Making the baby bed

I was talking to my mum on the phone about pregnancy in Japan lasting 10 months as opposed to nine. Neither of us had a clue as to how it could be different, but we laughed ourselves silly at the idea of an extra month for Japanese women. Thankfully, a quick Google search gave us the answer, so here’s a quote from Anna Hotline:

It’s becoming more and more common to describe the duration of the pregnancy in weeks rather than months. In the many countries, “9 months” means 36-40 weeks pregnant, while in Japan, the same length of pregnancy is described as “10 months” .In the Japanese medical system, a month is exactly 4 weeks: 10 months make up for 40 weeks. The counting of the length of the pregnancy starts at the first day of your last period, and not on the day of conception. This first day of your last period is week 0, day 0. The due date is week 40, day 0. When you talk about the length of your pregnancy to Japanese people, try to use weeks, to avoid misunderstanding or confusion.

Mami is now 25 weeks pregnant, and with a little over three months to go before Rikuto is born, we got a bunch of baby stuff from a friend recently, including a car seat, a pram, a little bathtub and a bed. I can’t stress how thankful I am for people’s generosity. It has saved us so much time and money.

Needing a break from the computer, I pulled out my toolkit and set about putting the bed together.

Here’s what it looked like before:

And here’s what it looks like now:

Just seeing the bed sitting there has got me all excited about becoming a dad. Roll on July!

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