My son, your daddy is not perfect.

You are a long way from being able to read this, my son. As I type these words on a cutting-edge computer that you will one day see as an antique, you are currently kicking your mum from the inside.

Something else you are doing is being very responsive to my voice – you become very active in there when I speak to you through her tummy. It must sound like thunder in there. Sorry about that, lad.

I wanted to tell you a bit about your dad. Me. I want you to know that, while you are a child, I may seem tall, strong and omnipotent. I may seem able to solve any problem and answer any question. I may seem odd and scary and strange and funny and happy and sad. I'm bits of all these things, but what I am not is perfect. I try my best, though. I will continue to do so once you're out here in the world, and will do everything I possibly can to ensure you are safe, loved and brought up to be a good person.

I am not perfect, but I will be the best dad that I can be. Remember, I've never done this before and I will no doubt make a lot of mistakes along the way, but I love you and will always do so. What I am not trying to do here is offer an excuse for being a bit rubbish at life.

I just want you to know I'll always do my best and be there for you, not because people have let me down in the past - which they have massively – but because I want to. I have to. You and your mum are the most important things in my world. Yes, more than the junk I collect and the stuff I talk about which probably bores you stupid. More than that old black guitar that I keep talking about. More than the CDs and books and magazines with my name on them.

I haven't even met you yet my boy, and yet you're the most important person I have ever had in my life. I'm not a millionaire or a scientist, a hero or an adventurer. I'm just me, a bloke bumbling from one ay to the next like everyone else. My son, your daddy is not perfect. However, I try my best. Love you, lad.

Can You Hear Me In There?

I have been informed that our baby can now hear our voices from inside the womb. This is at once amazing and distressing. On one hand it has meant that I have started talking to my lady's belly, singing to it, playing my guitars to it, and aiming music at her tummy with lovely results (our son seems to be very fond of old Def Leppard songs).

He seems to wriggle and make his presence felt during these moments of interaction. The thing is, the flipside of this is that we are trying to clean up our language.

Of course, it would be silly of us to expect our unborn soon to understand words like ****, ****, ****, **** or ******, or even to hear anything other than a muffled jumble of noises with our tone of voice, but we are doing our best to become sensible parents long before he is born.

My lady has even taken to coming up with her own swear words to use around him once he is out here in the big, noisy world. These are inoffensive outbursts that are all but meaningless to other grown ups, but in reality to us they signify some of the most brutally rude words in the English language.

So, to you my son, I hope you appreciate the fact that your impending arrival has already had an effect on how we talk and the way we live our lives. Mind you, no matter the hassle, no matter the difficulty, it will all be worth it just to be with you, my little boy. If you can hear me in there, hear me now: Your daddy loves you.

Our Amazing Friends

We have some truly amazing friends. This is being brought home by the sheer amount of advice and the many offers of baby gear that have been coming our way of late. As my lady's pregnancy continues to grow (and my god, it's growing fast), we are being inundated with baby stuff from friends far and wide, and we can't thank them enough.

 We are extremely grateful for every bit of advice and every sleep suit that people have been kind enough to hand us. Of course, we have been going mad buying a huge amount of stuff in order to prepare for the arrival of our son, but these gifts of advice and gear are massively appreciated.

 It has been this outpouring of well-wishing and helpful knowledge that has helped to put me at ease a little of late. I know I'm not alone in what I'm going through as a first time dad, and my lady is justifiably getting way more help and advice from friends. After all, she's the one carrying our little boy around in her belly.

My point here is that you should not turn down help from friends at this turbulent time in your life, folks. Don't be too proud or headstrong to say “Yes, actually I have no idea what I'm supposed to do and some pointers would be grand.” This is a time where it's actually feeling good to be growing up a bit at last.

Important things are happening, life is changing, preparations are being made and the old me is being left behind somewhere. The thing is, despite the chaos, the uncertainty and all of the worries that we're facing, we are constantly being reminded of our amazing friends, and just how much they mean to us. Thanks, you guys. I hope we can do you justice and be halfway as decent parents as you. You may never know how much I admire you all.

I See You, My Son

Dear world: We are having a son. Yesterday myself and my lady were witness once again to one of the most wonderful technological marvels of our age – the Ultrasound scan. This was our second scan and it was thrilling, from the moment we arrived and waited until the final moments of the scan when we discovered that the shape we had been referring to by an affectionate nickname could now be referred to by the name we had chosen for a little boy.

Once again I was mesmerised by the level of detail that was visible on the crystal clear LCD screens that the delightfully pleasant midwife was working from. Hand in hand with my other half, we watched in awe as each part of our baby's body was examined, catalogued and checked for abnormalities.

We gasped in even more awe as we watched the baby, our beautiful son, moving around inside his mummy's tummy. One of the defining moments of our lives had arrived, and it was so much better than I could ever have hoped. Technology is marvellous, but at that moment it really did seem like magic.

Plus, it wasn't just a fuzzy image of a vaguely baby-shaped conglomeration of pixels. It was a baby. Our baby. Our son. We saw him, getting comfortable, moving his arms, arranging his legs into a new position. We saw his brain, his heart beating strong, his bones through his precious skin. We saw our son and we held hands ever tighter.

We left the hospital soon afterwards, clutching new scan photos and marvelling over them on the bus back to town. We celebrated with hot food from the Christmas market in the town square and lots of laughter, many meaningful glances and a swelling of pride that could rival the swelling of my lady's belly. Seeing him there, much bigger than before, growing perfectly as he should, gave me a heady cocktail of emotions. At once elated and scared, bringing it all home ever more that I'm about to be a daddy for the first time.

Well, my dear son, I will do all that I can to make you proud. I see you, my boy, and I look forward to you seeing me for the first time.

Tomorrow we will know

Tomorrow is going to be a big day in the chronicles of our lives as individuals, a couple and a family. Tomorrow we will (hopefully) find out whether our baby is a boy or a girl. It's time for our second scan, and will (hopefully) take place at a moment when the little 'un is willing to display itself in all its glory to the Ultrasound monitor. It's a strange moment to consider.

This is a moment that has always seemed vague and far away in the distant future until right here and now. It's one of those moments that you think about when younger as being a million years off, not tomorrow. Tomorrow is a very real prospect.

It's weird, that sense of strange displacement. The realisation that one of the moments you briefly pondered as a kid is about to come to pass, and the sudden dawning that you still feel like the same kid that pondered it. I do still feel about 18 in my head, despite what my 33 year-old body is telling me. 

Tomorrow is going to be scary and wonderful, and I am very excited indeed. Excited and terrified. This is becoming more and more real with each passing day, and the enormity of it all is starting to seep in.

 More than anything though, I am looking forward to finding out what I have to look forward to. Baby, whichever you are, and whoever you grow up to be, I am very much looking forward to learning more about you tomorrow. Love, daddy.

Will I Be Good Enough?

Something that I expect a lot of expectant fathers go through is the worry that they may not be a good enough dad. This is foremost on my mind at the moment. I know I won't be the perfect parent, but I want to try and be the best I can for baby.

I want to be good enough. A good dad.

Something that has been playing on my mind of late is that I want my baby to be proud of me. I want it to look back in later life with fondness. I know that by the time my child is capable of reminiscing it will have completely forgotten about its early life, but I want to do the best I possibly can from day one.

People are telling me, endlessly, about sleepless nights to come. About the tiredness and the stress and everything else that goes hand in hand with raising a baby, and I am trying to prepare myself for it. I want to face these challenges head-on and do my very best for this brand new person.

But the question remains – Will I be good enough? Will I be able to be the father that I want to be? I hope I'm not alone in these concerns, and if you're going through something similar, I can relate. Sadly, until the actual event and the subsequent years of fatherhood, I doubt there'll be a proper answer for anyone.

Friends are telling me, because I am concerned about being a good enough daddy right now, then in all likelihood I'll do well once baby is here. I am not convinced, but not because I don't respect the opinions of my friends and loved ones. Not at all.

I am not convinced because this is a whole new world for me, uncharted territory, an all-new experience. I have no experience that compares to this, and as such I can't help but be concerned. Will I be a good enough daddy? I don't know, but I'm going to try. I promise.

The Night I Heard My Baby's Heart

Hmm, that sounds like an old blues song, but it's true. The night before last I heard our child's heartbeat, thanks to using a gadget a close friend of ours has passed onto us. It's called a Doppler (or a Fetal Heart Detector), and to be honest I had never heard of the thing before yesterday. It looks like a toy, but when pressed against my lady's belly it allowed us to hear what's going on inside her.

I listen to a lot of stuff with headphones, but when I plugged mine into the Doppler and heard my baby's heart for the first time, I swear I've never heard anything quite so beautiful. It was a little difficult finding baby at first, but it was worth the effort.

First we found my lady's heartbeat, which is a beautiful sound in itself, but I wasn't quite prepared for hearing baby's heart beating deep inside her. It brought to mind our first scan, when we saw our baby for the first time as the Ultrasound image formed on a crystal clear LCD screen.

We didn't say a word as we saw our child for the first time. We didn't cry, didn't move, didn't exclaim at all. We were holding hands, and as that image became real in front of us we clutched each other tighter. This was repeated when we heard baby's heart the other night. It felt like magic was real.

I guess Arthur C. Clarke was right all along - “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

On the strength of hearing our unborn baby's heart beating, and baby moving around inside its mummy, I would have to agree. I love technology, I follow science and advanced in modern thinking, but that sound could only be described as magic.

The Bump Is Growing

We're at seventeen weeks now, so I have some catching up to do in terms of going through all of the many emotional states that have passed through me in recent months, but something very tangible is happening that I must tell you about. The bump is growing, and it is already starting to pick up pace in its expansion.

Now, while I was fully aware of the physical chaos going on inside my girlfriend's middle, but it was when the bump started to show that everything started to crash into place in my mind and become a bit more real. We're having a baby. It's in there. It's growing. Soon we will be able to feel it moving around and kick.

My lady just went away for the weekend with a group of friends, and a friend of ours who is mother to a beautiful little boy helped my girl try to find our baby's heartbeat. She managed it, and I was so moved to hear about it.

We're going to see if I can find it for myself tonight. It is moments like these that are starting to make me feel like my fatherly tendencies are kicking in. You see, it's all too easy to say 'yeah, we're expecting. It's amazing', but until there is some kind of physical manifestation of this equally exciting and terrifying process, it doesn't quite feel real.

But there it is. A bump. A bump with our baby inside it. It's coming, and I'll never get any sleep again. I can't complain though, as I will still be able to see my feet in the coming months.

"We're having a baby!"

Those were the words my girlfriend said to me the moment we found out we were going to be parents, sat on the floor of our bathroom waiting to see if two lines would appear in the window of the pregnancy test.

We tried not to think about how the test had been done (it's hardly all that appealing, is it?) and concentrated on the two little windows. The test window filled with a line, swiftly followed by a line in the 'Pregnant' window.

"You're... pregnant!" I exclaimed, and we threw our arms around each other. To be sure we'd not got a duff test, we did the other one in the box. Lo and behold, that too was positive. We're pregnant. Well, my girlfriend is, but you get the idea.

We were ecstatic, and rang our mothers in order to tell them the good news. We held off telling anyone else until we'd spoken to a doctor and got everything checked out by a qualified person and not a little plastic tube covered in wee. It seemed the polite thing to do.

That's how it began, and that's how I'll start here.

If you're in a similar situation, I hope you find some use here. If not advice, then at least the knowledge that you're not alone in your fears and your excitement.

Hello. I'm going to be a daddy.