Today I am off work. The reasons for this are two fold; someone needed to be home for the Sky engineers who are, as I write this post, fitting all the gubbins needed for high definition television to our house, and my beautiful girlfriend and I had an appointment at the hospital this morning for the 20 week scan of our baby. The importance of this day can best be summed up by a conversation Sallie (my girlfriend) had with a colleague at work a few weeks ago after mentioning that I had Tuesday off. Obviously these weren’t the exact words, but it went something along the lines of;

Sallie: “Well John’s booked the whole day off so he could be in for Sky to come fit HD, but he already had the morning off for the 20 week scan.”

Colleague: “Oh yeah, are you excited?”

Sallie: “Yeah, we’ll be able to record the programs we usually miss.”

Obviously her colleague had meant excited about the scan, and the impending prospect of being a parent, but it’s nice to know I’m not the only one in the relationship who’s thoughts aren’t 100% baby orientated… though it sometimes feels as thought people think I should be.

Anyway, the scan went well, other than Sallie’s increasing discomfort over the very full bladder she was required to have prior to the scan; we were called in only ten minutes after our appointed time, but it must have felt like a few hours for Sallie. I can’t imagine having the ultrasound thingy pressing on her lower abdomen made things any better. We found out that, in addition to looking like some kind of weird prehistoric animal buried in strata, the aforementioned baby is a boy… probably (they’re “never 100%”) and that everything seems to be normal, though we can tell he’s a hyperactive little bugger from the amount of moving about he did during the scan. And when Sallie’s eaten. And when she’s sleeping. And when my head is near her stomach.

This now settles a lot of question marks over baby related thinking. Things like which gender of names we can consider are greatly reduced… by half, in fact, and we now know that clothes of a feminine nature are out, until he’s old enough to make his own choices at least. It doesn’t make the choosing of a name any easier as, even with half as many names to choose from, I have absolutely no idea what I would call a boy, though I seem to be fairly clear on suggested names I don’t like.

So, here we are at 20 weeks, the baby is fine, it’s male, and we have Sky High Definition.