Understandably, I hasten to add. Have you ever looked at the size of a full-term baby and wonder just how it fits in there without squeezing a woman's internal organs out her ears? The skin is as taut as a drum and when it moves, it's like the chest- burster scene from Alien is being recreated in your living room.

One of the most curious effects of expecting is how much more you notice other impending parents.

I call it the new car clause. You know what I mean: when you buy a new car, you suddenly see the same make and model everywhere you drive.

Suddenly pregnant women and nervous blokes are everywhere.

At work the other week, I was sitting within a three desk radius of two other first-time fathers.

We should form some sort of gang: the Fertile Three or the Paterson Street Impregnators.

OK, we will have to work on the name, but the concept is sound.

Expecting your first child gives you a special secret handshake that allows entry into a fascinating backroom club. My vocabulary has filled with pregnancy terms from apgar score to zygote and everything in between.

Mostly, however, you are left staggered by how amazing and fascinating the pregnant body is.

For example, did you know the heart increases in size, producing up to 50 per cent more blood, which clots quicker?

Or that the hormones oestrogen and relaxin cause ligaments to stretch, including making feet up to a size bigger?

Hopefully my wife isn't reading this - she got freaked out knowing the baby had fingernails by 12 weeks - but one in every 2000 children is born with a tooth.

The change I found the most interesting was the increase in the sense of smell and taste; an apparent evolutionary trait that protects the mother from eating harmful food.

While my better half could not stand the smell of sausages (she still can't get inside Bunnings without holding her breath), she loved cleaning products, paint or petrol.

I should stress that she hasn't been hanging around the local servo trying to cop a whiff, but if there's a chance to walk through the fire lighter section of a hardware store, she's all over it.

Overall you come to appreciate how much tougher women have it in the reproduction game.

Sure new dads might have some of the same emotional ups and downs: I almost blubbered over an advertisement for a stupid camera because the picture showed a boy in a wheelchair patting his labrador with a robotic arm, but I'm quite sure the physical symptoms would ensure a one-child policy became law should men be in charge of gestation.

I would not have survived morning sickness, which my wife described as an all-day hangover.

These days I can't drink more than two beers without clearing the next day's schedule of anything that involves getting out of bed before 3pm and making sure there's a marathon of The Simpsons on television for when I do struggle to the couch.

And as a soccer player, I would spend most of the day rolling round the floor if I got kicked half as hard as she has been lately.

Now all that's left is the phone call and trip to the labour ward.

The car journey is seven minutes from home but I reckon we can get that down to 25 seconds when contractions get close.