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.