The helpless blog of a first time dad: Pregnancy pause is driving me bananas

Time moves slowly when waiting for labour to begin (Andrei Zametalov)

I was typing away on my computer at work but a glance towards my mobile on my desk told me this could be the main news item of my day.

The call was from Hannah. There was no reason for her to be calling me at this moment. She was due to go for lunch with a friend and she knows I only take calls at work in an emergency.

My heart skipped a beat. Is this the call from my wife to tell me she had gone into labour and our lives were about to change forever.

“Hello” I said, answering the phone with a gulp of anticipation.

“Hi. Did you get me any bananas from Sainsbury’s?”

I guess we have a different view of what an emergency is.

Now I hesitate to call this a false alarm. The thought that this phone call heralded imminent fatherhood lasted the briefest of moments, from the time of the phone ringing to my instant realisation upon answering it that my wife’s tone was not one of mild panic that her waters had broken but one of minor annoyance that I hadn’t bought her enough fruit to see her through the week at home.

But it does give you an example of the heightened state we exist in at the moment.

The first four and a half months of my wife’s pregnancy went quite slowly. My first trip to Mothercare seems a lifetime ago.

Then we reached 100 days to go and everything went into hyperdrive and life became a blur.

We went to see Derren Brown in January and I swear he put me in a trance that has left me with no memory of the first quarter of the year.

In that time writing my blog became not so much a source of entertainment for you, the reader, as it was a document of record so that I could refer back to it like an amnesia sufferer checking what I’d actually been up to.

Then April arrived and somebody seems to have stopped all the clocks.

Although my wife’s due date is still a week off, she has been “full term” (37 weeks) for over a fortnight. So, if it was so inclined, Junior could have arrived at any moment in that time and not be classed as premature.

But Junior is not so inclined. Far from it, it seems. He’s content to just lie in my wife’s womb, growing larger by the day, getting all his food passed to him, even having his breathing done for him. I can’t blame him for being in no rush to start doing everything for his or her self but it sure is tedious waiting on the outside for the off.

Time has never moved so slowly in my life. I live every minute. Daily chores are now proceeded with the refrain “this could be the last time I cook the dinner/empty the bins/eat a banana” before I become a dad. In the evenings I just stare at my wife’s stomach just looking for a sign that Junior wants out.

I’m beginning to get on my own nerves so heaven knows what my wife thinks of me (to be fair, she does get her own back at 4am most mornings when, unable to sleep now because of the sheer awkwardness of her shape, she’ll wake me up to ask something trivial like “When we went to Italy, what was the name of that cheese I liked?”)

Hannah takes a brief break from cleaning... and thinking about cheese — Hannah takes a brief break from cleaning… and thinking about cheese

When not enquiring about European cheeses, my wife is cleaning. Everything is being given the once over with a bottle of Cif and a Jiffy cloth. We’re going to welcome our child to a house that smells like the bottom half of a giant lemon meringue pie.

Such is her sanitising mania she even cleaned the toilet with a toothbrush. Junior’s not going to be able to sit on it for two and half years. And I didn’t have a spare!

As well getting on each other’s nerves, it would be better for our own if Junior arrived before next Wednesday (his due date) because, for the first time in the history of the NHS, junior doctors working in maternity wards are going to go on strike in England and Wales.

Yes, that’s right, 70 years of history, and it could be the most important day of our lives that they stage a walk out.

Looking for possible alternatives, and to relieve the tedium of waiting for an hour at least, we tuned in to BBC2’s Five Star Babies: Inside the Portland Hospital last week.

This programme gave a behind-the-bed-curtain peek at Britain’s only private maternity hospital.

Victoria Beckham had given birth there, as had the Duchess of Cambridge. Indeed there was general astonishment that Kate left hospital just 12 hours after arriving when giving birth to Princess Charlotte last May.

But at £1200-a-night I’m with Prince William on that one. I’d make my wife’s stay as short as possible as well.

Watching the programme is about as close as my wife will get to being “inside the Portland” but, such is its reputation as being the best that money can buy, wealthy mums-to-be from around the world are not as easily put off by the price tag as me when it comes to having their heirs delivered there.

These included Hui, who we were told was a “high society it girl from China” but who might as well have come from another planet compared to my wife and all the other expectant mums I’ve met at our NCT classes.

Hui couldn’t imagine giving birth naturally (it sent her into a fit of giggles) and wanted her baby son cleaned and a nappy put on it before she would touch it after her caesarean section. So much for skin-to-skin contact.

Hui’s four-night stay at the Portland came to just under £40,000 and her main fear about motherhood was how quickly she’d get back in shape so no one would steal her husband.

As he was paying the bill, her concern was understandable.

But for all Hui’s wealth I didn’t envy her lifestyle, even if it’s extremely unlikely she bothers her husband at work with questions about bananas.

No amount of gunge is going to stop me from welcoming Junior into the world with a hug.

Any day now…

The helpless blog of a first time dad: We didn’t make a boob attending local NCT class