The Waiting Game

As the old saying goes “a watched pot never boils” I’m thinking it may also have some relevance to expectant mothers!

Those who already know me will probably also be aware that I’m a rather good poster-child for the fact that cycling DOESN’T effect your fertility. Like many of the cycling greats such as Lance Armstrong and Chris Boardman I have also spawned enough off-spring to partially fill a pro-cycling team 🙂 At present I have 5 wonderful children (I write that after having spent a great day with them, I would have used different words last weekend :-)) and am currently eagerly awaiting for no. 6 to arrive.

The due date was sometime last week. I say “sometime” as we can never really rely on the traditional methods of ageing the little person growing inside my wife as we bred them rather large, our smallest so far being 9lb 7oz, so using the fetal size it is generally off by a week or so and don’t even ask me to try and guess a due date from conception date 😉 As the last 5 children have all arrived at 41 weeks we are certainly on the “home-straight” now and I’m poised on red-alert at work to make a mad dash home should it all kick off during the working day.

It turns out we also couldn’t have picked a better year to have our only summer baby, the recent heatwave that hit the south of England has coincided perfectly with the later weeks of the pregnancy meaning that my poor wife has been rather un-comfortable as she doesn’t do well in the heat at best of times, let alone having to lug around a small person inside her! It has however cooled off a little so she is a bit more comfortable now so we can only hope that the little active devil inside her makes an appearance sooner rather then later. We are hoping for another home-birth like we had with no.4 as it truly was one of the most wonderful experiences in my life – she arrived in the early hours of the morning and within 2 hours or so I was tucked up in bed with the 2 of them! It also made for a nice surprise in the morning when the 3 big sisters woke up and found we had a new member of the family 😀

Undoubtedly my next posting on here will be a birth announcement 🙂 Either that or I’ll be sitting around waiting for the new baby to arrive contemplating what sportive to enter next year !