The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

7 pm

Dear Diary. I'm at the indoor rock-climbing centre when Girlfriend calls. She says her vagina is bleeding and I've got to come home because this could be the start of the birth. I grab my stuff and run.

7:10 pm

I'm walking home. Girlfriend calls me again and says to hurry. "Are you running?" she says. "No, I'm walking," I say. "Well, run," she says. So I start running again. It's like a scene from a movie. All it needs is some music.

7:20 pm

I get home, out of breath. Girlfriend's in the kitchen, cooking dinner for 4-year-old. This isn't what I expected. I expected to see Girlfriend on the floor with a baby halfway out of her vagina. Not cooking chickpeas.

The babysitter comes. I stuff some clothes in a bag and a taxi whisks Girlfriend and me to the hospital.

7:52 pm

We go through the emergency services. You expect it to be like ER, with people with gunshot wounds and a person screaming on a stretcher and pain. But there's nothing like that, it's just people sitting in a waiting room like they're waiting for a bus. Once again, television has lied to me.

A nurse takes us to the third floor. This is where the birth stuff happens. Girlfriend goes inside, but I try to follow her, the nurse closes the door in my face. I guess I have to wait outside, in the waiting room.

8:40 pm

I've been here for almost an hour. No one's told me anything. Maybe the baby is coming out right at this moment.

8:55 pm

A midwife comes out. "Paul?" she asks. I leap up from the chair. Is it a boy? Is it a girl? I'm too nervous to ask.

The nurse tells me to follow her. So I follow her down corridors and through automatic doors. With me, I have a suitcase, a bag, a blow-up mattress and a blow-up doll - all the things we need for a few nights in the hospital. Actually, the blow-up doll, I think I left that at home.

We reach a room. The midwife tells me to sit me down. "She's started having contractions," says the midwife. "But they're just minor ones. She's dilated by one and a half centimetres. Which means you can go home. Come back when the contractions are every ten minutes."

So we get all our stuff, get the taxi and go back home.

9:25

We're home. We open the door. 4-year-old is in bed but he's still awake. He's managed to trick his babysitter into believing that he watches TV before he goes to bed. So he's watching Paw Patrol on her phone.

We kiss him good night, it’s past his bedtime now. More importantly, it'll be past my bedtime as well soon.

It was another 19 days until Girlfriend gave birth.