The Guardian newspaper reckons it costs around 186,000 pounds to raise a child from birth to 21. I don’t know whether this figure starts while the baby is still in the womb or not.
By all rights, it should probably also continue well into the child’s late 20s and 30s. Gen X and Ys are such a lazy bunch of shits, they’ll be mooching around the family fridge, expecting handouts, till their Emo beards go grey.
That, by the way, is the kind of wonderfully misguided crap you can say, when you’re a dad.
Not ours. But they all look the same at that age.
I have been in Canada for a week, at a wedding, while Emma stayed at home eating toast and bursting into tears in front of the Comedy Channel every night.
It was a holiday I booked nearly a year ago. Honestly.
My sister is in town from Sydney. I returned this morning from a week in Canada for a close friend’s wedding. Mum arranged dinner at her house for our family. I had intended to wait until after the scan before telling my brother and sister, but these things have a way of slipping out.
My sister cried a little, which made my mum cry a little, which made me get a lump in my throat.
For many years I really believed I would be the last of my siblings to have a kid. Turns out I’m now the first.
Everything was, as usual, tempered by hushed reminders ‘not to get too hopeful for at least a few weeks’. It is, however, becoming increasingly hard to remain without hope.
Pregnancy. Nobody tells you about the blue fur.
I thought preggo girls were supposed to go nuts over pickled gherkins generously dipped in peanut butter, or some such shit. Maybe that comes later.
Right now all Emma seems to want is crackers and dry toast. There’s even been an uneaten half bar of chocolate in the fridge for over a week. Chocolate in our fridge never goes uneaten.
Another great misconception of pregnancy, the term “Morning Sickness”. There is no such thing. It is an all day event.
Forget about those movies where the cute girl runs to the toilet and throws up, then gets on with her day glowing like fucking spring tulip. The reality wouldn’t do much business at the box office.
Emma and I have been out doing ourselves with breaking family news items. I can’t help wonder if we should be teasing it out a little, saving events for a rainy day, spring the news on our Mums and Dads at some more opportune time when they may really need cheering up.
The second thing you learn, after you find out your better half is pregnant, is that you can’t tell anyone about it for another 2 months, due to a one in five chance it’ll pop out before then.
How, exactly, are you supposed to keep that one quiet.
It starts. 2 weeks ago, apparently.
The first great mystery of pregnancy – even time itself has a baby brain when it comes to pregnancy. Only 10 days since the point of conception, and my fiancee Emma is already, magically, 4 weeks pregnant.
To be fair, we could have saved ourselves alot of confusion, had we just read up on the topic first. But – like trailer park teenagers – we hadn’t expected to to get knocked up quite so damn fast.
