Any partner who’s been in the delivery room while their loved one gives birth to their child knows that there’s not a whole heap they can do to be helpful.
Yes, they can hold their hands, soothe and encourage them, but that’s about it.
Hamish Blake discovered, however, there are a few things you can do to be unhelpful while your partner is in labour.
Listen: Nine months later and your bump is ready to burst out. (Post continues after audio.)
The 35-year-old revealed on his radio show with Andy Lee on Monday afternoon that he would give himself a “B+” for his efforts as a delivery room assistant while his wife Zoe Foster Blake gave birth to their daughter Rudy last month.
Blake only deducted a half mark from an ‘A’ because he rendered the laughing gas unusable to Zoe.
How? Well, as he told his co-host, he thought he’d have a suck on it himself, earning the label from Lee of a “delivery room nuisance”.
“I think is very standard procedure for the husband, to go, – she can’t be on it all the time – ‘look, it’s free gas, we’re paying for this, let’s have a honk on the gas’,” Hamish said. “And it’s fine, it was fun, it’s pretty fun.”
It was fun alright, until his beauty guru wife went to have a suck herself and tasted nothing but the minestrone he’d just eaten.
“I guess I hadn’t cleaned my mouth out enough, so when I put the gas in my mouth some pasta and carrots and soup had got caught in it and it was down to far to clean out,” he confessed.
“That’s probably where I lost my A rating and went to a B+.”
However, Blake’s grade could have slipped a lot further than that, listeners soon found out. The True Story host later confessed that he almost missed the birth because he needed to “do a poo”.
As Blake explained, he needed to use the toilet, but couldn’t go in his room and couldn’t see any down the hall, so he faced a dilemma.
“Do I run off into the hospital blind, hoping to find a toilet, but be present and clear-headed for the birth of my daughter? Or do I hold it and always remember the moment as where I’m like, ‘she’s great, but I’m distracted. When can I put her down?'”
Thankfully, Hamish made it back in time.
“I chanced it and I was able to hold her clear-headed.”
Blake and his author wife welcomed Rudy Hazel Blake into the world on 17 July, sharing photos of the bub a few days later.
Rudy is little sister to three-year-old Sonny, and according to her mum, “has morphed her parents into gooey love monsters”.
In early February, Foster Blake announced she was expecting baby number two with an image that bore a striking resemblance to Beyonce’s pregnancy announcement, posted just hours earlier.
“When @beyonce and I fell pregnant at the exact same time, we were so happy,” she wrote. “We made a best friend pact to announce the news with high-concept, oversaturated floral imagery and mismatched lingerie on the SECOND of February.”
Was your partner a delivery room nuisance?