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?

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.

Good news and bad news.

Don't panic - the bad news doesn't relate directly to mother or baby, who are both in rude health as far as we know. However we have all been very upset by a big change in our circumstances, which I don't really want to talk about, but feel like I should.

Last week we came to the very difficult decision to have our dog, Frankie, rehomed. He has always been hard work on account of his boisterous, energetic nature. And he has always found it very difficult to make friends with any other animals (apart from humans), not least our cats. They understandably found his presence quite inconvenient, to the point where one of them once tried to blind him, and very nearly succeeded. Frankie, it turned out, is not one for forgiving and forgetting.

We had hoped that moving house would somehow break his bad habits. But no. This was new territory and it was up for grabs. I refuse to describe him as an aggressive dog, but you don't have to be malicious to be dangerous. After a couple of weeks of rapidly decreasing authority over him we arrived, tired, stressed and bruised, at the realisation that something had to give. So Frankie is currently at the doggy hotel waiting for his new family to find him. The lady who runs the kennels did her best to assure us that Frankie won't pine for us, and that we have done the right thing for all concerned. But this was still the most upset I have been in a long time.

We know we have made the right decision and I'm not trying to justify anything here, because we don't need to. But this was not an easy choice, and had nothing to do with our convenience or happiness, because it certainly doesn't feel like we have achieved either. Rather - and this is what makes the situation relevant to this blog - we have made our first truly difficult, but responsible parental decision. I think we have started to learn the lesson that you have to risk making yourself unpopular, and you have to risk making yourself cry to keep your child safe at all costs. I think we are becoming grown ups.

Which doesn't exactly bring me to the good news, but it's about time for some, so here it is: my wife had a scan for medical reasons last week. It wasn't a fun one, during which you just look at the baby and coo and point and then take a photo home. But the nice lady doing the scanning did her best to manufacture that situation, sneaking in a look inside the bump and revealing that, to the best of her knowledge (which seems to translate as "probably"), it contained a girl. We are having either a girl or a very modest boy. Well, no son of mine...etc, so we are assuming that this tentative gender diagnosis is correct.

As my description of this news as "good" implies, we are very happy about this. For the record, I thought it was going to be a girl, and a small part of this happiness derives simply from being right. But I do like the idea of being the father of a daughter. Mainly, just knowing (or probably knowing) makes it all seem more real. Which is nice. We have chosen a name, but revelations of it thus far have met with a slightly upsetting mixed reception, so I'm being shy about it now.

In other news: Cessation of sickness, itchiness and smoking continue successfully, and my wife falls asleep at precisely half past nine every evening.

Ding dong, the itch has gone.

It's been a busy time for we expectant ones. We moved house, which we have been well aware we were about to do for quite some time, and yet it all seemed to come as a bit of a surprise. I hope I'm not saying the same thing about having a baby in six months' time. I think that, on some level, I never really believed that it would finally happen. I hope I'm not saying the same thing about having a baby in six months' time.

Of course, moving house when you are pregnant is probably not recommended by life coaches. The physical strain is an obvious issue, which we overcame through a combination of me not moaning about my back anymore and a lot of help from some friends and relatives. (You know who you are: thanks again.) Thus my wife pulled her weight, but not any muscles. And nobody's conscience was troubled by any threat to the health of she or the baby.

Then there's the stress. Moving house consistently features in lists of very stressful things to do, and with good reason. Once all the stuff has been transported from one place to another (in our case via a third, independent place, just for a laugh), you have to perform dazzling calculations in your mind concerning the order in which to unpack, decorate, get new furniture which suits the architectural authenticity of the new house, and arrange for that carpet to be banished from your house - and preferably this earthly domain - to be replaced by something altogether more palatable and easier to clean when the dog pisses all over it. Any assistance you may need from third parties with any of this will be promised within two weeks, and confirmed a week later to be available in about six months.

These activities must be carefully balanced against the relentless need to phone every person you have ever spoken to in order to obtain a form to fill in so they know that the payments you make to them for whatever it was you originally spoke to them about will now be originating from a different address. This is very important to most of them and should really have been done several years ago.

And then there is the ongoing need to segregate the dog and cats, their magical moment of spontaneous harmony not having happened yet, despite us really hoping that it would. The new surroundings are, of course, incompatible with any sensible form of segregation.

All of which makes me very reluctant to associate with hormones any unusually heightened emotions that may or may not have been displayed recently. Besides, that particular association (which I am not making) only applies to the first trimester, which is now trailing in our wake.

I admit I was sceptical about the promise of any unpleasant symptoms abruptly disappearing upon the stroke of week 13, but it does seem to be coming true. The morning sickness which seemed to have gone long ago, but persistently turned out not to have done, has now actually gone. Touch wood. And best of all, the ridiculous itching - which was really beginning to threaten the future of my wife's skin, not to mention her sanity - has disappeared like some sort of Keyser-Soze-in-the-Usual-Suspects character. Seriously - this was a blight on my wife's life which left her crying herself to sleep, and which I honestly feared would continue indefinitely. I cannot adequately describe the relief I felt when she calmly mentioned that it had stopped, by the way. I probably appeared less excited when she told me she was pregnant.

Appeared.

So. The moral of this story is that the passing of one hardship can overcome the presence of many.

Or: stressed? Tired? Just be grateful your wife's not itchy anymore.

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.