Let Nobody Sleep

As the pregnancy developed my wife was forced to sleep on her back. The resultant snoring provided ample training for the sleepless nights to come.

I considered going to bed first, which reminded me of childhood holidays sharing a room with my snoring elder brother. I would watch the clock, trying and failing to get to sleep, knowing that each elapsed minute brought me closer to a restless night.

The decision to wear ear plugs seemed the perfect solution, although waking up to a silent world was a little disorientating.

Then one morning at 3am, I was woken up by my wife. She was agitated, she was shouting at me, but I could hear nothing. I removed the ear plugs ...
"I think my waters have broken."

This made little sense, she was only 35 weeks pregnant, we hadn't packed her bag for the hospital and we hadn't covered this bit in the parent craft classes yet. I didn't realise it then, but we were going to have the mother of all excuses for missing the next class.

I packed her bag with a mixture of trepidation and disbelief, which perhaps explains why her bag contained six pairs of underwear, but little else. The only coherent thing I did was to put a dustbin liner on the passenger car seat to keep it dry.

We drove towards a new life, with the empty early morning roads making a slient mockery of our decision to chose the provincial hospital because it would be more accessible in rush hour.