullduggary out takes a relatively short amount of time and when presented with evidence, people cave. People are more shameless in real life and leads harder to follow.
Then again, Colin, TV and movies aren’t always wrong, as many a YouTube video about having a baby in the car on the way to a hospital prove…
The thing is, though, that mass media presents the “delivery in the car” thing as almost the standard, because it’s exciting. In reality it’s quite rare, particularly with a first child.
Well, the people in those videos never say if it’s the first child or not.
Then again, art imitating life has proven otherwise about fast labors. Danielle, in “Kevin & Kell”, for example, when she had her baby in early November 2006. Granted she wasn’t IN the car when rabbit-instinct-driven labor kicked in to the phase, but it was still on the way to the hospital when it happened.
Other example of VERY fast labors come from this image on FA; https://www.furaffinity.net/view/30508463/ when the baby was out in 3 contractions, and only last year in “Safe Havens” when Feryl had her baby around mid-April, her labor, from 1st contraction to final push, lasted only 6 MINUTES!!!*
(* = Okay, technically, the former image is that of a reoccurring surrogate in the artist’s gallery, but it’s never established whether it’s her own baby or her latest job, and the latter was formally a bird, so that could’ve accounted for something)