Baby Bird - Part II

For the past thirteen weeks, Stephanie and I have been harbouring good news. I’m proud to finally announce that Stephanie is pregnant again and that come November, we’ll hopefully be celebrating the safe arrival of a long awaited brother or sister for Oliver.

As much as you try planning life’s big events, moving out, getting married, having children they do inevitably get mixed up with circumstances, uncertainties and the perennial question of “am I doing the right thing?” Making the decision to finally have a child with Stephanie after so long in courtship set off a huge chain of events that tied us to one another for the rest of our lives. This time around the decision to have another child came with a sense of freedom and an acceptance that what we was about to set off on was another journey of excitement and trepidation.

Having a child the first time around, everything is new, every day brings something different, whether it be Stephanie’s body changing in response to nature’s pre-programmed setting that creates the perfect vessel for motherhood, or the first moment you see the baby kick and the ‘bump’ starts to pulse like something from a sci-fi movie. This time we know what to expect, and far from diminishing the experience, it actually enhances it as you know what is coming up.

We’ve been asked quite a few times since we shared our news if we had a preference to gender. We’d both obviously like a girl to complete the set, one of each. But ask Oliver you’ll more than likely get a different answer (“a sister Daddy, a Boy”), who’d like a brother to play with. Stephanie has an older sister and the pair of them get on really well and are close, whereas I never had that. Me and Jessica get on really well, but there are differences between how two brothers or two sisters get on than one of each sex. Having said that, if we do have another boy there will be the inevitable question, shall we try once more for luck? The danger being that wanting a girl starts to become an obsession and the unlikely, but not unheard of event of rejecting the third child because of them not fulfilling a desire.

Last week, we met our growing child for the first time in our twelve weeks scan, the marking point at the end of the first trimester where it is suggested “safe” to inform people of your news. We had already told our close friends and family and “revealing all” via Facebook and the blog was the next logical step. Stephanie was already pregnant first time around when I started my blog back in the summer of 2006. Documenting feelings, events, things that happened became therapeutic at the time, a coping mechanism for these strange and foreign things that were happening daily around me. It’s the reason why I do this. My life isn’t exciting, I don’t have a jet set job or adulated by millions. It’s hardly the diaries of Samuel Pepys, but if I’m lucky to live to a ripe old age I can look back and remember these milestone events and how they happened, why they happened and more importantly - who they happened with.