A bit up and down. And up.

I've been putting off writing this, because I don't know where to start. At the risk of rendering the phrase "resorting to cliche" a cliche, I shall have to resort to cliche in describing the past few weeks as an emotional rollercoaster.

In hospital

Despite her impressive size, our daughter was technically over three weeks premature, so the first five days of her life were spent in hospital. They let her mum stay there with her, of course, although this meant that I was left alone to look after myself and the house. I had my first taste of life as a busy person as I struggled to get to grips with the washing machine, the dishwasher, the oven and, for the first time in years, sleeping in solitude. All of this while trying to spend every permissible minute at the hospital. By day two I was being told off for falling asleep in my wife's hospital bed. Apparently that's frowned upon.

I'm well aware, though, that I had the easy role in that first week. My wife's recovery from the most harrowing physical ordeal of her life was spent in a cubicle defined only by a blue curtain which didn't quite go around her bed and our daughter's tastefully soulless perspex cot.

Our daughter initially had quite nasty jaundice, which meant that she had one thing too many in common with David Dickinson, was a bit sleepy and not consistently bothered about feeding. To add to my wife's understandable distress and confusion (as well as my own), one nurse in particular seemed psychotically determined for there to be something seriously wrong with our daughter. Every movement she made was met with a gasp and a knowing look which promised us bad news. At one point this nurse even contrived for us to be led fearfully into a private room, in which a team of paediatricians told us that the nurse's observations compelled them to test our daughter for Down's syndrome.

I don't intend to pollute this blog with negativity and recriminations, but I have to say that this nurse was the only person to "observe" any symptoms relevant to such a diagnosis, and I therefore hold her solely responsible for the unnecessary life changing fears we went through in the days before the test results came back negative. I never discovered this nurse's name, but she is very definitely in the wrong job. The one good thing I can say about this little episode is that it taught me never to take your child's health for granted. Only a week previously I had had such little appreciation of the impact on a parent's outlook that can be caused by the slightest doubt in this respect. I certainly appreciate it now, and would urge any parent to be constantly grateful for all of the things that are not wrong with their child.

Homecoming

Five days after the birth, I brought my daughter and my wife home at last. I'm not sure what kind of fanfare I expected, but the event felt somewhat ant-climactic. We were inundated with cards, presents and visitors during the following week or so - all of which were lovingly intended and gratefully received. My wife's mother and mine were respectively virtually and literally ever-present, and I'm not sure we would have coped without them.

But despite all of this, the second week was, if anything, more difficult than the first. Nothing can prepare you for the profound effect sudden sleep deprivation and a dramatically increased weight of responsibility can cause. Somebody remarked to me that "Nobody tells you how hard it is", and at the time I eagerly agreed. But in retrospect I think that people do try to warn you, and you just don't listen, because you stubbornly believe that your love for your child will overcome any threat to your unbridled joy.

By the end of the second week I was seriously starting to doubt this assertion, and feeling increasingly worried about my wife's physical state (her old foe, SPD was refusing to let the excruciating pain in her pelvis abate), and both of our emotional states. And you can't really tell people that you feel depressed when you have a two week old child. It just seems ungrateful.

Don't worry: everything's going to be ok

Almost literally overnight, everything seemed a bit better. I don't know whether we started to get more sleep, or whether we just got used to less sleep, but suddenly I could understand what people meant when they said you had to really appreciate these early weeks of parenthood.

Every sound our daughter made; every inadvertent grin or glance in my direction - without wishing to resort to cliche - now felt like a cherished gift. I lay in bed one morning with my daughter asleep on my chest, my wife lying serenely at my side, and the sun shining through the window, and I had one of those moments (which only a year ago I would have found nauseating) when you're pre-emptively aware of your own future nostalgia.

With each passing day my wife and I get a little more confident; a little more trusting in our daughter's ability to breathe without us watching; a little more proud of her increasingly beautiful features; and a little more attuned to the nuances in her grunts and grumbles. I think we're quite confident now that the three of us are going to make a rather nice little family.

And any worries we had about our daughter's feeding now seem frankly laughable. During her stay in hospital, she lost 7% of her birthweight (9lb 7oz. Seriously), and had already started to claw back this deficit by the time she came home. Eight days ago she weighed in at 10lb 1oz. Yesterday she was up to 11lb 4oz. One of the midwives remarked that my wife must be producing gold-top. I think it's clotted cream. I want some.

In the hospital they give you a little red book, intended to be your child's health almanac for the remainder of eternity. Towards the back of the little red book is a chart on which to plot your child's weight during his or her early weeks, months and years. Our daughter is literally off the scale. In twelve years or so I imagine this pattern would cause some upset, but for now this is excellent news.

Hurrah.

WE DONE A BABY

I'm still emotionally and physically drained, so I can only hope that the following is in some way coherent, informative and a little bit entertaining. Having built up the excitement of my phenomenally large readership to feverish levels over the past few months, it seems only fair that I should outline the details of the climax. Are you sitting comfortably?

Deceptive sense of anti-climax

We went to bed somewhat disappointed on Saturday evening. Some significant twinges earlier in the week, followed by the removal on Thursday of the band which had for months been holding together my wife's cervix, had convinced us that everything was sure to drop this weekend. My wife had thought that she might be having some mild contractions on Saturday afternoon, but - not having had any before, neither she nor I could be sure. So when, throughout the evening, they failed to escalate into a full-blown agonising labour, we concluded that the wait would continue into the next week. I fell asleep some time before midnight.

At about 12:45 I awoke to the sound of my wife informing me that she thought her waters might have broken, but again couldn't be sure, because the resulting liquid constituted more of a cupful than the bucketful predicted by labour legend. She had more troubling back and downstairs pain than earlier, but it wasn't really coming and going like all well-meaning contractions should.

For the first time I can recall in my almost thirty years, I felt that this may be the moment to be manly and assertive. I decisively phoned the hospital, and told them "Um, er, hi, um, I um, I think my wife's waters broke. A bit. Maybe." Having described the night's proceedings so far to the nurse/midwife on the phone, she recommended that we come on down.

Going for a drive

On the way to the hospital, I nearly took the wrong turn, in an error which betrayed my attempt at remaining calm. "No, that's the DHL warehouse," said my wife, who actually was somehow quite relaxed. At this stage. "Well they do do deliveries," I quipped.

I did laugh.

Just me.

Snoring

Upon arrival at the hospital we had to use the A&E entrance (all the others are closed at night), which meant queueing behind some drunk people with broken legs, who had chosen to suffer their agony right in the doorway. I am ashamed to say that my decisive assertiveness deserted me as we waited patiently, my wife almost doubled up in pain, for the drunk people to move a bit.

Eventually we arrived at the maternity department, just in time to be deposited in a big shared ward full of no doubt delightful but nevertheless heavily snoring ladies who weren't in any apparent labour. Because my wife was under 37 weeks pregnant, this was technically a premature labour, which meant that we had to wait for a doctor (rather than a readily available midwife) to check her progress. Her discomfort was by now increasing exponentially, her SPD really showing us what it was made of. And we felt the need to be very quiet so as not to wake the nice ladies making a cacophony of snoring noise.

After about two hours of this, the doctor made some time for us, and inspected my wife before declaring that we had better get ourselves to the labour ward because she was 9cm dilated. Any fool who's seen Casualty can tell you that ten is the magic number when it comes to dilating. And also that it often takes roughly ages to reach this point. So it was something of a relief to hear that we were there already. It felt like we had cheated. And punishment soon followed, because when my wife took this, her first opportunity to ask for an epidural, she was told that it was too late now. Gas and air then.

The business end

It was about 3:00 when we reached the labour ward. At some stage I had rushed outside to phone my wife's other designated "birth partner", her mother. She arrived to join us at around this point. The next four hours were something of a blur. The ante-natal classes to which we were assigned by a well-meaning local bureaucrat are due to start in about a week, so I only really had love and Casualty to inform my role. I settled upon a repetitive routine of patronising reassurance, which involved mentioning deep breaths and pushing a lot of times each.

Now, I don't want to make this about me, but I have to say that it is unimaginably difficult to watch someone you love in such intense pain. I remember fighting back tears several times as my wife produced screaming noises of which I had no conception she was capable. Her repeated requests for an epidural that would never come redefined desperate perseverance. This was an intense experience. She said afterwards that she had thought she was dying.

Done it

Our beautiful, perfect daughter finally graced us with her presence at 7:02 on Sunday morning. All my withheld tears made a break for it and successfully escaped. I remember repeatedly informing my wife that she had "done it". It turned out that she was already aware of this. The paediatrician was on hand to give our daughter the once over before casually declaring that "she's fine". And that was when the relief kicked in.

Over the next couple of hours this grew into a surreal sense of relaxed euphoria, as our daughter was measured and weighed at 9lb 7oz. Which means that my wife had a 9lb 7oz baby without an epidural. Admiration doesn't begin to cover it.

Post-natal

Once my wife had given our daughter a massive feed, got her breath back and cleaned up a bit (herself, not the room. They have people who do that), we were moved to the post-natal ward. All was happy and well until our daughter had her blood sugar and temperature tested, and both were worryingly low. Furthermore, the ease with which she had fed upon entering the world now seemed to have been a false dawn. She wasn't interested in feeding anymore, refusing to suck from either a nipple or a bottle, and had to have it forced down her with a syringe. And she objected to that.

This continued throughout the day, so that even though our daughter's temperature and blood sugar level were more normal by the evening, the midwife was talking about shoving a tube down her throat. At about this point visiting hours finished and I was again reduced to floods of tears upon leaving the hospital. Granted, I had only had about half an hour's sleep, but this moment made me realise just how much a parent cannot help but care for their child. I went home to bed lonely, worried and overwhelmed.

Improvement

At 6:00 the next morning (this morning) I awoke to a beautiful sunrise and a text message from my wife, telling me that our daughter had fed three times throughout the night. For the second time in 24 hours I experienced delirious relief.

My wife attributed this improvement to the midwife on duty overnight, whose more relaxed and patient attitude had eventually borne fruit. And this raises an interesting point. In general, the staff at the hospital have impressed me beyond description with their commitment, compassion and knowledge. However, the necessary turnover of staff shifts means that you and your baby are subject to the changing opinions of the staff on duty. Consequently, the approach to any problem has no continuity, and varies dramatically, as do the resulting conclusions. I don't know the solution to this, but I was surprised at the obvious impact it can have.

I should clarify that throughout today, our daughter has shown more and more dedication to consuming colostrum, and appears to be healthy and problem free. But I have had a taste of the irrepressible fear I will forever experience: that this situation could change at any moment.

Acknowledgements

Without wishing to mimic an irritating oscar winner, I would like to express my enormous gratitude to the staff at the hospital, to the friends and family who have relentlessly inundated us with good wishes and congratulations, to my parents, who could not contain their eagerness to meet their new granddaughter or their delight at doing so, to my wife's mother, who effortlessly coaxed my wife and I though the most difficult night of our lives, to my wife, whom I once described as my hero, and can think of no better description for her now, and most of all to my beautiful, precious daughter, whose very existence justifies mine.

Thanks then.

Trepidation

We're getting really close to the big day now. And - like on the morning of our wedding, when I woke up at 5 o'clock in the morning with diarrhoea - the tension is mounting. There's an almost tangible sense of excitement and trepidation in the air, the two of them battling for the honour of being our overriding collective emotion.

We've both been growing more impatient for a while now. Firstly because we're rather looking forward to seeing our daughter who, as a direct descendent of my favourite person and my wife's favourite person - decide for yourselves whether we are narcissists or a loving couple (it's the latter) - is bound to be worth meeting.

Secondly, my wife's adverse symptoms are piling up. The swelling is almost permanent, and affecting every extremity (by which I mean her hands and feet rather than anything untoward). Her SPD (extreme hip ache) is relentless in punishing her for any attempt to stand up for more than about five minutes a day. She has also developed carpal tunnel, which basically means her hands are constantly midway between numbness and the pins and needles which immediately follow numbness. And, as a result of our daughter being a typical girl and demanding a lot of space, and the consequent repositioning of my wife's stomach, acid indigestion is an almost constant foe.

All of which seems to get even worse at night, which means that sleep has been very hard to come by for my wife. And, despite her best efforts, my sweet dreams have also been disturbed. We keep telling ourselves with a kind of self-congratulatory irony that this is good practice for the inevitable sleepless nights to come. But a part of me thinks that it would be nice to get in as much slumber as possible now, to build up some sort of sleep credit, as it were. I'm not sure if it works like that, but I guess we'll never know.

Anyway, last night trumped all previous efforts. It seems that our daughter is making preparations to leave, and has made a move towards the exit. In real terms, this means acute lower backache for my wife, as well as various other symptoms which politeness prevents me from describing, but all of which can be grouped together under one general heading: labour pains.

Time and the cold light of day have revealed that they were not labour pains. The nice lady at the hospital has revealed (over the phone - we didn't actually go there) that they do, however, indicate that we can expect labour pains soon. That's not entirely accurate: they reveal that my wife can expect labour pains soon. Either way, the whole experience made it all seem very real and looming. And flippin' scary.

Also very exciting, of course. But trepidation is edging it at the moment.

Don't panic.

Up until the last couple of weeks I've found the pregnancy/impending parenthood combo surprisingly ineffective in the face of my calm, dignified and frankly quite enviably self-assured persona. "Easy for you to say, man," reply, doubtlessly, any mothers or feminists reading. Probably all of the women, actually. And the more reasonable men.

And you're quite right. If there's one cliche which the experience thus far has confirmed - and I hope my musings have reflected this, even though I am fairly confident that they haven't - it's that it's all much easier for nearly-Dad than it is for nearly-Mum.

But so heavy now is the burden on my wife, that even my cracks are beginning to show, so to speak. The last week or so has seen her fluid content increase dramatically, resulting in hands, ankles and feet that look a little bit more like those of the humans in Wall-E than they used to. I'm allowed to use that comparison because my wife came up with it.

Also, her midwife this week revealed some minor anomalies in her protein levels. I'm still resistant to panic, but it seems that she is now only a nasty headache away from pre-eclampsia. For those who don't know, pre-eclampsia can lead to eclampsia, which can be as terminally serious as it gets. I should stress that everybody else is quite relaxed about this possibility, precisely because it is a very small one, but I found myself in the unusual position of being the one who allowed paranoia take hold of my sense of reason for a day or two.

I have now been convinced that your wife's midwife mentioning the name of a condition is not the same as your wife having the condition. Sensible serenity has been restored. But I think the doubt will linger in the corner, occasionally waving frantically in my peripheral vision, until our daughter is born and I can tell it that it is no longer needed, thank you.

Strangely, I was a bit disappointed at remaining much calmer than I would have expected when, this morning, my wife believes she had her first braxton hicks contraction (a false alarm contraction, basically). The first I knew of it was when she interrupted QI (which we had recorded the night before because you go to bed very early when your wife is 33 weeks pregnant) by saying "I think I just had a braxton hicks contraction" in the same tone of voice as she would usually use to tell me what she wanted for lunch, for example.

I suppose my calmness was a reflection of hers. But I'm quite retrospectively excited about it now. To my simple man-mind (a phrase which hopefully will get the feminists back on side), this represents the precursor to the beginning of the beginning of the end which immediately precedes the actual beginning. Which, when you think about it, is really very important.

Hip hip hooray.

Because I'm quite vain, I've been reading back over my previous posts on this blog, and I've realised that, because I'm quite vain, I've said a lot about how I feel, but not enough about the welfare of our main protagonist: my wife.

In my defence, some of her symptoms would have made unnecessary or unpleasant news. To mention them would have been cruel on either their victim or the reader. Or both. Also, so well has she coped with what is, after all, a massive physical ordeal, that I have been far less aware of her suffering than I expected. (That's supposed to be a compliment, as well as an excuse).

But in the last couple of weeks, my wife has started to suffer more noticeably. We have tentatively diagnosed her with SPD, which has nothing to do with a short-lived eighties political party, and everything to do with very, very achy hips. The cliche I expected to see manifested months ago - mother-to-be struggling to sit up, let alone stand or move, and then suffering for hours as a consequence of her efforts - has finally arrived. Or, as my wife puts it, she feels like a barbie doll who has had her legs pulled out and then put back wrong. Her sense of humour, mercifully, remains unaffected.

I think I know why she's suffering: our daughter's enormous. We had another scan the other day, during which they took more measurements than a hyperactive cartographer before estimating that she is already nearly 5lbs. With two months to go. That's going to trouble anybody's hips. And she does like to push her weight around. Another excellent example of maternal humour saw this described as "using my cervix as a trampoline." I did laugh. Apparently it's normal for a baby's size to double in the last month or so, which is why we really hope she emerges early.

I try to avoid gushing, physically or emotionally, but it would be rude not to acknowledge and praise my wife's effort and resilience for the cause. Thanks wife. You won't regret it.

Decoration

We took the plunge last week and decorated the nursery. It never occurred to me beforehand how seminal this is. We were going to pay a man to do the job, but time, money and frustration determined that we chose instead to do it ourselves. So I spent last weekend lovingly painting walls and even woodwork an exciting shade of white. And I'm so glad I did. I feel like my daughter and I have bonded by proxy.

Maybe this seems so significant because we moved here not long ago, so every change we make to the house represents our first (and therefore extremely meaningful) mark on that particular part of it. I do generally feel a slightly excessive amount of pride upon surveying the fruits of our decorating labour so far. In fact, self congratulation is one of my many talents.

But I think this is a parents-to-be thing. It's difficult to stop thinking about my impending fatherhood, thus I feel increasingly emotionally prepared. However, I can naively daydream all I want about what my daughter will sound like when she laughs, or how I'll handle our first disagreement, or what she'll say about me to her friends in 15 years - but with my pragmatic hat on, I realise that nothing compares to decorating the nursery as a real, tangible indication of a baby on the way.

We can now stand in a space created exclusively for our daughter. We can look at the walls, floor and furniture that she will gaze upon in her formative years (although hopefully she'll have more interesting considerations to attend to than staring at the walls). Furthermore, the toys, clothes and various other equipment so far accumulated by our daughter now have a home, which seems to instill in them a purpose.

Another side to this - which I only recognised while I was painting away - is the fond memories I have of watching my Dad decorate my room when I was young. He used to teach me about nouns and verbs while he was painting away. It has been suggested to me that this particular aspect of the memory is not so cool, but my English GCSE begs to differ. Thanks Dad.

It seems obvious that this association has shaped my bizarre emotional connection with decorating. But I should also note that I have been displaying bizarre emotions all over the shop lately. As an example, I have recently been reduced to tears by The Sopranos, Doctor Who, and a predictably predictable Nicholas-Cage-showing-his-sensitive-side vehicle called The Family Man, which ordinarily I would be ashamed of even watching. Well, I still am, and yet I feel obliged to admit that it had me weeping like a hormonal drama queen who's just seen the end of The Champ, having not blinked for ages.

I can only assume that this is some sort of sympathy-hormone issue. I can't decide whether my newfound emotional vulnerability will be a timely aid in my relationship with my daughter, or an embarrassing affliction, from which I hope to recover immediately. I think it depends on who asks.

P.S. Eagle-eyed readers who haven't done already can discover our daughter's name in the accompanying pictures. So now you know. Sorry for being shy about it.

Grown-ups.

What makes people grown up? I've been considering this a lot recently - for what I think are obvious reasons - in both senses: what defines somebody as grown up, and what causes somebody to fulfill that definition? And is it supposed to be hyphenated?

My wife and I have just left the wedding reception of one of a family of dear old friends. We saw some very lovely and interesting people, with whom we very rarely get a chance to spend time. And it was, predictably, a very lovely and interesting occasion.

And we left before 9pm. Disgraceful.

Now, are we just a boring couple who use our bump as an increasingly convincing excuse to flee from amusement at the earliest opportunity? In my darker moments of self loathing, I fear that this is the case. But there are two problems with this outlook. The first is that self loathing is not technically a luxury available to a married man - the "self" includes someone else now, and I have neither the right or the inclination to project my shortcomings onto her. The second is that I don't think it's true.

Rather, I think that we are merely becoming more sensible: saving our money, and our energy for a long drive in the morning, and of course considering the health of mum to be. My transition to prioritising these concerns over drinking lots of beer and dancing until it comes back out again, has been recent enough for me to be aware that it does sound a bit boring.

Which brings me to my realisation that being grown up is defined, not by what you see as boring - contrary to my prior beliefs these perceptions never actually change - but by the fact that you can willingly choose the boring path. Furthermore, you can choose it and still escape the tsunami of regretful despair and humiliation which I had previously assumed would be unavoidable. (I've mixed a few metaphors there, haven't I? Oh well.)

But what brought me to this realisation? If this really is the definition of a grown-up, then what made me grow up? The obvious answer is that I'm going to be a daddy soon, and I have had to accept the responsibilities that this entails. But it hasn't felt like that much of a struggle. I think it's simply a part of getting older and wiser: I just happen to have reached that point in my ongoing emotional development. And that just happens to have coincided with a very real, baby related need for me to have reached that point in my ongoing emotional development. (That does make sense if you read it again.)

Lucky me. And, more to the point, lucky my family. I grew up in the nick of time.

I should point out that I'm still really cool and I could drink you all under the table. Twice. I just choose not to. See?