My life has just changed forever

Today my wife and I learned that we are expecting our first child.

We married in April last year and in November, decided that she would go off the pill. We weren't 'trying' in the true sense, but we were open to her becoming pregnant if that eventuated. We wanted to start properly trying toward the end of this year. My wife had been on the pill for around 10 years and we knew that it can take come time for a woman's body to be 'receptive' to conception after being on the pill for a time, so she stopped taking it and we thougt it might take 6-12 months or so, perhaps longer, to get pregnant.

Little did we know!

It seems that we're pretty potent in that area, as we are five weeks pregant, meaning she had one natural cycle before my boys made their way to her egg. This despite me being a smoker, which apparently reduces your sperm count!

Finding out we were pregnant was a bit of an accident in itself. It seemed like it had been about a month since the wifey's last period, so I got a couple of pregnancy tests. The lady at the chemist was really helpful and asked if this would be our first child, if the result was positive. I said that yes it would be, and grinned at the thought of actually having a baby. She said that the particular test kit I had was the most reliable and that you could get a false negative but not a false positive. I drove off and on the way home there were two other 'signs' - a car in front of me had a Baby on Board sign in its back window and one of the songs we played at out wedding came on the radio. It all seemed like it could be lining up for a pregnancy.

The wife did the first test before I realised and I walked into our bedroom just as she was looking at the tester. She looked a bit amazed and said, "This is a different result to what I thought it would be'. I looked down and there were two pink lines. I felt dizzy immediately and asked "Two lines means you're pregnant, right?". A quick check of the instructions confirmed this. We sat on the bed and didn't say much for twenty seconds or so. We were looking at each other and smiles began to emerge, small initially but they grew bigger. We were a little shocked, given it wasn't long since she went off the pill and we hadn't been trying very hard. We'd done no preparation - she wasn't on folate, I was still smoking and I hadn't even increased my Vegemite intake!

We talked a bit about how it was going to be a big change but one we really wanted. We knew we had to do the second test and make sure. A very long hour passed and my wife said she needed to go to the toilet again so I went and waited in the bedroom. A few minutes passed and she joined me in the bedroom. As the two lines emerged again, we realised it was true - we were going to have a baby! We wondered about how far along she was. Without going into too much detail, I hoped it was more than two weeks, as if it wasn't, our baby might have been the result of a particularly lacklustre performance on my behalf!

We woke my brother, who is staying with us, and told him. I needed to tell someone, and we also needed to be able to talk about it in front of him, it wouldn't have been fair to duck off into our room whenever we talked about it. He was pretty excited, if not a bit surprised that it was happening already.

Needless to say, I didn't sleep much last night. I kept thinking about whether it was a boy or a girl and what it would be like. Names raced through my mind - Sam is my favourite for a boy and we'd previously thought Charlie to be a nice girl's name.

I caught the train into work this morning and felt very different. It was as though I realised that the daily minutiae didn't matter so much. Stinky fellow travellers were insignificant when I thought about being responsible for raising a person. At work, I made a few calls and got us a doctor's appointment to confirm the results, and to start off our medical adventure.

I left work early and we walked into the surgery. As we sat down, a small child began to giggle at something it's mother had said and we both grinned at the irony. When it was our turn, our doctor told us of all the tests we needed to do, which started with confirming the pregnancy, but also checking my wife's blood pressure, iron levels, whether she had any diseases like AIDS or Hepatitis, and so on. She gave up some urine and blood and the urine test was positive once again. We have a nervous twenty-four wait before the blood test comes back, but it will tell us how far along our baby is.

It's been a pretty full-on 24 hours, but I am so excited about the future. My dad died when I was 16 (I'm 26 now) and I've felt the absence of a father ever since, naturally. My father-in-law is a great guy and I really couldn't wish for a better one, but still it's not quite the same, no matter how much you try and make it that way.

I am eagerly awaiting the blood test results, and really trying hard to keep this a secret for now, so keeping this blog is the best way to 'talk' about it until we share our wonderful news.