I think most dads will agree with me when I make the blanket assertion that the whole pregnancy thing is, in addition to being a wondrous beautiful miracle, pretty freaking scary and unfamiliar. While certainly your wife/partner/baby mama/significant other has to deal with most of the difficult stuff, it's still something that can be quite a challenge for the father-to-be. If anything, we just want to be the best partners and supporters that we can be.

That's why I really wish I had a copy of Your Pregnancy for the Father-to-Be: Everything Dads Need to Know about Pregnancy, Childbirth and Getting Ready for a New Baby (Glade B. Curtis, MD, MPH and Judith Schuler, MS, Lifelong Books/Da Capo Press, $14.99) back when our first child was born a few years ago. While I had a lot of resources to fall back on, most of them were from the mother's point of view and, while useful, weren't directly speaking to the father's experience. The 2009 edition pretty much tells you everything you need to know about what the expectant mother is going through, offers tips and suggestions on how to help, and basically walks you through everything you need to know about getting ready for your new baby.

Your Pregnancy for the Father-to-Be is comprehensive volume, so needless to say I can't go over everything in a short review like this. Some of my favorite features are the little tips sprinkled throughout, like the "Brownie Points/In the Doghouse" suggestions that help with issues that guys are usually just totally clueless about. They may seem rather obvious, but really there are quite a few real life examples in here, as my own experience and that of other dads I know bears out. The other tips that I like fall under the heading off "My Mother-in-Law Said". They're little nuggets of childbirth and child-rearing misinformation, urban legends, and old wives' tales that, if your mother-in-law didn't tell you, some other well-meaning individual did.

Overall, it's a valuable resource for any soon-to-be dad. Highly recommended! It lists for $14.99 but Amazon.com has is for a measly $10.17.