I know this is the news you've all been waiting for. I'm very excited to announce that Dan has finally had a vasectomy. He's been thinking about getting this done since around 2019! Originally I thought it would be nice to have 3 kids, but like many people I know, after having one you reconsider everything. But after having Eric (our second) the birth went quite well and he was a pretty easy kid, I did think maybe we should go for 3. Full blog about the pros and cons of 3 here written in 2017.
In 2019 I was much more seriously thinking about going for number 3, and at the time it felt like such a difficult decision and I was on the fence and Dan was too but a bit closer to no than me. There was a general election and I was telling people, I'm not sure how seriously, "If Labour get in I'll have a 3rd baby, and if the Tories get it we'll move to France." I felt like under Labour we could afford a 3rd baby, but if the Tories got in we didn't really want to live in England any more, and Brexit was about to come in which meant people weren't free to move countries, but we still could because of Dan being French. Liverpool was a really weird place to be on that election, because everyone I was hanging out with at mum groups were sad about the results, but we had this feeling of, "we have to all work together and look after each other, because no one else is going to look out for us." And I actually started giving away my baby stuff from then, which is a good but not irreversible step to take on your way to a decision.
If we had conceived a baby at the time I was thinking about it would have been a lockdown baby and I take a lot of comfort in knowing that that would have been an absolute nightmare mixed in with a 5 year old and a 2 year old. We wouldn't have gone to France with a 3rd child, which is weird to think about now because France has not exactly gone well. Anyway sometime in the face mask wearing days we decided it was time fo the snip and Dan got on the waiting list, which was a year long due to Covid.
Weeks after arriving in France in 2022 Dan got a phone call saying, "your vasectomy is next week," and I now wish he'd just flown back and had it, but at the time that seemed a bit mad. He told them, "I live in France now," and then it was just on the to do list for a long time but we didn't understand the French health care system. And the system is different depending on if you have a job or not and we kept switching between the poor person scheme and the person with a job and health insurance scheme. Eventually, after literally years, he got an appointment about it where they said "now you have to wait 3 months just to make sure you're really sure." WE'VE BEEN SURE FOR ABOUT 6 YEARS! It feels almost not worth doing now I'm 40, but hopefully I'll at least get a good blog out of it. I'll get to the juicy details now...
So I dropped him in the local hospital around lunch time and he had to wait around for ages with no pants on for this very busy surgeon to be free. And then it was pretty quick and I went to collect him, he seemed surprisingly well and could walk to the car ok. He got home and got the frozen peas straight down his shorts, and then we had a mad chat about if we should eat some of those peas for dinner seeing as he was deforesting them on his balls. Dan made the point that there were 2 layers between the peas and his balls, (the plastic pea bag and his underwear) and we both agreed that 2 layers is the minimum acceptable number of layers between peas and balls for peas to still be edible. We talked through a lot of different scenarios when we did our marriage prep course, but peas and balls was not one of them.
So yes half the peas got eaten for dinner and the other half that we refer to as, "the penis peas," were being continually frozen and defrosted for several days and have now gone in the bin.
I don't know how much you know about the vasectomy process, but they cut and then cauterise two tubes and then they put a "grounding patch" on his side that means "he wouldn't be barbecued" by the electrical rod. He could smell his own flesh burning. Anyway, after that you can still ejaculate but there's no sperm in the fluid. Sorry if that's more information than you wanted.
But the important bit is you're not straight away safe to get on with baby-free fun times. It's like that time I put cheese in my glue gun, it took a while to get fully back to glue again, and there were a few embarrassing moments in my art workshops where I could smell the cheese. Dan has been told he needs to ejaculate 30 times in the next 3 months. Then he has to go back for a test around Christmas time where they test the fluid to see if there's any tiny lonely half people still swimming around in there.
So here's where I need your help. What is a fun way to count up to 30? Obviously you could just keep a discrete little note on your phone, if you were boring. But Dan suggested it would be cool to make a big thermometer like they do for fundraising, but in the shape of a penis, obvs. Or I suggested getting 6 out the way and then getting an advent calendar to reward yourself with a little chocolate every time. Although if someone didn't know that was your special advent calendar they might eat some to catch you up with the date and ruin the whole system.
The fact that we're not having more kids means that I'm sadly out of the 15 year challenge of who can have the most ginger children by 2028. There's only 18 months left on that so really you need to get on it now if you want them to have a good amount of hair by 1st Jan 2028. If you are a participant (and I list them on this old blog here) please send me a photo of your kids, so I can do an update - it can be the back of their heads.
While recovering from the snip, Dan missed the opportunity to win his own motorbike. When he first got his previous job he bought a second hand 125 motorbike to commute on so I could still have the car. After a year of riding it a bit too hard on roads it was a little too small for, it completely died. The piston in the cylinder had melted, I don't know what that means, but it doesn't sound good. He had to pay a garage to take it away. He didn't even get any scrap money for it. So imagine how surprised Dan was to receive an email inviting him to an open day where the top tombola prize was his own bike! He wanted to go because he thought it would be funny, and he wanted to to potentially win his bike back. But as we all know it's illegal to participate in a tombola while you've got frozen peas down your trousers.
There's no big life news unfortunately. Dan was meant to hear about a job he's already had an interview for last week, but he hasn't so it seems very unlikely that he would get that, but not impossible. He had another interview today which went okay, but not amazing for a job with the council in Perpignan, and then he'd got into the final 12 out of 60 for a remote job in marketing for a bike tour company, that he was excited for, but they decided not to interview him. Then this morning he was also phoned about a job that the job centre sorted out for him, which is sales and admin for an agricultural company.
Next time I'm going to talk about having the best time possible with a big cardboard box and doing some comedy for the first time in 2 years which I will be doing on Saturday night.
Bye bye.
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