Monday, Chris – From Beam to Buck

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From Beam to Buck

A disclaimer is absolutely necessary here: I don’t have kids, may or may not ever have them, and view the process of giving birth as something that happens thousands of times a day (or millions if you want to take all the animals of the world into account), which makes it anything but a miracle. That’s right, I’m an asshole! Surprise! Eh, I have nothing against kids, but I fully expected a book detailing the home birth of Chris’s latest child to have at least a few moments that completely confused/alarmed me. This one starts off with a positive pregnancy test, and strips from there include subjects like Chris wondering if he should tone down his subject matter while his wife was pregnant (her verdict: no), telling his kid that she was going to have a sibling, telling a friend about the pregnancy and his reaction, getting a new place to live, trying to figure out a name (and sadly not going with Volaticus, which I am officially stealing if I ever do have a kid), trying to guess the gender of the baby, working with the midwives, and Chris wondering how to make telling people that he self-publishes sound cool. Then the scene shifts a bit to a story that seemed to meander to me while I was reading it, but it all fits in by the end. Chris was at work and was thinking of tieing one on (“getting drunk” to you whippersnappers (young readers)), but a woman came into the restaurant that made people uncomfortable. He finally told her to leave, so she stood outside the window knitting and generally freaking people out. He finally (and reluctantly) called the cops, but there wasn’t much they could do because she wasn’t doing anything illegal. They finally left and ignored her, but the end result of it was that he barely drank at all. This ended up being a big deal because his wife gave birth the next day, a couple of weeks earlier than her due date, and it might have been a disaster if he was hung over. The birth itself was graphic, in case you’re freaked out by such things (if you are a little growing up might be in order), but overall it seemed to go smoothly, or maybe Chris shortened the labor for the sake of the comic. Anyway, the whole comic is basically a sweet love letter to his wife and kids, with tips for other people who want to try home births. So yeah, I’d recommend this for people who are thinking about giving that a shot. It was also thoroughly entertaining to a childless heathen like myself, but I do have one big question. Is it really normal for the mother to chop up and eat the placenta? Because that sounded gross as all hell to me (again I have to point out that I NO expertise in this matter). Just curious! $5