By Pascal Oparada
Foremost Nigerian blogger, Linda Ikeji, has narrated how she discovered she was pregnant with a baby boy.
She posted her baby bump on both her blog and social media pages and described how she and her friend found out about her pregnancy when they did a home pregnancy test.
“2018 started with me finding out I was pregnant. When I missed my period and my friend and I did a home pregnancy test and it read positive, my friend began to cry with happiness but I was just there staring at the stick like, you’re not messing with me, are you? This is real and not a joke on me, right? I refused to believe it and asked my friend to drive me to a lab for another test. And there it was confirmed, I was pregnant. Me, Linda, I am going to have my own child. Please don’t wake me up from this lovely dream..lol,” she said.
Ikeji said she started loving children when she was an adolescent and was known as an unofficial babysitter for many women in her former neighbourhood.
“I grew up in a compound with a lot of neighbours and believe it or not, as a teenager/young woman, I was the unofficial resident babysitter. I swear, ask my siblings. I literally carried all the new born babies in that compound at a period of time until they grew up to a certain age. Their moms used to drop the babies at our house whenever they were tired or wanted to go out, this was, of course, to the annoyance of my family…lol,” she said.
The 37-year-old who is expecting a baby boy said, the first child she took into her arms was a boy named Makoba 20 years ago. She said since then her love for children had grown.
“The first baby I carried was a boy named Makoba (wonder where he is now, this was about 20 years ago, he will be a big boy now). From the first day I carried him, I didn’t want to let him go…so every time I had free time, and his mom hadn’t brought him to me, I would walk two floors up, knock on his family’s door and ask them if they wanted me to take the child off them for a while. I was always happy when they said yes. After him other moms started dropping their kids with me,” she said.
“So now imagine that in a few months, I will look down at a baby, and it won’t be a neighbour’s child, a friend’s child, a sister’s child, but my own child, my own flesh and blood, carried in my womb. My own son. It’s surreal. I can’t get over it.
“Sometimes when I’m lying down and I feel him moving around inside me (he’s so hyper already, constantly moving around…lol), I just get up and cradle my tummy and smile. Lol. I can’t wait for these months to go by so I can meet him. My own son!
Early in the year, news broke that the 37 year-old was engaged to a yet to be identified man. However, her sister, Sandra posted a picture of a man many believe to be Linda’s fiance and enthused how she could not wait to be his sister in law.
Ikeji announced in the same post that she is having a baby shower in a few weeks.
