Famous for 15 minutes

Hello, son. How’s it going? You’ve been drumming on my belly all morning so I’m assuming all is well in the womb department.

It’s been an exciting week for us. First was our monthly check-up with the midwife. She had a squeeze and a measure of my belly (all good), checked my wee (all good, too) and took my (normal) blood pressure. And then she got out a strange grey stick-with-wires-and-speaker thing, rubbed it across my tummy and listened to your heartbeat. Which was VERY LOUD. The midwife looked vaguely worried, I was terribly alarmed and the trainee midwife got the giggles. Luckily, you stopped using your umbilical cord as a skipping rope, your heartbeat returned to a less ear-splitting volume and we all breathed a sigh of relief. You and I were given a clean bill of health and told to come back in three weeks.

So that was that. The second development of the week was your name. As in, because we can’t decide on what to call you, your Dad took matters into his own hands. I know that by the time you read this you’ll be in possession of a fully-working ‘I’ve had it all my life’ moniker but I can’t tell you how difficult it is to come up with something suitable. I mean, it has to work at both ends of the spectrum: rock star or scientist. We can’t call you Moonboots if you turn out to be an accountant, can we?

Your Dad’s genius idea was to open it out to a public vote via Facebook, getting his virtual friends to send in their suggestions and then choosing something from that pile. (Look, so far your Dad is stuck on Isambard Kingdom Brunel and we currently refer to you as ‘Bagel’ thanks to the incredible amounts of bread products I’ve been scoffing while pregnant. Enlisting the aid of a social networking site can only be a good thing.)

I admit, I do quite like the idea. It’s very twenty-first century (though by the time you hit your teens we’ll have chips implanted in our heads, enabling us to surf the net by the power of thought alone and you’ll mock Facebook as terribly old-fashioned). And it’s kind of like getting your 15 minutes of fame before you’ve left the womb. Warhol would be impressed.

Talking of Warhol, I found a quote from the King of Pop (Art) himself, which I thought you’d enjoy:

“Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.”

Now, run down to the shops and fetch the shopping for Mummy. There’s a good chap.