October 16th 2014 started much like any other Thursday morning but it sure as heck didn’t end like any other.

Here’s the scene. … dog’s been walked,  emails checked, tea made and at my desk in the spare room, starting work for the day, with Mrs H upstairs getting ready to go to work. And then down comes Mrs H,  all ready for work, yet with a slightly puzzled look on her face. Ok so this is  the point when anyone screamish should change channels. This blog is not going to be for the screamish.  So it turns out the cause of the puzzled look is a few spots of blood (I warned you!) In her under crackers. Ordinarily not a huge concern and at 26 weeks pregnant, still not a huge concern but enough to cause the slightly vexed look being sported by Mrs H. So with a bit of persuasion, a message is left for the midwife to confirm that everything is normal and there’s no cause for concern.  Call made and off to work for the day it is. And that was that…no call back from the midwife and the all clear is assumed. Ooops.

Leap forward 10 hours to 6pm and I’m in the car picking mum up from the station and heading over to Fulham to pick up cousin Eve who’s visiting from LA, before meeting Roz (aka Mrs H) and the 4 of us heading out for dinner.  So that was the plan,  to be followed by a weekend at centre parcs… lovely.

Or at least it would have been if that’s the way the evening and weekend had panned out.  There I am, in the car with mum,  about to pick Eve up when Roz calls to tell me she’s had a call back from the midwife and they’ve asked her to swing by the hospital on the way home to see them for a quick check up. Fair enough,  it’s only 6 o’clock so quick visit to midwife and we’ll still make our 8pm dinner reservation at the Earl of Spencer.

Being the dutiful husband and less dutiful son and cousin, I drop mum and Eve at ours to catch up, pick up Roz’s little pack of medical notes and head down to meet her at St George’s. Short wait in the waiting room, pee in a pot (Roz, not me) and in for a quick exam to see what’s what.  Heart beat listened to and all AOK with the bump aka SJ as we’ve come to call her (as in Sam Junior as she acquired the name before we knew the sex and sam works for either… despite Roz making it very clear that Sam was not going to be on our shortlist of names). Diagnosis 1 comes in at the possibility of some leaky fluids but a quick scan reveals they’re all in tact and suggests the blood could be coming from a small clot on the placenta. Not too serious but worth keeping an eye on.  So the plan is to keep Roz in overnight to keep a watch on her and give her some steroids to help SJ’s lungs develop a bit faster on the off chance they decide to deliver her a few weeks ahead of schedule. So there go our dinner plans but all’s not lost as at least we’ll be out in time to head up to centre parcs for the weekend.

And with that Roz heads up to a ward to get comfy and I head home to pick up some bits and pieces for her. Toothbrush and pj’s packed and back to drop these in for Roz before calling it a night. Dog shut in,  mother depatched to spare room and off to bed.

Ok so when I said that the day didn’t end like any other,  actually I was lying as heading off to bed,  albeit alone as Roz was kipping over at St George’s, is a pretty standard way to end a day. Snoozing away, I’m rudely awoken at 3.49am by my phone ringing.  Not a long conversation but the tone of voice and timing was enough to have me leap out of bed, in the car and back at St George’s in under 15 minutes.  Totally confused as to what was going on,  I’m greated by Roz in what I can best describe as quite considerable pain, in a bed in the delivery suite in an altogether very different place and state to the one I’d left her in just a few hours earlier. Seemingly as confused about what on earth was happening as I was, Roz threw little light on the situation other than making it crystal clear that whatever was going down involved quite considerable amounts of pain. So there we are, 4am in the morning,  not a scooby what’s going on and how on earth we came to be in a delivery suite of all places. And in walks a doctor,  cool as a cucumber,  no panic or confusion on his face just an air of calm in a room where everyone else (ie Roz and me) are going out of our minds. And that’s when he told us… I can hear the words like it was only yesterday (which it was as it happens but that’s not the point)… “baby is coming”. What the f#$ k? did he just say? I’m pretty sure I internalised the words but clearly not the expression so he said it again and added a bit more detail second time round “baby is definitely coming, most likely within the next 12 to 24 hours”.

The doc said a lot of other stuff,  mainly about how bad a decision it would be to have a c-section as the likely outcome  would not be a good one and a ton of other scary stuff, none of which I can recall now. The only thing I remember him saying is that, as far from ideal as it was,  babies born at 26 weeks  have a reasonable chance of survival. He didn’t shy away from telling us an awful lot of other bad things that could occur during delivery, after delivery and longer term too but given that he made it pretty clear that “baby is coming” there didn’t seem to be a great deal of choice for us in the matter.

Right,  I’m not going to detail the labour. . Those of you who’ve been there know it already and I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise for those of you that haven’t!  That 12 to 24 hour estimate was way of the mark tho and at 6am my bursting through the door into the corridor and the look on my face was all that was needed for a stampede of doctors, midwives and quite possibly just some interested spectators to sprint into the room and spring into action.  I think I counted 9 of them in total. . Midwives,  obstricians, peadiatrians,  nurses and 2 very freaked out about-to-be-parents. No sooner had the room filled to way over the safe number the fire officer would have permitted for such a small space,  out pops the teeniest thing! The teeniest human life I’ve ever set eyes on but sure enough, through all the goe, I could definitely see a real live teeny weeny ikkle human. And then she was gone. .. whisked away by the baby doctors to their little table in the corner of this little delivery room and off to work they went on her.

Shit, did that really just happen?  Did we really miss dinner at The Earl of Spencer and deliver a baby instead?! This was a seriously large amount of info to process.

Seemingly it did,  it had and we were indeed, and rather unexpectedly, parents.  One beutiful baby girl had entered the world some 3 months ahead of schedule.

And so the story begins.