Baby on the way


About ten minutes after I lay down to sleep, my wife started shuffling around on the bed, and shortly after that we realised her waters has broken. The hypnobirthing term for that is "membranes releasing" but I think that makes it sound like she’s some sort of weird jellyfish, so I avoid calling it that.

Like any caring, involved father, when I heard this news I went to the office. We had prepared ourselves for an early birth but not this early, so we didn’t have a bag packed or any copies of our birth plan printed out. I wandered back to the flat, and my wife was going back to sleep again. I had time to update my Facebook status, and then I went to bed too, fairly sure that would be my last chance to sleep for a long time.

I was wrong. We got up at 7 and took a taxi to the hospital. A taxi whose driver complained when I only had a fifty dollar bill, as if I was going to be worried about having a convenient amount of change above all other things today. My wife was admitted to the labour wing and installed in bed in a few moments, and by 9 this morning we were both asleep again.

This is fairly boring, if one is to be brutally honest. No panic-stricken staff running hither and thither, no complex machines beeping and chirping, no bright lights, no shouting for fresh towels and buckets of hot water. Just my wife sat on a bed, doing her best to be serene and breathe gently.

This is also nothing to complain about. After all, you don’t get to spend every day of the week in a dimly lit room, watching your wife breathe. It’s not the most mentally taxing task I’ve ever had. And time flies; twenty minutes feels like five, as slowly she widens and thins. Not very long to go now, I assume.

[categories Family]


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