Get ready

My wife keeps thinking she's about to have a baby. Normally, as a responsible husband, I would be obliged to seek help for a spouse with such an alarming delusion. Except that this is no delusion. I also keep thinking she's about to have a baby. She is about to have a baby. I keep issuing warnings to my boss at work:

"I may have to disappear for four weeks at any moment."

"Yes, yes. Not due for another month though, is it?"

"Well no, but..."

"I shouldn't worry then."

I don't think he believes me. Of course it should and could be another month until labour day. But our first daughter arrived a month early, and my wife is experiencing portents of birth with increasing frequency. Her sleepless nights have been made yet more uncomfortable by the acute backache she suffers at sudden intervals. Her bump is dropping like a stone. A really heavy stone in her womb. There is no delicate way to add that she keeps feeling like she's being poked from within down there. This makes it difficult to resist imagining our next daughter knocking impatiently on the exit door.

Our only plausible reaction to all of these omens is to get ready. The hospital bag has been packed and waiting in the hall for a week or so now. I have taken to illegally keeping my phone on me at work. (On silent, of course.) Today we have reluctantly turned down an invitation to a friend's birthday lunch on the grounds that the venue is more than ten miles from the nearest maternity ward. I have become less prone than usual to taking risks with the volume of petrol in my car. Most dramatically of all: I can at no point drink more than the legal driving limit. Not that this is something I regularly do anyway, but not being allowed to makes me curiously thirsty.

Another addition to our preparation is that we have the grandmothers on call, eagerly awaiting the opportunity to cushion the forthcoming frenzy of child-based activity with generous helpings of love, attention and maternal wisdom. One of their main responsibilities will be to ensure that our first daughter retains an acceptable level of attention throughout the drama to come. I will be the sole birth partner for this birth, as the product of the previous one is kept company by Nana at home.

But it's in the long term that we must continue to make our daughter know how much she is loved, needed and wanted. And she, herself seems alive to this issue already. She has recently become extremely cute, being unprecedentedly forthcoming with the hugs and kisses. Even more impressive, though, is the acceleration in the growth of her vocabulary. She has, in the last couple of days, mastered the words apple, beans, ball, star and circle, all of which she will describe while eating, pointing at or bouncing as appropriate. I'm increasingly convinced that she is familiar with the numbers two and four. Clearly she is an even numbers kind of girl.

She also knows her favourite toys by name now, and will regularly request the company of or converse with Puppy, LaLa, Lola and, most pertinently of all, Baby. This will soon be a very useful word around here.