This last weekend my beautiful wife officially entered her third, and final, trimester of this – our first pregnancy.
I can’t believe we’re already two thirds of the way through this journey. It’s already gone so fast – and I’m sure this home straight, final trimester, will no doubt now go even quicker (speaking from my perspective at least, since I get the impression it may well get to the stage for my incredible wife where she’s pretty keen for the whole pregnancy thing to be done for the time being!).
So, with the ever-nearing birth and subsequent plunge into parenthood slowly but surely approaching, I thought I’d write down some of the thoughts that have been going through my head recently. Some are more practical, and more immediate – while others are looking further ahead. Hopefully my random thoughts and musings will be of some sort of interest, and maybe will ring true to other dads/dads-to-be out there…?
- What sort of personality is our daughter or son going to have? – Will they exhibit more personality traits from their mum or from me? And how early will their personality start to really appear?
- Have we bought enough baby paraphernalia yet…?!
- What will our lives, and our marriage, look like once there’s one/several children in the mix?
- Does it matter that I’ll be rubbish at helping with their maths homework?
- Will I/we be able to raise them to be inquisitive, kind, respectful, accepting and loving people?
- Will they get as excited by Christmas as I do?
- How do I find the right balance of sharing moments and snippets of my kids’ lives with family and friends, and privacy, in a world more and more driven by social media and living out every aspect of one’s life online?
- What if they have awful taste in films and music?!
- Will I manage to be the positive, supportive, loving and available role model that I want to be?
- Will we ever get a decent night’s sleep, or an actual lie-in, ever again…
This is obviously only a tiny selection of the many thoughts that are rattling around inside my head as I think ahead to parenthood, and to be honest mostly I just think “you have no idea what you’ve let yourself in for” – but I can’t help thinking ahead and pondering just what our kids lives will be like from birth right through to adulthood.
But, as my lovely wife often points out – I do rather tend to overthink things. So, for now, I’ll just go back to trying to decide which plain black car sunshade I prefer out of the 827 available on Amazon…
By Dave Robson