Baby Talk

By Julia Goga-Cooke of the BBC Albanian Service

I better warn you to get ready for a shock. I've got a baby. Not a boyfriend. A baby.

Well, you better sit down. I know, its too much to take in. It would be easier if I had told you I've become a grandmother. At 40 you sort of expect it, dont you and I suppose you're right.

My two other children are twentysomethings already. And I'm a mother again. How does it feel? Terrific! And here in London, it's absolutely normal for women of forty to have a child.

A fellow older mother, Jane Saxby had her first child at 38: "I can quite honestly say it's the best thing that's ever happened to me. I've done all the things that you want to do when you were young, partying, travelling abroad, what have you. And so for me Sophia is completely the centre of my life. To me, she keeps me young."

In fact I did worry that I might be in the oldest mum when taking junior to school until we met other forties at the ante-natal classes. Here in England, husbands or partners as they are often called, take part in ante-natals too.

You should have seen them, especially on the breathing exercises; you'd have dropped down dead. It was quite entertaining at the time but proved useful during birth. Yeah, husband was there all along, even in the operating theatre as I had to have a caesarean at the end. And the daddy really kept cool.

Finding the name was a story in itself as I'm sure happens everywhere but the fun here in England is that you give the baby up to four names. When I told that to my brother in Albania, he said "No problem then. We'll send all our choices."

British Studies expert John Roderick David Goodman says: "In this country, giving your child two names is really quite normal. It is indeed quite unusual I think these days, for children to be given three names. Although in actual fact, it's not quite so strange for me because I have three names and as does my brother."

Anyway, we opted for only two. We've called him Daniel Stephen. I hope the poor thing won't feel too bad having to live with a name which is at least half a metre long.