Day 115...I can haz 50 million swimmerz?

Daddy day! Woo!

My wife and I have gone a little over a full month without alcohol and caffeine, because we knew those could be potentially harmful to the baby making process. We knew the effects on the egg and a growing baby, but we didn't know how the sperm would be affected.

Well, from using the limited resources online about male fertility--let's face it, google and pregnancy show up only womanly topics--I found only one real site that said anything about really cutting back on caffeine and alcohol months in advance. However, one interesting fact I found was that sperm takes 3 months to fully mature.

The main effect of alcohol, I found was that it represses the numbers of swimmers, and/or deforms them. Sperm can be deformed in a variety of ways: elongated heads, multiple heads, no tails, multiple tails, bumps (I forget the term) on the head and tail. All of these make it harder for the sperm to swim, thus harder to get pregnant.

There is also another side-effect of having alcohol, is that it reduces levels of zinc in the body. Zinc is one of the major components of the sperm's coating that protects it. Lower zinc, means lower longevity in a harmful environment (a.k.a the vagoo).

I couldn't actually find anything about caffeine. Time to hit the books about both of these things.

So, potentially, alcohol and caffeine could find a way to influence sperm development, but the alcohol studies I read were mostly about heavy daily drinking versus one drink in a month.

If you really want to cover your bases, you should probably avoid both. It really isn't that bad! Beyond the pounding headache I had for the first three days of no caffeine (Redbull is my good friend), finding substitutes are easy. For example, caffeine free coke makes it seem like the holidays without the effects on the swimmers. And after a while, Sprite is an adequate substitute. As for alcohol, a lot of the time a glass of wine or a dry martini up with olives top shelf....still makes me drool....but this is my part of being in this partnership and this goal. So, think about you, your woman, and your future baby. It is easy to go without.

She can't take much more of this sort of pounding, Captain Pickle!