‘How massive is a child dinosaur?’ my son asks. ‘It relies upon,’ I say, ‘however that’s not likely what we…’
‘Will it's inexperienced?’
‘No, we’re making an attempt to inform you…’
‘Will it's as massive as a bus?’
Conversations like this have been comparatively frequent for the previous few weeks, since my spouse and I informed our son that we predict… a child. I suppose we’re telling you now, too. Congratulations us! We’re thrilled, to be trustworthy. We’d had a tough go of it second time spherical and had been starting to suppose it wasn’t to be. However then unexpectedly, it was, and now, it's.
She’s a little bit woman and, at 27 weeks, we don’t know an terrible lot about her. She appears good, has fingers and toes in the appropriate locations and seems to have a ardour for thumbsucking. We additionally know she’s categorically not a dinosaur, nevertheless it’s taking her older brother some time to get used to this.
We’d already damaged the one rule of these items – which isn't to phrase the information as a query. ‘Would you want a little bit brother or sister?’ we’d requested him, which obtained a cheerfully adamant, ‘No!’ a few months in the past. Fortunately, we’d caught him in an off second, so by the point my spouse began visibly exhibiting we had been in a position to ‘inform’ him for the primary time yet again. In reality we ended up having to telltold him for the primary time on three or 4 events. I don’t know what we anticipated. Ambivalence, I suppose. Resentment? Disbelief? However all we bought was delight, interrogation and a great deal of poking and prodding.
Some nights he bounds over, missing the tact normally fascinating when charging in direction of a pregnant girl and vegetation his ear to his mum’s abdomen, tuning out the world and listening to, nicely, not very a lot in any respect. The truth that she will likely be a little bit woman appears thrilling to him, albeit a supply of confusion. He nonetheless refers to folks of all genders as ‘he’, with a patriarchal mindset we hope to dislodge via cautious social programming. Principally, nonetheless, she’s ‘it’.
‘Will it have blue eyes and crimson hair?’ he asks, on these evenings he has grasped she won't be a dinosaur. We inform him we don’t know and ask what he would like. He thinks she ought to be brilliant white, however with black eyes, and her identify ought to be ‘Pizza’. This choice will final a couple of minutes earlier than he decides her identify ought to be ‘Pea’, then ‘Minnie’, then ‘child Alexander’, with no purpose given for such decisions. He conjures these whereas belly-eared, like an eavesdropping butler in an Edwardian farce, or a survivalist listening to the bottom for information of a storm. He says considerate, adoring issues like ‘Hey’ and ‘Shhhh’ and ‘What are you?’ He has even been recognized to sidle up and kiss mentioned stomach in a show so self-consciously lovable it’s onerous to not consider he is aware of precisely what he’s doing.
As we contemplate the pitfalls and anxieties of going around the new child carousel once more, we’re undecided what to suppose ourselves. ‘Can it's a canine?’ my son asks. Certain, we now have considerations and worries of our personal. However different questions take priority for now.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Purchase a replica from guardianbookshop at £14.78
Observe Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats
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