The Hub and I were in the third, no fourth, airport of that day. Or days, if you count the umpteenth time zones we went through. We were about to get on our fourth Emirates flight in as many weeks. Have you ever noticed how all major airports look the same? Especially international terminals, where the same mix of people seem to exist in equal proportions. This was a year ago next week. How time has flown by and how life has changed. We have a baby son. What an adventure!
On our first trip through Dubai airport at the very beginning of our trip, we met a man we christened Uniball. Darling Uniball was there AGAIN when we went through immigration in Bangkok on the way home. So either there is a country out there where men insist on wearing tight, black, shiny Nike tracksuits with no broeks or undies to protect their dignity, or Uniball was FOLLOWING US. Thank the Lord not to Vietnam. My best was when he leant forward to pick up his hand luggage and showed us a view no person who has just shared an Economy seat for 8 hours with their husband and a very drunk Russian man should ever have to witness. The poor man had clearly had some sort of surgery and due to his lack of undergarments everyone in Terminal 3 of Dubai International could see the clear outline of his misfortune. The Hub and I laughed about Uniball for the remainder of our travels. It's amazing the things you remember from a trip. But I digress.
On the way back from 2 weeks of pleasant mayhem in Nam (baby) and a week of sloth-like drinking and tanning in Krabi, we were in Dubai again. I can’t tell you if it was morning or night, just that I felt like I’d been swallowed by a whale, basted in breadcrumbs and deep fried on the wings of a Boeing 747. I had a niggling suspicion I might be knocked up already, but told myself it was impossible. It had to be impossible: I drank my body weight in gin on that overnight train to Da Nang…not to mention those free evening cocktails at the Sheraton Club where something called a John Collins was often mixed up in the South African to Thai translation of Tom Collins. Much, MUCH stronger amount of booze. Never mind I had a frighteningly firm massage from a tiny Thai lady on the beach, where she delicately rearranged my internal organs. She would have squashed the baby! Like a Vietnamese pancake! (Flatter than even the normal, Western kind). I was in the horrors.
So I did what any self-respecting jet lagged to hell person would do, I squashed the thought of my pancake baby down and lost myself in Emirates lovely selection of in-flight entertainment, telling the Hub I would take a test once we were safely home and I could buy one in English, from Clicks, with my Clubcard. Nice and familiar like.
After 36 hours of travelling, the Hub and I were shattered and so I nigh on forgot about the possible pancake baby. Until the next morning. It was Tuesday and we had had the foresight to take an extra day of leave to recover from all of the airports. As promised, I made my way to my local Clicks and bought about 5 different kinds of pregnancy tests. All the time thinking of my misbehaviour on holiday and Foetal Alcohol Syndrome. And yes there were the two lines, or the plus sign depending on which brand I used. I was pregnant. And then the waiting began for my first scan at 9 weeks (4 weeks away) to see if our little miracle was indeed a Vietnamese pancake and I had started out being the worst kind of partying, boozing mother.
