petite anglaise

I’m fed up of being pregnant.

‘I honestly feel like time has slowed to a crawl,’ I moan to The Boy as I toss and turn, trying to find a comfortable position in bed. ‘I swear, this has been the longest seven months of my entire life…’

‘Not long to wait now,’ he replies, doing his utmost to sound both positive and comforting.

Officially, though, D-day is still another nine, maybe ten weeks away. And that doesn’t feel like ‘not long’ at all.

I know I should count my blessings. I’m not on enforced bed rest, or suffering from gestational diabetes or high blood pressure. I’m simply twelve kilos heavier, with occasional shooting pains in my left buttock (sciatica) and an odd tingly burning sensation in my left knee when I walk (also sciatica). Getting to sleep at night is a challenge (not least because if I don’t manage to fall asleep before The Boy, I have to work on tuning out his snoring) and I often end up surfing the internet at silly o’clock, marvelling at the veins in Madonna’s arms or chuckling (quietly) at photos of Lolcats to pass the time until I’m finally too exhausted to fidget and deem it time to return to bed.

By day, aside from making inroads into the towering pile of books on my bedside table, developing new television addictions and doing the odd bit of book release related stuff, I’m not really gainfully employed just now. With maternity leave looming, I decided I’d rather not rush into working on a new project straight away. There couldn’t be a better time, I figured, to take step back from the whirlwind of the past three years and give myself the space to work out just where I want to go from here.

But the inactivity is beginning to weigh on me, and Tadpole’s prolonged absences this summer certainly haven’t helped. Since we returned from our family holiday in Turkey, in mid-July, she’s been away more often than not, and is currently with her French grandparents, returning to Paris only a couple of days before she’s due to start ‘big school’.

Without a doubt she’s much better off elsewhere, doing lots of fun activities with people who can waddle more than a few metres without running short of breath. But I miss her. I miss our cuddles in the morning, her touching solicitude (‘mummy, will you be alright on the stairs?’) and the kisses she has taken to planting on my protruding bellybutton.

Mindful of her sometime reluctance to speak on the phone, I decided to set up a Tadpolemail™ account in an attempt to spur her into keeping in touch while she’s away. Typically my daughter’s messages are short, sweet, peppered with the sorts of mistakes French people usually make when speaking English and, last but not least, guaranteed to bring a tear to my eye.

hello mummy

I want to have my bath in a minute and I love to talk to you at the telephone

lots of kisses from

tadpole xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

In the weeks leading up to our second ultrasound scan, lots of people began asking me whether we’d be in favour of taking a closer look at baby’s undercarriage to determine its sex.

This is something I’d studiously avoided the first time around, allowing Tadpole to creep up on me by stealth. I was hankering after a little girl, but knew that whoever popped out (oh, if only that were an accurate verb, it makes it sound so much easier than the fourteen hour marathon her birth really was) would instantly steal my heart.

Despite an overwhelming intuitive feeling that the inhabitant of my womb was a boy this time around, I found myself, once again, hoping for a girl. The official reason I gave, when pressed for justification, was that I’m not a big fan of golden showers. I’ve heard several horror stories – from reliable sources – about boy infants and their fountain-like abilities during nappy change time and decided this was not something I felt the need to experience.

But – joking aside – the real reason was that I have little firsthand knowledge of what makes small boys tick.

I grew up with two younger sisters, you see, and although I actually have twin brothers as well, we didn’t meet until I was almost thirty and they were in their late teens. Small boys are therefore something of an unknown quantity to me and preferring the idea of a daughter over a son was probably a case of ‘better the devil you know’.

Observing friends of mine with their sons from a safe distance, I’ve often found their levels of boisterousness overwhelming. And I’ve noticed other differences too. The way infant males tend to cling to their mothers, for example, often quite literally, wrapping themselves around their mummy’s legs like bindweed when they are going through the separation anxiety stage.

The Boy was adamant that he wanted to find out the sex of our baby at the second ultrasound scan, and I decided doing things differently this time was a good way to ring the changes, so we informed the doctor of this just as she was noisily squirting a huge quantity of lube onto my belly. She nodded, but explained that she’d be taking all the usual second scan measurements first, and would look at the genitalia afterwards.

And by the time she got to the money shot, I have to admit that I was so preoccupied with the baby’s SIZE that all gender-related considerations had taken a back seat.

Baby’s estimated weight – at 22 weeks – was 570g. I happened to know for a fact that the average weight at this stage tends to be more like 430g, meaning that baby was about two weeks ahead of him/herself. The head, femur and foot measurements were all equally supersized, placing baby in the 90th percentile. How on earth, I began to wonder, eyes watering in premature anticipation, was I ever going to get this baby out of my womb without breaking my pelvis in two?

And then there it was, the turtle-like outline on the ultrasound screen that clearly indicated that my (and the Boy’s) intuition had been correct. Le bébé is indeed a he, just as we’d both suspected.

A few days later, I find I’m getting used to the idea of male offspring and I even bought a delightful blue robot-print babygro in the sales, by way of celebration.

But as for the size issue, my eyes still water every time I allow myself to think about that.

Oh, boy.