Time's Up, Shorty

“Well, that wasn’t very magical,” says my wife.

She’s right. It really wasn’t. I’m not sure what we’d been expecting, but I distinctly remember being promised magic. Everyone we’d spoken to had said the 20-week scan was going to be an amazing experience. By now our baby would look like a baby, and not like the weird grey jellybean it looked like at three months. We’d get to say hi. We’d connect with it. We’d see it wriggling around doing cool stuff, like sucking its thumb and kicking it legs; maybe some shadow puppetry against the uterus wall. It was going to be awesome. It was going to be magical.

It was going to be no such thing.

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That’s everyone told then. I appear to have announced my impending parenthood, not via the traditional method of Facebook status or Twitter update, but instead through a sodding full-page magazine article with colour pictures. (I really should have ironed that cardi.) Obviously I’d told my family already, but an embarrassing number of friends and colleagues were still in the dark until two weeks ago. The truth is, you spend so long keeping it a secret that it becomes quite a hard habit to break.

In spite of this, I’ve had a lot of messages of support and congratulations from everyone. And more than a few suggestions that if I want to keep my marriage I should ease off on the flatulence chat. Which is, of course, nonsense. If I can do one good thing with this column it will be to spread the word that pregnant women are windy. Really windy. The truth will set you free, ladies.

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