Thanks, wife.

You might find the following a bit mushy and sickening if you're as cynical or emotionally repressed as I usually am. (I'm making an exception here because I'm talking about my wife and my first born child. They are, I hope, not your wife and first born child, but hopefully you'll be able to feel at least a bit of the love.) I'm about to attempt to gush unashamedly, and yet not before time (and not literally), about how bloody amazing my wife is.

It's easy for me - or any expectant father - to take the role of the mother-to-be for granted. Yes, we can and should pay lip service to the obvious, various physical strains they go through, and the melon through a hosepipe analogies they try desperately hard to ignore, in an heroic attempt to maintain sanity's fragile superiority over fear. But do we really understand and appreciate what they endure to the massive extent that we should? I'm not sure that I have.

I'm ashamed to admit that it was only recently that I made a concerted effort to imagine what it feels like, to have an actual living being inside my tummy. I really visualised our daughter wriggling about inside myself. I could almost feel it. And it scared the funk out of me. Of course I may have been imagining inaccurately - I'll never know, unless science makes some rapid and frankly unnecessary advances in the near future - but this brief glimpse was enough for me to reach an improved understanding of the huge undertaking my wife is currently, um, undertaking. She is responsible, in the most extreme, physical sense, for two lives. She has been for five months, and she will be for four more. Nothing it is physically possible for me to do can ever pay my debt of gratitude.

I'm sure I'll regret making that concession at some surprise juncture during a heated disagreement in about seven years time, but hopefully the fact that I've said it may at least delay that juncture.

All this, and yet she still manages to be the best cook I know. She still allows me to watch pretty much all of sport. She still finds the reserves of patience to nod in vigorous support of every misguided and insignificant opinion I offer to her, the internet or anybody else within earshot. She still produces, from thin air, better ideas for christmas presents for my own family than I have managed in 28 attempts. She still effortlessly outclasses me by a large distance in aesthetic terms. There are countless other examples, but I'm starting to sound like some sort of lazy misogynist, which I'm not, so just one more:

She still spent this afternoon making a craft-tastic book (the creative standard of which would, I imagine, cause Martha Stewart to betray her ladylike manner in a fit of uncontrollable jealousy) about how much she loves me. It made me cry with joy a little bit. I've been struggling for six paragraphs now to resist resorting to cliche, but I can no longer avoid the conclusion that I'm the luckiest man in the whole wide world.

You may now make sarcastic vomiting motions. But I know you're really crying with joy for me on the inside.

Getting my kicks.

Maybe it's my laid back nature - which brings with it the mixed blessing of instinctively prioritising sarcasm over genuine emotion - or maybe it's simply the ultimately inconceivable nature of the miracle of life, but I never seem to be quite as engaged as I think I am with the fact that I will soon have a living child. I know this because I generally think I am fully engaged with it, and yet there always turns out to be another level of awareness, the existence of which I discover only upon reaching it.

I have commented previously on one such surprise: discovering the probable sex of our baby meant that we were incubating a she, rather than an it. We now refer to her constantly by name, which makes it much easier than the uninitiated might suppose to conduct in-depth discussions about what she might be up to at any given moment. The possibilities for this are admittedly quite limited, but that's really not the point.

So I was feeling smug and content with my conversations about which of the numerous available activities our daughter-to-be was indulging in, when she found a new one.

Apparently it's normal for first time mothers to feel their baby kicking after about 18 weeks. So imagine my wife's horror when, after 18 weeks and a couple of days, she was yet to feel anything. At least nothing that could be distinguished with any certainty from some gas. And we can all feel that. I feel it quite often.

But then it began. I'm not sure how my wife knew that this time it was genuine baby movement. I think it's just one of those things that a woman knows. But our (probable) daughter was suddenly kicking away and rolling about all over the shop. There was - and still is - no apparent pattern to what she does when (despite our ongoing analysis and discussion of this), but I can always tell because it brings instant, unconditional joy to my wife's face, in a way that I only wish I could achieve. And also because she tells me.

So, already, I'm playing second fiddle to the fruit of my own loins, and the fruit hasn't even been, um, picked yet. But I don't mind, because sometimes, if I put my hand in just the right place on my wife's tummy at just the right time, and apply just the right amount of pressure, I can feel it too. And it instantly scythes through all my prior smug assumptions of complete engagement with my daughter's impending existence, and makes me very happy. And my wife and I share an immediate glee which is exclusive to us, in a way which I would previously have been quite aggressively cynical about.

And I think this has something to do with why parents are a bit embarrassing sometimes; a bit lacking in self awareness. I think they all have this special secret knowledge that some things transcend that sort of thing. They never speak of it to outsiders, but they all know how it feels, however briefly, to be unashamedly happy.

I feel like I'm getting a bit carried away here. I'll show some decorum while I still can, and stop there. If you think I'm being silly, though, make a baby and then see how emotionally restrained you are.