The helpless blog of a first time dad: A Facebook poke I couldn't hide from

My wife looks ready to pop at any moment. She’s packed her bag (and repacked it twice). We’ve washed and ironed all of Junior’s clothes up until the age of nine months. We’ve had a week of eating frozen stuff to make way in the freezer for my wife’s breast milk.

Yes, basically, we’re bored.

The wait has also given me time to reflect on a couple of incidents that make me wonder if my wife and I are really responsible enough to be parents.

First of all, we recently discovered a cupboard in our kitchen we never knew we had.

It was the same week that we marked our fourth anniversary of living there. It was also just a day after a conversation we’d had with my parents about how little cupboard space there was in the kitchen and that we might need a redesign what with baby on the way.

Twenty-four hours later I was removing the oven hood in the first stage of this redesign and needed to wedge open the false door of the cupboard above the hood to give me more room to work.

Only it wasn’t a false door.

It had been a perfectly usable cupboard with a door that opened upwards all along. So we’re £5,000 better off than we might have been, if a little red faced when I told my parents.

But it’s not the most embarrassed I’ve been regarding home improvement in recent times. Not even close.

As regular readers are aware, we’ve been doing some serious nesting since the countdown clock ticked down to 99 days and I realised it would be unfair to expect Junior to sleep in our study/junk room.

The biggest project was not actually the nursery but a much needed new bathroom, which was beyond my DIY capabilities and required a proper builder.

It’s done now and looks fantastic, so much so that I wanted to show people on Facebook (not because I wanted to show off to people where I took a dump but because it was paid for in part by money we’d received from guests at our wedding, so I wanted to thank them for what they’d help fund).

The builder had asked to put photos up on his Facebook page so I went on to his personal profile to see if I could find a link to his business page.

Did you know you can still poke people on Facebook?

Neither did I until I inadvertently poked the builder instead of pressing “pages” in his settings.

Now the only people I’ve poked on Facebook are people I’ve slept with previously or wanted to do so in the future.

That’s not a rule I’ve imposed on myself, or a way of marking them out and making them aware that they were in my sights. I’m not a predator.

It’s just that I always viewed poking someone (back when it was popular) to be quite an intimate action and something that was only appropriate with a loved one. Fifty-two-year-old male builders don’t fall into that category no matter how good a job they’ve done on my bathroom.

If my embarrassment ended there it’s unlikely to have been something that would still make me cringe when I thought about it for no reason in ten years’ time.

But the builder had to come back to our house because he had a pipe cover he wanted to put on our radiator to finish the job off.

Being a perfectionist is admirable but it did mean I had to face the man I’d inadvertently poked 24 hours before.

And I didn’t want to face him. For some reason unfathomable reason, I believe physicians call it “being British,” I hid.

Instead I told my wife to tell him I was out and cowered in Junior’s nursery not making a sound while he performed this ten minutes task in the bathroom.

My wife told him I was working late and then I could hear them making the usual sort of idle chatter you make with builders after a job is complete (where they’re off to next, was this job any easier or harder than others they’ve done, bewilderment at how many sugars they have in their tea ).

Then, just as he was about to leave, he remembered there was one more job I’d asked him to do.

“Was there?” replied my wife.

“Yes, he wanted me to put a dimmer switch on somewhere,” he ventured. “I’ve got time to do it now if you want me to.”

“Yes, that would be good of you,” said my wife.

“Where do you want it put?”

At this there was an awkward pause as the consequences of the conversation she was having finally caught up with my wife.

“We want it put in Junior’s nursery…”

The helpless blog of a first time dad: Dads avoid the F-word around their unborn child

View all posts from The helpless blog of a first time dad – click here