Today is a momentous day.

Yes, today a stranger offered me his seat on the tube.

I am now officially a big fat pregnant woman, make no mistake.  And I am loving it.  The baby appears to enjoy putting his feet up by my belly button, so my new favourite game, as discovered last night, is poking him in the foot.  Not hard, obviously.  In fact, judging by his lack of reaction to this tonight, he probably doesn’t even notice I’m doing it.  It must be very odd being a baby and being stuck in the womb, and then coming out all of a sudden.

I don’t know why I just said that, I mean, I was a baby once apparently.  I’ve seen photographic evidence of this, even though I don’t remember any of it.

The problem is, I’ve read so much informative literature on babies recently, that I’ve become very worried about the effect of all of my actions on the Mini-Me, particularly those related to after he’s born.  For a start, I have singularly failed to do much talking to the baby in the womb.  Nor have I played him classical music, although I did play Saturday Night by Whigfield to him today, as obviously he will be very interested in learning about the days of my youth, in much the same way that I used to persistently ask my parents what life was like in the sixties, as if they spent the entire decade holed up in Carnaby Street with Twiggy and Mick Jagger, instead of going to school and getting pimples, like the ordinary teenagers that they were.

Anyway, I worry that my failure to teach Baby the joys of Mozart or provide him with scintillating conversation in the womb may have damaged him for life, in much the same way that I worry that if the  whole birth thing takes an unexpected turn and I end up being wheeled in for a caesarean, or with those giant tong things between my legs (forceps-urgh) then the baby will be traumatised for the rest of his life after having such a terrifying start to life, as my hypnobirthing books warn.

It seems a bit presumptuous though to assume that a difficult birth means a lifetime of trauma, given that I’ve never met a single person who can remember theirs, regardless of how euphoric or awful it was.  Mine, for the record, involved an emergency caesarean, and although I don’t remember the “stress” that I was apparently suffering at the time, I do remember the glow of self-satisfaction I had when my mother told me that the first she saw of me I was all pink and cuddly and wrapped in swaddling bands, having been freshly laundered before before being presented to her, unlike all those natural-birth babies who first greet their parents as a bloody, screaming mess.

Anyway, I’m off to read some more information on How Not To Balls Up Your Baby’s Life Forever.  By the time this baby is actually born, I’ll be terrified to do anything at all.