Step away from the vehicle

With hindsight, not keeping it in the boot of the car is quite a wise move.

I can only imagine the bewildered looks and cautious questioning I would be on the receiving end of should it be exposed.

It wouldn’t take much more than a fender bender or a heavy accelerator foot for a member of my host Queen’s police force to be rummaging through the contents of my boot.

I envisage holster clips being released and faces turning solemn as the bag is opened and its contents removed, item by item.

Baby clothes. Several pairs of underwear. Pajamas. A bag of sucky sweets. A prepaid mobile phone. Not to mention the digital camera.

The absence of a roll of duct tape is all that would save me from spending my child’s first hours in police custody whilst they verified that it isn’t actually a kiddie fiddler’s starter kit, but is in fact nothing more sinister than the famed hospital bag.

Packed and ready to go, like my sanity.

1 week, 2 days.

Pucker up

Midwives are magic Zen masters.

They exude an air of calm and leave you treats of mental time to spare.

So when one sees a midwife spring into huffy action making speedy appointments on your behalf, using phrases like ‘low fluid’ and ‘handing you over to the gynaecologist’, your heart beats that little bit less comfortably and the time to spare evaporates.

Yesterdays midwife visit was one such moment. ET is big and round, and only getting bigger and rounder. In an attempt to measure the baby the midwife had doubts over the level of amniotic fluid she could feel and thought it better to arrange an ultrasound to be on the safe side.

So there we found ourselves once again staring up at a grainy screen having unidentifiable body parts pointed out to us against a whooshy soundtrack. It transpires that all is well and the midwife’s caution was just her being thorough.

She was right on one point; it’s a big ‘un. Quite an odd shaped big ‘un by all accounts. With short wee legs, and a small head, it still manages to weigh more even now than most newborns do thanks to a ginormous belly.

We are basically breeding a Jerry Springer guest. A short arsed fatty. At least we will save on the cost of a paternity test.

As we left she semi-jokingly commented that it could easily arrive tonight.

That remains to be seen, but in the meantime this isn’t a bad sight to tide us over.

1 week, 6 days.

Turning you off your cereal

I'm impotent. Or maybe omnipotent. Or omnipresent perhaps, I forget.

Some one of those anyway, but basically I'm in many places today. Here, and somewhere deep in the bowels of today's Irish Times health section.

Early last year they featured an article about our attempts to conceive, and today they ran a short catch-up piece for the sane people with jobs who don’t read here every day.

Complete with picture that makes me look like an anaemic wino with a glandular problem, and a title that will nauseate many, today's article can be found here.

For the lazy among us, the original feature was run last March and a follow up based on the reaction it generated ran a few days later.

As you were.

Far more entertaining are the guesses being placed here. Go on, give it a shot.