<<– Part Three – Get Married
Early last year Jo went on a rowing holiday. It was great – I didn’t have to hear anyone talk about rowing for a whole week (or so I thought – she phoned me mid-week to tell me all about it). When she returned she told me not to get excited but that she was a little late. So obviously I got quite excited.
About a week later she took a pregnancy test. She came downstairs excited and so I got excited, only for her to tell me that she was just excited that she’d taken the test and that she had to wait a few minutes for the result. A few minutes pass and she comes back down with the good news and we both got even more excited.
One of the weird things about finding out you’re having a baby is being unable to tell people your exciting news for a while. I completely understand the reasons, but this is something you really want to share with people and it can be quite difficult keeping such an exciting secret.
There was a weird rollercoaster of emotions that I went through after finding out we were having a baby. It started with excitement and then went through fear – about how our lives would change, whether I would be able to deal with the lack of sleep, if I’d be good at being a dad – and alternating between the two before settling very much on the side of excitement.
Like a wedding, having a baby requires a lot of planning. This was where I felt most comfortable and helped with controlling the fear and increasing the excitement.
Nine months is a long time to wait for a baby. It can make you especially broody, well it made me especially broody at least. I have a total of 5 nephews and nieces who are awesome and have just made me want a mini human of my own even more. However even 9 months is not enough to make you mentally ready for the moment you get rushed into hospital.
One of the things we did in preparation was a short hypnobirthing course. I had a vague idea of what it was as my sister-in-law had used it for her second child but I was very impressed by it and would recommend it for anyone who is due to give birth as it gives you a very positive attitude towards the experience, regardless of what route your birth takes.
The birth itself went quite well. Not a textbook birth, but possibly as close as you could realistically expect. Having heard stories about other people’s birth experiences, we were very lucky in our experience.
Everything went really quickly on the day. So quickly in fact that there was a point at which I thought I would have to catch our child but fortunately the midwife came back into the room at the vital moment.
And now we have a baby. She is called Imogen Scarlett Eileen Anderson. She is called Imogen as that was one of the few names we could agree on, Scarlett after her gran and Eileen after her great-gran who was born 99 years and 364 days before her. I’m sure I’ll tell you more about Imogen in the future.