As soon as I’d posted my pregnancy announcement, I got e-mails from two old friends telling me that they are both also pregnant. (Old friends not in the sense of age, but in the sense that we’ve known each other most of our lives, since before we started school.) Their pregnancies are just a few months ahead of mine. Which is all very convenient for me – at any point, when I will be wondering about this or that baby-raising question, they will have gone through the very same thing just a few months earlier!

Although at this point, all this talk about babies feels remote… intellectually I know that there is a baby at the other end of this pregnancy. But I find it very difficult to imagine a life with a baby. I haven’t got much first hand-experience of them, either. There haven’t been any births on my side of the family since I was born (no cousins, no nephews or nieces) and those on Eric’s side are on the other side of a sea, so contacts have been limited. I guess we will simply learn from our own mistakes rather than others’ experience.

We had our first appointment with the midwife today. Lots of talk (an hour and a half!) and lots of box-ticking. The amount of paperwork that this pregnancy is producing is astounding. I begin to understand why the NHS costs as much as it does. It’s all paper-based and their usage of computers is minimal and mostly limited to booking appointments. Communication between different hospitals / clinics takes place in the form of letters – on paper! snail mail! Ante-natal care involves not just midwives and GPs but also specialists (for ultrasounds etc), and they all need to have access to notes relating to my pregnancy. So these are all in paper format, bound up in a red folder that I myself have to take care of and carry around; there are no databases or electronic patient journals involved. Very quaint.