One of the more startling things about going through this pregnancy is the sheer amount of time during which nothing much is going on. In my own impression of other couples going through pregnancy, it's a clear and brief process: there's an announcement, maybe a visit or two during which the lady is bulging, then a bit later the proud parents are showing kid photos to anyone they can reach. It's all over in a matter of weeks.¹

This all is technically true, of course, but it turns out that 40 weeks are quite a long time when you're the one counting them down. Christina's been pregnant for months, now, and she's not even halfway done! Yet most of the time we just go about our normal lives. While there's no such nonsense as forgetting about the pregnancy, it also really hasn't impacted our daily habits all that much yet. We're still in the stage of accepting that we have to sell our nice little two-seater convertible; not yet in the stage of having actually gone to a car dealership to shop for something more practical to replace it.

Still. It's not always routine.

This is the phase of the pregnancy, according to our books, at which a typical kid's kicks are strong enough to be felt. They also say that there's a pretty wide range in the start date, so not to worry if you haven't felt anything like that yet. Despite that, for a week or so now, Christina's been reporting faint ticklish feelings from the area. We've both been a bit hesitant to say that this is definitely the kid, because the obvious alternative is that it's psychosomatic, induced by anticipation and hope. The third possibility is that she's feeling the movement of food through her digestive system, for the first time in her life, just because she's paying much closer attention now.

Whether or not last week's butterfly brushes were the kid or not is likely to remain forever a mystery. Last night, though, was different. Shortly after getting in bed, she asked me to just put my hand on her belly. After a minute or so of waiting, there was the most minute tap, by my thumb. Another quiet minute, holding our breaths, trying to ignore the sensation of our own breathing and heartbeats, and then it happened again: a tiny vibration, quickly damped, by my fingertip.

Either the psychosomatic feelings are catching, or I just felt Olive's movements for the very first time.

I don't even know what to feel about this. It's concrete evidence that our kid is growing, and healthy, which is great! We had much the same assurance earlier this week, when the midwife pulled out the Doppler heartbeat monitor at our scheduled appointment. We'll get it again in a few weeks, when we go back to the gynecologist for the organ-scan ultrasound. Basically at this point I take growing and healthy for granted. It sounds ridiculously complacent when I phrase it like that, but it really doesn't feel that way. While there exist hazards at this point, they're all either non-serious or unlikely. Growing and healthy is the normal and expected state of affairs, and there will be Serious Talks to Olive if she fails to meet expectations on this count.

I read, a few weeks ago, a fun little anecdote by another new father, whose wife was much further along than Christina is. He described lying awake in bed at night, after his wife had already fallen asleep, and gently tapping her belly in various locations; a few moments later, he would get a response nearby. To him, that was amazing: the kid wasn't even born yet and he was already playing with it!

I'm looking forward to that sort of experience², I guess largely because it's so much more definite than this one. I'm looking forward to interacting with this kid without any ambiguity muddying the waters. The microtaps that Olive gave last night were small enough that I am honestly not 100% sure that I didn't imagine them, and that ambiguity makes it a bit less exciting.

Still, I'm pretty sure—call it 80% or so—that I felt her kicks last night. Ambiguity or not, it put a grin on my face and joy in my heart in the moment, so I guess I should just trust my memory, and stop second-guessing myself.