The helpless blog of a first time dad: Baby Brain leaves us all in high spirits

We had a scan on Tuesday to check on the anomalies that had shown up in our 20-week scan, namely the choroid plexus cyst (CPC) in our baby’s brain and a low-lying placenta in my wife’s womb.

There was now no sign of the cyst and the placenta had moved 6cm away from the cervix, clearing the way for Junior to come hurtling down the birth canal on his or her own terms in a couple of months.

As parents, we feel more prepared for that arrival than we did a few weeks ago. We’ve bought three of everything on the Babycentre.co.uk “what you need” checklist, my wife has packed her hospital bag and we’ve also become proud owners of a pram (and a matching changing bag which my wife bought for herself as a “treat,” just after spending £850 on a travel system).

As well as employing the economics of a Third World dictator, Hannah is also becoming noticeably “demob happy” as her maternity leave hones into view.

So it’s a good time to risk a blog entry I’ve been planning for a while.

I want to talk about baby brain.

Now let me begin by stressing that my wife is an intelligent woman. She has more qualifications than me, her degree is in a subject a fair few people wouldn’t be able to spell let alone pass an exam in and she’s very good at Cluedo.

I’ve always found intelligence attractive and when a beautiful woman like Hannah began a conversation early on in our relationship with, “According to Freud…” marrying her seemed like a no-brainer (I’d had the opposite experience with a previous girlfriend when she was asked at a quiz night “What is the capital of Australia?” and she wrote down “A”).

Then Hannah got pregnant.

A few weeks ago she had to attend a teaching training course in the next town. It’s about a 20 minute drive away, half an hour with morning traffic, and she left at 8.30 for a 9am start. She text me later to say she had arrived half an hour late.

On further questioning I found out that she had got lost on the way and had forgotten her sat nav. She then mentioned asking directions from the owner of a petrol garage which I knew to be a good 15 minutes down a road she should never have been travelling on.

Getting ever more defensive – she exclaimed at one point “what is this, the Spanish Armada?” – she finally admitted to me that on first becoming lost she made the decision to follow the car in front in the hope that the occupant was attending the same teacher training course as her. Fifteen minutes of tailing a random vehicle later she decided the car in front was probably going somewhere completely different after all so pulled over. What are the odds?

No scientist worth his salt would take an isolated incident as proof that baby brain really exists, and believe me, neither have I.

As a former commis chef it pains me to admit that it’s not always possible to serve up cordon bleu worthy dishes when you get in from work after 7pm. So occasionally we have a ready meal.

As Hannah is first in she usually puts these in the oven to start the cooking process and I come home and rustle up some vegetables or something to go with it.

Recently we were having a pre-prepared mini-roast chicken.  It came in a foil tray and the instructions told you to “cover tray in aluminium foil and then place on shelf in middle of oven.”

When I came home and looked in the oven to see how the chicken was progressing I found a baking tray wrapped in aluminium foil with the uncovered chicken dish sat on top of it. She had covered a tray in foil, but not the one with the chicken in it!

And finally onto the story of why we can’t look our new neighbours in the eye.

Two weeks ago a couple moved in across the road. Wanting to be friendly and welcome them to the turning, Hannah bought them a card and posted it through their door.

She wrote in the card “To our new neighbours, wishing you all the best of luck in your new home, from both of us at Number 10.”

Now the idea of sending them a card was to introduce ourselves as Darryl and Hannah. This is a bit of a bugbear of mine. I like to be neighbourly, send Christmas cards and the like but it is becoming increasingly hard to be friendly in this way in the 21^st Century. When we moved into our house four years ago I introduced myself to our next door neighbour. She never told me her name in return and has never sent a Christmas card so to this day I still don’t know her name. You only get one opportunity for an introduction.

Putting “from both of us at Number 10” blew that one chance for us with our new neighbours. For all they knew it might have been a card signed personally from David and Samantha Cameron as part of a government initiative to congratulate all new homeowners.

But that’s not the reason why I present this to you as a prime example that baby brain exists.

Hannah admitted to me that she’d forgotten to put our names in the card. So I dug out a cheap bottle of wine from the back of the cupboard to give me an excuse to knock on their door and introduce myself a second time and hopefully get their names in return.

What Hannah didn’t tell me was exactly what she’d written in the card, which was shown to me by the smiling man of the house when I knocked.

The house across the road that the people have moved into is Number 10. We live at Number 9.

“I thought we had ghosts,” he chuckled.

No, just a pregnant woman living across the road who can occasionally turn into a zombie.

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