EXTRACTS FROM THE YUMMY MUMMY'S SURVIVAL GUIDE

HELLO BOYS! Some Physical Changes You (and Others) Might Notice

The starting gun will still be smoking when your body starts to change all over the place, and the rate at which this happens can be alarming. One of the good side-effects of pregnancy is that your breasts get bigger: even if you have practically no breasts at all you will develop something worthy of a decent ‘Phwoooaaar!' if you happen to pass a building site. This is just one of the changes you'll notice within weeks of fertilisation, along with the following:

• Your boobs become tender and harder (oh great) before getting noticeably bigger (great!).
• The skin around your nipples gets darker (this part is called the areola, if you really want to know).
• You might get light-headed easily.
• It gets harder to pull your abdomen in successfully and pretend you have a washboard stomach: it's like having permanently bad premenstrual fluid retention, except this time it doesn't go away – it just gets worse.
• You have trouble sleeping, despite being exhausted.
• You start having very complicated, frantic dreams, in which you already have a baby but you keep doing all sorts of dreadful things to it, such as dropping it off the top floor of Selfridges, leaving it at a bus stop, forgetting you put it in the bath while you go out for a meal, only to find…well, it's not pretty, but it's just a normal reaction to your huge news.
• You might start to feel sick, or even be sick

MORNING SICKNESS: IF ONLY...

What a misnomer! Firstly, as millions of women every year discover, it does not only occur in the morning, and secondly, it does not always involve being sick. The (presumably male) genius who came up with the term ‘morning sickness' should have spent a month or two in our house during the first trimester of my pregnancies, and then maybe we'd have had something more realistic to work with: 24-hour Nausea, Early Evening Retch, or Twelve Week Hell, for example.

From what I've read, this ‘feeling really sick', which you are very likely to experience to some degree in the first few months, seems to have something to do with hormones, as usual, and the reasons it seems worse in the morning are, apparently:

• The levels of these wretched hormones are higher in the morning.
• Your stomach is empty, so you feel sicker.

I suffered from evening sickness, which confounds all these theories.

The other misleading thing about ‘morning sickness' is that it sounds as though you are actually going to be sick. If only. In fact, one of the things I found hardest to bear was that I wasn't sick. Ever. I always felt that if I could only be sick, I would somehow feel relieved and better, but I never was. It was just hour after hour of feeling sick, like terrible sea-sickness, except that, being pregnant, I didn't want to take any anti-sickness tablets, because of the potential health risks.

It eventually passed at 12 weeks, and all was well again. Hang in there...

MORE WORRIES

I'm afraid sections dealing with worries, concerns, fears and feelings of utter doom and gloom will crop up time and time again throughout this book. This is not because I am the world's greatest pessimist, or because I am trying to wind you up into a panic, but because you will experience many of these worries over the course of becoming a mother, and I couldn't possibly fit them all into one part.

Most of my worries in the early months of my pregnancies focused on all the evils I had done to my body in the past , rather than what awaited it in the immediate future. Could a baby grow inside a body which was previously best known for its pint-downing ability? What about that magic mushroom I was offered (but declined – good girl) in Indonesia ten years ago? Maybe just being in the same tent had an effect on my brain, which would surely be passed on. And what about the genes from the rest of my unsuitable family? Mum used to smoke, my dad's great-great-great-grandmother had a heart attack, my husband used to live next to an asbestos factory, there's a phone mast at the end of our road, and I don't drink green tea. Oh God, Oh God! This baby is doomed to grow into a hallucinating piss-head, with heart trouble and a carcinogen-filled brain . What have I done ?

As far as I can make out from other Mums, this sort of irrational panicking is perfectly normal.  

Heather, mother of Alex, three, and Katie, six months:

We went to a wedding when I was eight weeks pregnant, although I didn't know at the time. I got hammered, and I put all the throwing up down to the ten glasses of champagne I had quaffed during the reception. When it turned out I was pregnant, I was convinced my baby would be a pickled onion rather than the healthy child she was. It was worrying, though.

CHEERING YOURSELF UP

If you are feeling worried and scared about what is happening to you, and about the whole ‘becoming a parent' thing, then read this bit over as many times as you need to over the next nine months:

• Becoming a Mummy changes the way you feel about everything, and if you are not sure about it now, you will be absolutely sure about it, and know you have done the right thing, when the baby comes. You will manage just fine.
• You will get your figure back , if you want to.
• Being a mother does not mean you change who you are , and you will still be able to go out, have a job, go shopping, travel and see your friends. A little less than before, but you can still do it.
• You will get Mothers' Day treats (yippee!).
• You will be able to board flights first.
• You get balloons when you go to restaurants with your baby.

SHOE WARNING

Don't even think about buying expensive shoes when you are heavily pregnant, especially if it's in the summer months. I made the huge mistake of indulging in some ‘shoes are the only answer to my hideousness' retail therapy when I was eight months pregnant with number three.

Alas, when it came to the Big Summer Wedding three months (and one baby) later, I discovered that they were a size too big. Needless to say, I wore them anyway, with several layers of insoles, but to be honest I just looked ridiculous, they came off with every step, and I ended up barefoot on the dancefloor. Silly girl.

PUTTING ON WEIGHT IN PREGNANCY

So, so, so, so many of my friends dread becoming fat during pregnancy. In fact, they're so convinced that pregnancy will turn them into a big blob of lard, that it's one of their main reasons for putting the whole thing off a little while longer. This completely baffles, and also rather annoys me for two reasons:

Firstly, what's wrong with getting a little bigger? Maybe pregnancy is a good time to lose the boyish hips, and develop a womanly curve or two. Secondly, being pregnant doesn't mean being fat. Not all pregnant women swell to the size of a salad-dodging Sumo wrestler. It all depends on how you decide to play it, and how much willpower you have. If you have no willpower at all, then now is a good time to start cultivating some.

When you are pregnant, you will get bigger. It's mainly just your stomach and breast regions which will go a little crazy, and to be honest that's hardly very surprising: there's a person growing inside you, and it's got to go somewhere . Unless you have some really weird internal arrangements, like no vital organs at all, then the only way is outwards, hence the big tummy.

The trouble starts, when you feel you have to eat enough to feed your growing baby as though it's running a marathon in there or something. It's not. It's just hanging around, swallowing, stretching, sucking its thumb occasionally, and growing a teeny bit. Hardly enough to merit a full extra meal, if you're honest.

‘But it needs to grow – I must eat more!', you will cry, washing down another granola bar with a full-fat latte before polishing off your husband's pain au chocolat and wondering if just one more banana before lunch might be in order. This is absolutely fine, if you don't mind turning into a bus. It's not fine if you want to recognise yourself in a few months' time.

SEX: HOW, WHY AND WHEN?

Sex may not be foremost on your mind as your pregnancy really starts to take shape (so to speak), but it's still there, and it needs some attention too. Pregnancy can have a huge effect on your attitude towards sex, and whatever your experience, somebody else will be feeling the same way.

Some women become nymphomaniacs, others go off sex completely for the rest of their lives, and most fall somewhere in between.

Dealing with the WHY first, there are two answers I have found: firstly, because you still can , and secondly, because if you don't you will worry about your lack of interest, and that your partner, becoming paralysingly frustrated, will run off with next-door's nanny while you turn into a miserable old prune. The first part is very real: when you are super-huge, sex becomes physically impossible, if not dangerous to whoever happens to be underneath you. Once the baby is born you won't be able to have sex for a good few weeks, or even months, and after that you will have to schedule it in between ‘go to bed' and ‘fall asleep', which can only amount to about ten seconds, on a good day.

HOW is up to you really, but any chandeliers, trapezes and highly penetrative sex toys are out for now. Sorry. Lying on your back is uncomfortable and unwise for long periods of time now, because the baby is getting heavy and it presses down on your back and reduces your blood flow. Get a book and play around, because I'm sure as hell not going to tell you how we did it!

WHEN? Whenever you can. And can be bothered. And don't feel sick, or have terrible heartburn (although my husband swears he knows the best cure for that , if you know what I mean…), or are too tired, or want to sit in the bath squeezing colostrum out of your nipples instead. It's your call, because you are the pregnant one here, so you call the shots.

TOP TIP: Less of a tip than a request, really. Please, please keep having sex as much as you can while you are pregnant. It's so easy to put it on hold for a while, but getting your mojo back when you've been ‘on a break' for several months is really difficult. You will need all the help you can to feel like a sexy, horny, desirable, nubile young thing once you become a Mum as it is, and sex is one of the best ways of keeping in touch with the old you.