Visual confirmation

Throughout what, for want of a better term, I shall call my art career, I have always found it a useful means of viewing my work objectively to look at it in a mirror. Seriously, try it. I might become an art teacher purely so that I can share this single piece of wisdom.

Anyway. It was for much the same reason that this works that I had a sudden moment of clarity last night. My wife was quite understandably assessing her pregnant profile in the mirror, and upon joining her in admiring the reflected view, it all suddenly hit me. Now, obviously I was aware of the fact that she was pregnant prior to yesterday evening - my previous musings on this blog will attest to this - but I was somehow more aware at this moment. It all became very real to me that my wife is one of those women you occasionally see, who has a small person inside her tummy, which will at some point soon cease to be in her tummy and demand a lot of attention. From me.

As if to clarify any remaining doubts I may have had, my wife went for her 12 week scan today. This was the first one I have missed, much to my regret - although my being at work meant that my wife's doting mother was granted much deserved scan escort status. We have, as previously mentioned, had scans before, the images from two of which are at the top here, depicting a blob which could, in all honesty, be anything. This time, we have six images which verify with relative certainty that we shall be producing a human. A human which apparently requires its mother (and grandmother) to eat lots of chocolate in order to lie still and have its photo taken. I think you'll agree it's got my blur.

We are told that all is as well as can be determined at this stage. He/she proudly sports all sorts of arms, legs and noses in the usual quantities, and currently measures 7cm from crown to bum, which seems to be some sort of common measurement. And 7cm is normal, as I'm sure you know. I am encouraging my child more now than I will at any other stage of its life to be as normal as possible. My wife is as happy as I have seen her in the last two months, and we are both experiencing a heady mix of pride and relief.

We are definitely having a baby.

What to expect when you're reading about pregnancy

I've had a relapse on the bad back front, which essentially means I'm living the dream of being off work without feeling particularly ill. Only the dream doesn't really account for the fact that you can't go anywhere or do anything. For the first time in about fifteen years, I'm bored.

Sky Sports News can only hold my attention for a finite length of time. And the sports pages of the various newspaper websites have become more than sufficiently populated with my opinions on UEFA's incompetence. Even the late, great J.G. Ballard's compendium of short stories has diminishing appeal now that I'm over 500 pages in.

For these reasons, and also because my wife bought it a long time ago and has read it several times over and probably knows it off by heart and really feels that I should make some sort of effort, I read a bit of What to Expect When You're Expecting yesterday. It's the book that parents to be always read in films about parents to be. It's sold ten million copies. It's widely regarded as something of a bible on the subject. My outstanding impression - admittedly after reading only one chapter (the one about the third month of pregnancy) - is this:

It hedges its bets.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. The format is very clever - the book adopts a sympathetic, I'm-your-friend-not-your-doctor tone by covering each issue in the form of frequently asked questions. So pregnant women concerned about blockages can turn to the section headed "I've been terribly constipated for the past few weeks. Is this common?" to be comforted by subsequent assurances that yes, it's perfectly normal, try eating some fibre. This is reassuring and informative.

But immediately after this comes the section headed "All my pregnant friends seem to have problems with constipation. I don't; in fact, I've remained very regular. Is my system working right?" This is of course followed by assurances that yes, it's perfectly normal. Having read both sections, I'm left wondering why the issue needs to be mentioned at all if it's no problem either way. This seems to be the standard pattern.

I don't mean to write off a book which has successfully comforted and informed ten million expectant couples. I was just surprised to find that there was more emphasis on the comforting than on the informing.

Although I suppose that's what we all need really. Maybe that's why I'm contriving to write scathing reviews of internationally bestselling books: I'm not bored; I'm nervous. If only someone would write a book to comfort nervous parents to be.