280 days and counting

Ok, let’s start with an apology, the class puns and becoming a bit tired, and this isn’t even the last one… but we’ve now done the second and last of our ‘intensive’ NCT course on child birth and parenting, so the class pun warfare continues (SORRY!). You can read my thoughts about our first one here if you didn’t catch it last week. I left that class, and that post, with mixed feelings about the value of the NCT and still awaiting the development of the ‘network effect’ that everyone had re-assured me would be the greatest benefit I would gain from the NCT. 

If you’ve read a few of my posts here, or know me in real life, and certainly if you follow me on Twitter you will know I am something of a cynic, so I wasn’t 100% convinced by the promise of making friends on the basis of living nearby one another and having happened to have conceived at the same time. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a bit like choosing to go for dinner with someone because you happen to have been in adjacent stalls in a public toilet – a biological process might well have brought you together but that doesn’t mean you’ve anything else in common. 

The day after the NCT class my certainty in my lack of need of anybody’s help in any way was shaken. I met a school friend I have recently regained contact with after not seeing him for years… he has two children, and selfishly, part of the reason I reached out to him was to have another dad to talk to about things (it’s ok, he reads the blog and I suspect I’m far more transparent in my motivations than I’d like anyway!). He put me to shame slightly on Monday when I raised this idea of NCT friends – he’d been out for drinks with two of the dads from his now five-year-old NCT group on the previous Friday, and they had all taken their children swimming together on Sunday morning. The rest of the group were also busily producing babies number two and the support network was still in full swing. So there’s clearly something to this network effect for some people… 

He isn’t our only friend with children of his own though. MTB and I are quite lucky in that we already have a fair sized group of friends who have taken the plunge and are now toeing an assortment of six month to three year olds with them in their wake. Through our friends we’ve seen a lot of what raising a child looks like, baby sat, played with them, and even have a fantastic godson who turns two in December. We’ve also both spent a lot of time since announcing the pregnancy grilling them about all sorts of things… Perhaps on that basis the attraction of meeting a group of new people who ‘are in the same boat as you are’ is less for me – we have real friends, who were friends first, parents second, to draw on, and they come with real live babies to practice on, instead of the slightly creepy dolls at the NCT. 

But we recently moved to a new part of London - as I mentioned in my last post as people seem to be often asking us if we plan to move again – and we don’t really know anyone around us yet, let alone anyone else with children… So I genuinely think there might be something worthwhile in developing links with local parents one way or another, if only have someone to meet at the cafe that’s at the end of the road for a flat white instead of having to go to Bournemouth to get a coffee with a fellow parent! The NCT might well add value that way, but that being said, I also know a lot of people who haven’t done the NCT, and have used the early years group organised by local libraries, or the council to make friends with parents. 

What about the classes themselves? Were they more useful than my short-lived studying history at school (ah, the Nazis again you say…)? Well yes, but like any class at school, the group tends to move at the pace of the slowest learner, and many of the pupils seem to know more than the teacher does. If you are a total newcomer to babies, if you haven’t had the opportunity to attend an NHS prenatal class, and if you haven’t the time or inclination to read about pregnancy, birth and child raising, and if you can afford them, then I would wholeheartedly recommend the NCT. If you have done all of those things, then it depends on your appetite for making new friends in a group of strangers, your desire to spend money on hearing things you already had an inkling of, and how much time you want to give up while you still have some of your own! 

Mum To Be attended the class with a more open mind than me (she does everything apart from eating vegetables with a more open mind than me), and has come out of it more positive about making new friends to share the experience of motherhood with. That seems for her to be happening already – that might be because she is just better at making friends than me; it could be because the common experience is already stronger for pregnant mums than expecting dads, or it could be that the NCT work harder to get mums to get along – certainly the post-natal groups seem to be more mum and baby than dad and baby. 

And what about in my own situation? Well, in conclusion, the classes were generally useful, informative, and well taught, though somewhat lacking in direction at times and frustratingly repetitive; the network effect might not have started yet, but I am going to do my best to suppress my inherent cynicism and get in touch with the other dads to see if they fancy meeting up for a drink before we all (gladly I hope) lose the opportunity to do that for a while… 

I’ll let you know how it goes.