Who's your daddy?

With two young children to juggle, wife asked if it might be possible for me to get home from work a bit earlier to help with bedtime. I quite enjoy my leisurely cycle home through Richmond Park, but since she agreed that the only realistic way for me to reduce my commute time was to get a motorbike, I wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity – not many men can say their wives practically ordered them to buy a new motorbike due to the imminent arrival of a second child.

She said I should get something sensible. I agreed…

Temperamental high-performance Italian superbikes – what could be more sensible? Fortunately I married a girly girl who hasn’t got a clue about this kind of thing, so as far as she’s concerned it’s just a plain old, boring,  run of the mill, get-you-to-work-and-back kind of commuter bike.

About 2am and we’ve already been in the hospital since about 10pm, the contractions are getting more frequent and the midwife thinks things are about to get started. Barely slept in the past 24 hours but it’s all good; we’ve done all of this before, I know the routine and I’m at ease with the situation.

The midwife, her assistant and my wife are all talking their own language – once medical people find out she’s a nurse, they have a tendency to talk to her like a colleague rather than a patient. I quite like this, it makes me proud of her, but it does mean that I’m left out of the conversation, so I just hold her hand, stroke her hair and tell her how well she’s doing. We’re still in the warming up for the main event stage when the mood in the room changes suddenly and I don’t really know why, something about the baby’s heartbeat.

The assistant midwife hits a big red button on the wall, an alarm sounds and within seconds the room is full of doctors, nurses, more senior midwives, paediatricians and others. The crash team. Lots of serious conversations take place between them all and a young woman, who appears to be the boss doctor and looks like she means business, tells my wife that she’s worried about the baby so it needs to be delivered extremely quickly. She pauses. “Don’t I know you?”

“I think we worked together a few years ago?” suggests Wife.

A flicker of recognition. “You understand the situation.”  she says, matter of factly. I guess at some sort of unspoken professional courtesy, an implied promise to avoid any sugar-coating, Janet & John explanations, Hobson’s Choices and other niceties that might be required for civilians, but to just do what needs to be done without wasting time on unnecessary bullshit. Wife gives a “don’t worry about me, just get on with it” nod.

The next eight minutes are extremely tense. Boss doctor works with the senior midwife (a formidable Nigerian lady who looks like she’s seen things that would make hard men weep) to get the baby out. A team of baby doctors waits behind them, ready to spring into action as soon as possible. Various other professionals look similarly ready to do critical things should the need arise. Wife talks calmly and professionally with boss doctor, taking instructions and providing feedback. Unpleasant things happen which, unless you ever give birth yourself, you should do your best to remain happily ignorant of.

I stand at the head of the bed, the most useless person in the room, elegantly reminded that no matter how smart, capable and in command of your own destiny you think you are, so many of the most important things in life are completely, hopelessly beyond your control.

Under normal circumstances it should have taken an hour or so, maybe longer, but they got the baby out in eight minutes and despite all the drama he was perfectly fine. Before I can thank boss doctor and the rest of the crash team, another alarm goes off and they all run from the room, leaving our original midwife and her assistant to finish the job. Wife goes into an adrenaline crash, all pale and shaky, so I hold the baby for an hour while she recovers enough to give him his first feed.

Eventually I get home at about 4:30am, pour myself a glass of Scotch and, despite being dead on my feet, take a little time to enjoy it before climbing into bed.

I head back to the hospital in the morning to see how they’re doing, and stop off at the labour ward reception to drop off a box of chocolates and a thank you card – I want the team to know that I didn’t take their skill and professionalism for granted, and even though they were just doing their jobs, it means everything to me that they helped bring our second-born into the world safely. The receptionist barely makes eye contact with me as I hand them over. “Thanks” she says, casually, adding my gift to the pile behind the desk and then turning back to her computer screen.

Second child was due on Saturday but so far hasn’t shown any inclination to make an appearance, which means I have to go to work next week when I was all geared up to start my paternity leave.* Our first was born on his due date, a rare occurrence which demonstrated a level of punctuality that he almost certainly inherited from his mother – I despise people who are on time for everything, and I’m glad the next one has decided to be late.

The whole thing is a completely different picture this time around. Obviously the first time we did it the whole experience was a bit like, woah, fuck, we’re having a baby, that’s MASSIVE, but this time it feels a bit more routine and mundane with only the slightest frisson of nervousness, like we’re sending the car for an MOT and hoping there aren’t going to be any nasty surprises on the bill. Kind of.

Because I’m so terribly important these days, work just keeps getting workier and there’s been plenty of stuff at the office to keep me occupied recently, so it’s been fairly easy to not think about the impending arrival. But now it’s almost here, I’m forced to finally acknowledge that we are in fact going to have another baby very soon, so I should probably try to be at least a little mentally prepared. Child number one has turned out to be an absolute star, he’s funny, cute, clever, and an all round welcome addition to our lives – he occupies such a huge space in my heart that it’s hard to imagine how I’d be able to love another child quite as much. Maybe I won’t, maybe child number two will turn out to have none of his brother’s charm and charisma, so we’ll just make him live in the shed and feed him on scraps.

But anyway. He’s still not here, and we’re stuck in the weird limbo of the soon-to-be-parents. It could be tonight, it could be two weeks from now, we just have to be ready to drop everything when it happens. I can handle this because I’ve always been a bit of a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants, make-it-up-as-we-go-along kinda guy, but wife likes life to be properly organised and planned, so it isn’t really her cup of tea at all. I suppose lugging a bowling ball around in her stomach probably isn’t helping her mood either, but she should have thought about that before she let some guy knock her up.

*Interesting discussion with gay colleague: “It’s completely unfair that you dirty breeders get free time off for having babies. If I get a new dog or something, am I allowed an extra two week’s paid holiday?”

I’m speaking at a big conference tomorrow – hundreds of marketing industry sleazebags have paid good money to listen to what I’ve got to say for myself. The only problem is that I’ve been so horribly busy with, you know, work and life and getting ready for baby number two (who’s due any day now) that I haven’t actually got round to spending much time thinking about what I’m actually going to say.

Fortunately I’ve made a pretty good career from what we professionals call “making shit up as I go along”. Essentially, my plan is to make a Powerpoint presentation that consists of a load of nice looking pictures that are vaguely related to themes I might possibly talk about, depending on what kind of vibe I’m getting from the room, and then just waffle in a meandering fashion about everything and nothing until my thirty minutes is up. So far nobody seems to have figured out that I’m a fraud, and some people even seem to think that I have a presenting “style” rather than a well worn line in marketing industry bullshit.

Right about now I should be getting nervous about my lack of preparation, but I’m pretty experienced at this kind of thing so I know how it’s going to go. Whatever I say, 10% of the audience will think I’m full of shit, 30% will think I’ve shared some amazing insights, and the remaining 60% won’t have listened to a word I’ve said. Later, at the networking dinner, I will manage to speak to 1 person who has actual budget to spend but already has a dozen other consultancies circling him, 3 people who want to hire me, and 10 people who want me to hire them. Despite the menu having lots of interesting options, I will order the steak, which will come well done no matter how I ask them to cook it.

This weekend’s swimming lesson got cancelled, so I thought I’d take The Boy to the pool at the local leisure centre instead – they’ve got a nice little kiddy’s pool there that he likes. It’s shallow and warm and they have waterfalls and other features that he thinks are fun. We’d spend half an hour splashing around and giggling and maybe he’d remember that the pool can be fun, so when we go to the next lesson he’ll be happier about it.

Only, the kiddy’s pool was shut for the morning, so instead of just turning around and giving up I thought I’d take him into the grown-up pool instead. Not as much fun, but we could still have a bit of a splash around. Big mistake. He was so terrified of being in the pool that within ten minutes he shat himself, and I barely managed to get him out of the pool before a little brown cloud began to escape out of the edge of his swimming nappy. I don’t think anybody noticed.

I didn’t sign up for this shit, so to speak. I know it’s important that he learns to swim, but I’m starting to think we should leave it until he’s a bit older – I don’t want to spend every Saturday morning dragging a miserable, petrified toddler to the pool. We’ll just have to make sure that for the time being we keep him away from boats, rivers and suchlike.

The Catholic Church of England and Wales has just insulted my wife and I, along with thousands of other heterosexual couples. By arguing against the right of gays to marry, they’re claiming they have some kind of moral authority over the institute of marriage and effectively saying that any marriage not sanctioned by Christianity should not be legal.

That would put Lovely Wife and me in an interesting situation, because we had a wedding in which religion and the church played no part. No mention of god in the vows, no songs about Jesus in the service, even the music we chose for the service was carefully vetted by the registry office to make sure it had no religious meaning.*

As far as I can see, if the bible-fondlers are saying that gay marriage doesn’t count because it doesn’t have their blessing, then they’re also saying that our hetero marriage doesn’t count either because we neither sought nor desire their approval.

So, I’d be grateful if the Catholic Church could take a break from raping children just long enough to fuck itself, and keep its beak out of other people’s relationships in future.

*Apparently there’s some bylaw which states that if you are having a non-religious wedding, none of the music played during the service is allowed to be religious in nature. This includes Angels, by Robbie Williams, thank fuck.

Lovely Wife likes gardening. I do not like gardening. I don’t see the point in growing vegetables when there’s a perfectly good shop nearby that sells them for next to nothing. It’s a lot of effort and it saves us a grand total of £1 a year.

Nevertheless, if she enjoys gardening, far be it from me to rob her of that small pleasure. Except, because she’s a feeble girl and almost constantly pregnant these days, I get roped in to do the parts of gardening which need a bit of oomph – which is pretty much all of it. Gardening mostly seems to involve lots of digging, and carrying heavy stuff from one part of the garden to another part of the garden.

Still, The Boy loves being out with me when I’m working on the garden, especially down in the vegetable patch which is currently toddler paradise; 16 square metres of mud and worms.

Being out there reminds me of helping my dad on his allotment when I was very little – when saving a few quid a month on the food bill was more important than it is now. Every Sunday morning we’d carry the gardening tools over from the house, because he didn’t have a shed on the allotment, and spend a few hours digging, planting, weeding and all the rest of it.

I don’t really remember much about it, other than the feeling that I was helping with an important job and that it was good to be outside, just dad and me, away from the chaos of a large family. I can’t say I ever learned anything about gardening that has stuck with me.

On the day that dad died last year all of the turf for our garden got delivered. The previous owners had a maze of rockeries, crazy paving and a deep concrete lined pond, which took me weeks to dig, drill and smash out before I could cover it all with soil, ready for the lawn.

Then the turf turned up one morning, just a couple of hours after I’d got the news about dad, and I welcomed the excuse to throw myself into some physical work so nobody could try to talk to me while I was getting the job done. The turf went down and I spent the next few weeks obsessing over it – people had warned me that newly laid turf can be fragile, especially in the kind of hot weather we had then, so I religiously watered it twice a day, pushed down curling edges and repaired any damage the local wildlife did overnight.

But it bedded in well, and now we have a nice lawn that my son and his imminent little brother will spend many years running, jumping and rolling around on. I can’t really say how my dad would have liked me to remember him but, for now at least, whenever I look out at the garden it reminds me of the day I laid the lawn and memories of the old man come rolling back.

Wife wanted me to find an activity to do with The Boy on Saturday mornings, because I don’t see him much during the week and it would be nice to have some father/son time. What she actually meant was “can the pair of you just piss off out of it for a few hours so I can have some mummy/cake time” but let’s not split hairs.

I decided that swimming lessons would be a good idea because even though he’s too young to actually swim, the sooner he gets comfortable in the water, the better. Also, there was a distinct possibility of MILFs in bikinis.

The class is 30 minutes long and involves an instructor running us through various exercises to help the kids (mostly babies and young toddlers) get used to being in the water and learn to hold their breath. For the first five or ten minutes it’s all fun and giggles and splashing, but then the underwater exercises begin: a quick dunk to start with, eventually building up to you sitting on the bottom of the pool with the kid for a few seconds before resurfacing.

Being a fairly bright kid, The Boy is terrified of being pulled under the water. After the first dunking he clings to me like a limpet, desperate not to go under again, and after the second time he’s wailing and doing his best to plead with me to get out of the pool.

“Ninish? Ninish, Daddy?” he implores, with big sad eyes, nodding his head to encourage me to agree that it is in fact time to finish. It’s enough to break your heart. He’s scared, he wants me to take him home, but I have to smile and tell him that no, we have to stay for another 15 minutes of spluttering water torture. This reduces him to a screaming wreck, which starts to spook the other kids.

Frankly, I don’t blame him – I never really liked swimming. We evolved for a fucking reason, water is no longer our domain, let’s just stay out of it and stick to dry land where there’s relatively little risk of drowning if you ever decide to stop moving your legs for a minute or two.

All the same, there’s eventually an upside once the dunkings have finished – we do Horsey-Horsey, which is where the child sits on your back, arms around your neck, and you swim/waddle around the pool. This teaches them to hold onto a grown up while swimming to safety, and The Boy thinks it’s hilarious.

Ever since the first swimming lesson he takes every opportunity to clamber onto my back and shout “HORTIE! HORTIE!” which was funny the first couple of times, but not so much at 6:30am on a Monday when I’m trying to savour the last few minutes of duvet-time before I have to get up for work.

This week I’m working in our Amsterdam office for a few days, shacked up in a fancy hotel where the drinks are free of charge for guests. Not so long ago this would have been a recipe for all kinds of mischief, probably ending with me being found floating face down in Herengracht canal at 3am with my pants round my ankles and half a kilo of magic mushrooms inserted into my rectum.

But not any more. These days the highlight of a trip like this is being able to spend a few nights eating out and/or relaxing peacefully alone in a quiet, comfortable hotel room. Not that I let on to anybody – the rule of business trips is that you have to make a big song and dance about how much you don’t like spending time away from your family which, as anybody who’s got a toddler will tell you, is complete fucking bullshit.

As far as free booze is concerned, I can take it or leave it, but three nights sleeping in a big comfy bed that I don’t have to share with a heavily pregnant woman, or being woken up at six in the morning by a hungry small person shouting “MILK! MILK! MILK!” is my idea of heaven. I love my family, but thank fuck I’ve got a job with regular opportunities for free mini-breaks business trips.