NOT ACTUAL GAME FOOTAGE!
 
For those who don’t know who I am, allow me to introduce myself. I am a newly thirty year old Man-Child who’s into nearly all things geeky. I don’t feel I have to whoop out my nerd credentials here, for the sake of Shatner I’m writing a blog on a website dedicated Geekdom. What more do you want a signed DVD of the 1989 Doctor Who story Ghost Light, that might be in my in my chronologically organised collection (I only say might to keep a bit of the mystery, you so know it’s there). I also write the ‘Demo Reviews in fewer than 500 words’ articles also found on the Plymouth Geek Collective website. And I’m sat here, on my sofa, writing this waiting for my beautiful eight week old daughter to wake up for her night time feed. Shush, I think she’s stirring.

What I wanted to do with this article is show how having a child doesn’t mean you have to stop doing all the things you want to do, in fact I want this on-going blog to stand as a testament to the enhancement having a child does to your passions and interests. I have to admit that I have missed the last Magic: the Gathering pre-release ‘Dragon’s Maze’, because I didn’t feel I could warrant that much time and money one day without my little girl and her mother. Don’t get me wrong, my Other Half does play Magic, but a pre-release isn’t her thing (I am willing to bet that she would come fairly high if she breast fed during each match). I also chose not to see ‘Iron Man 3’ in the cinema because I know OH enjoys the Iron Man films, I think it’s a mix of Robert Downey Jr’s acting and Robert Downey Jr ( but to be fair I bet most people are a bit attracted to him, I know I would). I did go and see ‘Star Trek: Into Darkness’ with a friend (the OH did enjoy the last one but I knew she wouldn’t begrudge me Trek) and four days after she was born I did go down the pub till 5 in the morning to watch ‘Wrestlemania 29’ live. So it’s all down to those swings and roundabouts.

So let’s get down to the nitty gritty of this blog. We had a baby, by ‘we’ I mean myself and my OH. Typing ‘We had a baby’ makes it sound like an easy thing, of course the fun bit was, but then you get a long period of highs and lows that make life one epic rollercoaster. We had been living with my dad on a farm in Cornwall when we found out that my wife was expecting, to be fair the year before we had decided to try to expand our family but over that period things had changed drastically. We had bought a house next to some not very nice people and made the decision to move when things were at their bleakest. The good news had spurred us on to getting the house ready to rent out and we found a nice little two up, two down in the center-ish of Plymouth. My OH had a bit of a rough time during the morning sickness phase but everything was going on smoothly until the due date.

Now I like to know what’s going on and have a plan for everything, I went up to the hospital and got a photo of the parking charges and then went to the bank and got out a bag of change to sit in the car, forward planning is key to my survival. But when you know that two, or more, weeks before the due date is a fairly okay time for your baby to be born, you start to wonder if this morning is going to be your last morning before you become a dad. The job I was in had me working 12 hour shifts, and sometimes I had sleepers in-between them. This led me to being on edge for a lot of the time. When I say a lot of time I mean four weeks, you see what didn’t help was that our bundle of joy didn’t want to come out, so in the end the OH had to go in to be induced.

We had been advised that we wanted to get in nice and early so that it would all get over and done with the same day. RUBBISH. My bit of advice, have it as late as possible. Go have a bit of a walk around and try and have a nap. Otherwise you might go into labour at six in the afternoon and not get any sleep ever again. But all in all it ended up happily. She was born just before four in the morning on the third of April.

We had had a long list of names, for both boys and girls, but as soon as we laid eyes on her we both agreed she would be called Dorothy Evelyn. Now Dorothy is the real name of the seventh Doctor’s companion Ace and Evelyn is the name of the sixth Doctor’s companion from the Big Finish range of audio dramas. We thought they had a nice ring together, and they pay homage to the way her parents met.

What we didn’t know then was she was going to have another name, you see a friend of ours was making a video behind our backs. He had roped in some of our other friends to send their congratulations. He then produced a forty five minute episode of his YouTube series ‘Zed and Stan’s Random Adventures’ themed around Doctor Who. Within that video he referred to our unborn baby as Bobbie, he was sure it was going to be a boy. The video was such a nice thing at a time when we were feeling the strain of being first time parents that it really touched us. Which you can watch here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LMQRuE-yWY

When it came to registering Dorothy we did have a short conversation in the car that went something like….

Me: “What do you think of call her Dorothy Evelyn Stormageddon Nicholls? We couldn’t”

OH: “We could.”

Me: “Well we could, but we shouldn’t. Could we?”

Dorothy: “Gurgle”

OH: “We could.”

Me: “Let’s ask facebook”

OH: “We could call her Dorothy Evelyn Bobbie Nicholls.”

Dorothy: “Gurgle”

And so she was named.

By Chris Nicholls 
Youtube: BritGeek