DCDT Book Reviews: What to Expect When Your Wife is Expanding

From time to time, I elect to enrich my mind in ways that don’t involve beer, sports, video games, or beer.  One of the scariest things about becoming a father is that most fathers will go into the adventure knowing absolutely nothing.  Thankfully, there are about 9 million books on becoming a father (makes you wonder how so many screw it up), and I’ve taken the time to read a few, so that you don’t have to, and would like to impart a bit of opinion on them.  I’ll probably do more than one of these posts, as the books don’t tend to be very long, and don’t take a long time to read.

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The first book that I picked up was “What to Expect When Your Wife Is Expanding“, a book in line with the incredibly popular (it’s even a movie now) line of “What to Expect…” books.  Now, I’ve not read any of the Mom versions of these books, so I don’t really have much to compare them to, but in terms of an expert advice book, this one seems to err on the side of parody, more than it does an actual “How to be a dad” book.  It should be noted up-front that this book does market itself as a parody, but it’s a little tough to ascertain that without doing a little digging.  Chances are probably pretty good that this book is going to be one of the first that you buy or receive as a gift, so you may not realize that it’s actually a parody book.  Lord knows I didn’t figure it out until about halfway through.

This book really tries to be funny.  At times it pulls off Dad humor in good ways, but other times it finds itself making jokes when actual advice would be a lot more useful.  It should speak volumes that I don’t remember a whole lot from actually reading this book, and felt as though I knew just as much after I had finished reading it as I did when I started.  It’s a quick read, and you may pick up a few things as it goes along, but chances are that you’re going to be able to find just as much information on babycenter.com or thebump.com or some other baby website.  Hell, you could probably pick up more information from Teen Mom than this book.  Dr. Drew does know his stuff, after all.

I guess this book is a great introduction into the world of “You’re going to be a dad” books, but I don’t know that I would target this book as the book to read if you’re going to only read one book.  It’s going to give you SOME information, but certainly not enough to become a Dad.

On the DadsChangeDiapersToo.com scale of 5 poop-filled diapers, I give this book 2.5 poop-filled diapers.

 

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