ITSABAYBEE!ITSABAYBEE!

I was expecting a certain amount of drama when we broke the news to S’s parents. But I didn’t realise quite how close we would come to killing his mum. Perhaps, in retrospect, S’s chosen technique wasn’t the gentlest of methods. He simply handed an envelope containing the pictures from our scan across to her and smirked as she opened it and, to put it frankly, completely lost her shit. ‘OHMYGOD! OHMYGOD I’m hyperventilating!’ she wailed, looking genuinely ill and clutching at her chest. I glanced around the restaurant, trying to calculate the likelihood of a cardiologist eating at one of the other tables. No dice. The average age of the punters was about 80, and most looked as if they had been bussed in from 1974. S’s dad looked at the pictures in complete bemusement. ‘What is it? I can’t see what it is’ he said plaintively. S’s mum let out this kind of primal howl. ‘ITSABAYBEE!ITSABAYBEE!ITSABAYBEE!’ which didn’t really leave much room for doubt in the matter. ‘Oh’, said his dad. ‘I thought it was something you had run over.’ Yes, my father-in-law actually compared my unborn child to road-kill.

Later in the evening, S’s dad turned to me and informed me that I was carrying a boy. Apparently the fact that he has been doing yoga for forty years has imbued him with a kind of sixth sense about these things. There are probably other things he could have said which would have irritated me more, but off hand I can’t think of what they might be. This from the man who can’t tell a foetus from a squashed squirrel.