To NCT or not to NCT

There’s something about London that keeps you young. People tend to make the big life choices a little later – there’s so much to do and see that you can’t fit it all in your twenties. New bars and restaurants are opening all the time, so it’s not like living in some one-pub town where you’re bored of going out at 25. Plus, it’s not until your thirties that you can really afford to settle yourself somewhere that you’d actually be happy to raise a child in, so people tend to do it later.

Because of this, while we had plenty of friends with children outside of the city, Steph and I were the first of our close circle of London friends to take the plunge and decide to have a baby. If we’re honest about it, we really miss the freedom of being able to go out whenever we want – we do go out, but often it’s separately and if it's as a couple we have to be home by 11 at the latest, which is NOT our idea of a good night out.

We’ve got around this by having people round for dinner more and making the most of willing grandparents/siblings/cousins/godparents (thank god for our large and generous families!!) and booking in as much babysitting as possible. But despite this, we still see far less of our friends than we’d actually like and months can go by without us getting to have a night out together.

While Steph was pregnant, we discussed whether or not we should sign up for NCT classes. Steph was unsure as NCT have had a lot of bad press for putting pressure on new/expectant mothers on issues such as breastfeeding and the use of drugs during childbirth. Also, there are lots of free classes that the NHS put on for expectant parents, so the fact that the NCT classes are relatively expensive was a factor that needed to be considered. One factor made the decision for us: friends. We knew other couples who had made good, local friends through their NCT groups and we also knew that our ‘real’ friends would only have a limited tolerance for hanging around a screaming baby.

We signed up to classes in Borough and were part of a group made up of 8 couples. After the first class, we thought that we had definitely made a mistake: I actually remember saying to Steph, “I think that I might hate ALL of them”. She agreed.

The issue was that this group of perfectly lovely people were there to talk about babies, and people that talk about babies are boring, right? I don’t know what we expected, or if it’s just that we hadn’t come to the terms with the fact that we were hurtling towards Boringtown ourselves, but we didn’t make any potential friends that week, nor did it look likely that we would in the weeks to come.

There’s a strange pressure in looking at a group of 16 people and knowing that you have to pick friends from among them – it’s a bit like being back at school. And in this class of young, shiny professionals, Steph and I were very much the socially awkward nerds who huddle in the corner and never raise their hands to answer the teacher’s questions.

Week 2 wasn’t much better. In week 1 we had be asked to go around the group and each list our interests and hobbies to our new friends. Steph went last and following an enthusiastic group of amateur sportsmen, avid readers and semi-professional chefs, my heavily-pregnant girlfriend announced that her main hobby was going out and drinking gin. This got a few titters, a glare from the lady running the class and then silence… Week 2 started with the teacher asking us to go round again, but this time we had to pick someone else from the group and reel of the facts that they had shared about themselves the week before. This happened every week and without fail someone piped up, “that’s Steph, she likes gin”. I was slightly cross about this as Steph has plenty of other hobbies that she could of listed, for example she’s also very keen on wine..

But over time, we did warm to the group and tentative friendships started to form. It was a really diverse group with a great mix of nationalities and cultures present, meaning that conversations around the traditions of childbirth and rearing were actually really interesting (obviously, this is all relative). The group was made up of people from Britain, Canada, Iceland, Germany, Greece and Japan, and everyone had their own opinions and ideas about how they wanted to raise their child. What we really liked about the group was that no-one was placid, unquestioningly taking the NCT advice on board – things were questioned and debated, before people made up their own minds about what they wanted to do. We learnt as much from the people in the class as from the class itself.

As for the class itself. It was useful and covered all the basics, but really didn’t give us much more knowledge than the free NHS classes already had. Some of the advice was great, some was just plain silly – we were told to take 7 pillows to the hospital (and had a demonstration on where the doting father-to-be should place them on his labouring wife/girlfriend), when in reality there isn’t enough space for more than three pillows in the average hospital cubicle. I was actually asked by hospital staff to take some of our supplies home as it was taking up too much space and staff kept tripping over it. (I rather resented this as I had decided that the best way to maintain control of this terrifying situation was to freeze about 300 juice cartons so that they would be nice and chilled for the labour – I’m sure that any labouring woman will tell you that her main concern is whether or not she has a perfectly chilled Capri Sun to hand …)

One thing I will say is that the advice was all great, as long as you have a nice normal birth, Steph didn’t (she had an emergency C-section) so a lot of what we learned didn’t apply to us, and we had only very quickly brushed over the basics of problematic births in the classes.

Was it worth it? Yes. At the end of the last class, the 8 couples all made plans to meet-up again and the mums have done every week since then – as a stay-at-home Dad, I also go along and it’s lovely to see the 8 babies playing together. The dads also have occasional nights in the pub and everyone has meshed really well. 

After Oscar was born and I had gone back to work, Steph found the other mothers in NCT to be a real lifeline and they have all become really close whilst navigating the pitfalls of early motherhood together.

We’ve known them for over a year now and would consider everyone in the group to be a real friend – that’s got to be worth a few hundred quid of anyone’s money. So, to summise: go to NCT for the friends, make a list of your hobbies so that you don’t panic and paint yourself as an irresponsible alcoholic mother-to-be, ignore their advice about pillows.

Dan out. x

The Story of Us

Steph and I met at a book group. Yep, we’re that cool … We were discussing Richard Dawkin's The God Delusion and Steph was being very loud and opinionated about the book, despite not having actually read it. I took an immediate dislike to her.

That could have been the end of it, but the book group kept meeting up once a month and Steph and I kept bumping into each other. Steph hardly ever read the book and I soon learned that book group was really just a sham name for drinking club – sure, there were books and we sometimes discussed them, but they were really there to add an air of respectability to what were always fairly drunken affairs.

This was about six years ago and, at this time of our lives (and to a certain point, still now), Steph and I had one very definite thing in common: we were always the last people to leave a party …

Because of this, once a month Steph and I would find ourselves roaming the streets of London trying to find a pub that was still serving at 2am on a Monday night, and it was on one of these walks that I first realised that I actually quite liked this girl who I had initially decided to dislike: she was funny, confident, opinionated and bolshie as hell and yet had a way of instantly making everyone in the room like her (apart from me, apparently). We became friends. Then we became good friends. Then she went to live in Australia.

At this point Steph and I had been friends for about three years, I had met a few of her exes and she had met a couple of mine. We had done a fair bit of flirting and had a couple of drunken kisses, but that was it. Neither of us would ever have said that romance was on the cards, but her leaving changed that …

Steph moved to Australia for a year with her job and during that time we spoke on an almost daily basis, often for hours at a time. It became a weekend ritual for us to skype (skype's a verb, right?) each other late at night, one of us cuddled up in bed, often hungover from the previous night's adventures, the other one with glass of wine in hand, drawing out the Friday/Saturday night fun into the wee hours.

If we talk about it now, then we'll both say that it was during this point that like turned to love, but at the time we never really acknowledged that anything had changed. We both knew it though and within a week of Steph being back in the UK we were officially together.

While it took us 5 years to make the leap from friendship to relationship, things moved at a much faster pace once we finally got together. Within 5 months of starting to date we were living together and by our first anniversary Steph was pregnant.

It seems quick, but our line (and we’re sticking to it) is that we were such good friends before that when we finally got together we knew it had to be for keeps. After finally getting together we wanted to get on with our lives and start a family fairly quickly, so that’s what we did.. Plus we were both early thirties and convinced that one, or both of us, would probably be infertile (I’d been carrying a mobile phone around in my pocket for around 15 years at this point), so thought it best to get started and see what happened. Oscar happened, and he happened quickly.

So that’s an abbreviated story of how we came together and decided to have a baby. Best leave it there for now. I'll cover the horrors of pregnancy and childbirth later. In detail.

Dan out. X

An introduction

Hello Internet,

My name is Daniel Hurst (you can call me Dan) and I am Oscar’s dad. Oscar (Ozzy/Oz) is currently 11 months old and, as a stay-at-home dad, is very much at the centre of my ever-shrinking universe. He is also the most beautiful baby the world has ever seen. Not that I’m biased.

I have decided to write this blog as a way of documenting the first days of Oscar’s life and the lessons that my fiancee, Steph, and I learn as we embark on first few tentative steps together as a new family.

I am hoping that this will be a record for Oscar to look back on in older life and realise that we didn’t mess him up intentionally, and also a sounding board for those of you out there embarking on similar journeys. Plus, writing a blog is what all the cool kids do so I thought that I should jump on the bandwagon …

I guess the first thing to do is to tell you about Steph and me, Oscar’s parents and the situation that we find ourselves in starting out as a young family.

We live in central London. I’m starting with this because it plays a huge part in forming who we are and the things that we enjoy doing. Like many families, we are aware of all the problems that raising a child in a huge metropolis like London raises – the city is expensive, dirty and noisy. And we love it. We are determined to cling on to our London life for as long as possible – yes, we want Oscar to have space to run around and it would be great if he had access to a garden (we live in a 9^th-floor flat without any outside space) and we know the benefits of raising children in the countryside having both been raised in the sticks ourselves. But we’ve both been in London for about a decade, it’s where we met and fell in love and it has a vibe and energy about it that you can’t get anywhere else - it’s home and we want it to be home for as long as possible (ideally in a three-storey Georgian townhouse with a basement kitchen on a garden square, but anyway …). A lot of what I write about on here will be about London and why it’s actually a great place to raise a child with incredible amenities and amazing heritage and culture on your doorstep, access to great schools and a huge range of activities for children close by (you can tell that I’ve talked myself into this..).

Steph works in recruitment in the city and I work as a freelance cookery editor from home. I made the jump to freelance because nursery costs were so expensive that it seemed like a good thing to try at this stage of my career. Plus it meant that one of us got to be there for Ozzy day to day. So far it’s going well, but it’s very hard to get the work done and look after Oz – and it’s getting harder every day with his mobility and natural inquisitiveness developing more and more as he grows. We both feel that it’s really important for Oscar to get out and about to explore and play as much as possible, so I do a lot of work at night, but that’s fine – it means that I get to spend my days playing with Ozzy and for the most part he’s an absolute delight. For the most part.  

So that’s us. And this is my first blog post – let’s hope I keep it up.

Dan out. x