Time has been in short supply of late, what with University, some part time work that I needed to do before I sank financially and then of course family commitments which are my life right now and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Mason is now 10 weeks old and fit and well after his early bout of not gaining weight which scared the bejeebers out of me, I’m proud to say he’s now quite the chunky munky. But what I really want to talk about is child birth or rather my experiences of it and not in a “ooooh it’s so hard for the man” kind of sexist piggy kind of way… I hope.

Firstly we felt like we had been waiting forever, we were convinced he would be early which meant the closer it got to his due date the worse it felt and then after his due date it was even worse. If I can give any advice to any couple it would be to not tell anybody that you think your child will be early, i lost it on facebook one day because everybody knew we thought he would be early and would ask if he was here yet which added to our frustration. If I were to give any advice to friends of people expecting a baby I would say don’t keep asking if the baby is here yet, believe me when the baby does come you will find out one way or the other.

Anyhoo 6 days after the due date mild (and when I say mild that’s not me taking anything away from Jen it’s just they are mild by comparison) contractions started in the afternoon. It’s hard to relate to what’s going on as a man because the most logical comparison of the way this feels is apparently really bad period pain, in addition to this Jen had these feelings before several times so your in a weird state of prepared for everything and nothing at the same time. During this period a none the wiser three year old is running around and you don’t want to alert them to the fact that anything is wrong in case it freaks them out, it’s a false alarm or both. Then the point came that Jen knew it was the real thing, I’d like to think I would be as calm as her if I were in her shoes, I’d also like to think that i was as calm as her after she shared this knowledge with me. I’d like to think I had the body of an Adonis too but I also know that this is not the case.

Jen asked me to ring her dad to come pickup Ruby. Everything became very real very quickly but before the reality a brief moment of nothing. If somebody told you that you had won a million pounds that information would not sink in straight away, your brain would take a moment to process that A. somebody had just won a million pounds and B. that person was you and this is how I think I felt at that moment. If it were the movie of my life (TV Movie or straight to DVD of course) the screen would go soft focus and blurry round the edges and the sound would be muffled with a very slow pull to a wide shot then snap back in to a tight shot with clear sound and visuals. That kind of disconnectedness that must have only lasted .54153394 of a second before that amazing I’ve won a million pounds/ we are going to have a baby feeling kicked in.

Two whole hours have passed in which period checks were being made (clothes, nappies etc), hands were being held and grimaces of discomfort and pain were being made. Its now 9pm on Tuesday the 5th of January 2010, I don’t know if you were in or around South Yorkshire on that date i also don’t know if you remember the weather on that date, but i do. There was a lot of cold wet white stuff on the floor and more of it was falling from the sky. The car was covered in it and needed warming up and de snowing ready for our trip to the hospital. The roads were slippy and quiet, snowy nights like that always remind me of the BBC kids drama from my childhood called “The box of Delights”. The hospital is not far away from our home and we got there within ten minutes and were greeted by a very smiley and friendly midwife who informed us that due to the weather they were under staffed and (her words) “i apologise in advance for the level of care you are likely to receive”. I think in anybody’s book of “comforting things to say to a woman in labour” these words would not feature.

In order to keep the post size down i figured i would split this into before, during and after so this is as suggested by the title part 1 of 3