The helpless blog of a first-time dad: We’re pregnant!

WE follow reporter Darryl on his exciting, and sometimes scary, journey into fatherhood for the first time.

The champagne has been on ice for 20 years.

It was in 1995 that I won a bottle of Dom Perignon for winning a pool tournament. Not being that great at pool I realised this was probably going to be a one-off so rather than jumping up onto the table and spraying it everywhere like I’d just won a Grand Prix which was my first thought I decided there and then I’d keep it until the birth of my first child.

Cut a long story short, two decades later it’s still on a shelf in my fridge waiting to be opened.

Relationships have come and gone and commitment has been avoided until earlier this year when I finally decided to settle down (or, to put it another way, I managed to hide my obsession with sport from a woman long enough to trick her into marrying me).

In truth, the commitment was made three years ago when Hannah and I bought a three bedroom house together. In comparison to living with someone for the first time, and suddenly finding myself watching EastEnders and The X Factor instead of El Clasico and NFL, married life hasn’t meant much of an adjustment.

But being the son of a shop steward and the daughter of a socialist we’d both been brought up to view living with two spare bedrooms as the height of bourgeois excess so as soon as we’d made our coupling official in the old-fashioned sense we turned our attention to having children.

Which brings us to our belated honeymoon cruise on the South China Sea.

We’d docked in a place called Vung Tau, two hour’s drive south east of Ho Chi Minh City, and were about to embark on a day trip to the Cu Chi tunnels, the underground lair that had hidden the Viet Cong from the Americans in the Vietnam War.

Darryl and his wife on their honeymoon cruise (Image: Darryl Smith)

I was pottering around trying to work out how best to attach the strap of my money belt for a day’s scrambling around on my hands and knees when my wife stepped out of the bathroom with something that looked like an electric toothbrush and a big smile on her face (something which only reinforced my initial thought that she was showing off about her toothbrush). But, no. It was something more life-changing than shiny white teeth.

“I’m pregnant,” she said, waving a stick she had very recently urinated over under my nose.

For 30 seconds I had a carefree sense of elation that my bits worked – then was overcome with a feeling of responsibility the like of which I’d never felt before.

It may have been an embryo the size of my fingernail but to me “it” was already a human being my flesh and blood – that had bedded down in my wife’s tummy and I was being put on watch.

Outside our cabin window was a country with 17,128 cases of malaria last year. You can’t go nine months in Asia without someone coming up with a new name for another strain of flu. Has Hannah been taking her folic acid tablets? Oh my god, I think a snake is wrapping itself around my legs oh, it’s my money belt.

If this was how I felt in the first five minutes one thing was for sure.

By the time the baby arrives in May I’m really going to need that drink.