I had my first ultrasound scan this morning.

There is actually a little creature in there, believe it or not! Until now I’ve just felt like my body is growing an extra inner organ – it has been a part of me, and nothing else. (In fact some days I’ve doubted whether I am pregnant at all, because I haven’t experienced any of the things that are said to go with pregnancy – nausea, cravings etc.) But today, as I saw the creature move, it became real, in a way, and acquired an identity of its own. It already has more-or-less recognisable body parts: a head and arms and legs, and even a tiny heart that’s already pumping.

It also turns out I’m a bit more pregnant than I thought – I’d guessed maybe 10–12 weeks or so, but was told 14! That suddenly makes me feel a lot less fat. ETA was said to be 18 October. It turns out that this is calculated by simply measuring key bits of the baby (femur length, skull diameter) and then comparing that to a graph of standard sizes. Apparently all babies are roughly the same size up to week 20; individual differences come later.