Summary of my day so far:  Got up, realised it was my birthday, threw up, returned to bed.

That pretty much says it all.  Thirty-four just has such a great ring to it.

Just exactly what last night’s mushroom omelette and chips were still doing in my system ten hours after they were eaten is anyone’s guess.  Does food just never get digested anymore?  Does being pregnant mean that one no longer has intestines and food just sits there in the stomach, gradually congealing forever?  The levels of acid reflux I am experiencing would suggest that it is so.

See, I told you this blog would be a veritable goldmine of Too Much Information.

In other news, the baby shows precisely no signs of wanting to come out yet, but then this is probably a good thing, since one would hardly want the prediction of one of my Year 11s “but miss, what if the baby comes on your birthday?” to come true, since that would mean never having a birthday ever again, but being condemned to spend own birthday in perpetuity stone-cold sober, trying to direct children’s birthday party complete with overpriced party bags and screaming hordes of other people’s children baying for cake.  Even at 34, I’m not sure I’m ready for that kind of self-sacrifice.

Also, mercifully the fact that the baby has not come yet has allowed me some time to prepare.  Preparing in this case means trekking to London and picking up piles of baby clothes, along with the few remaining threads that I can fit into, and organising an appointment with the midwife here in order to change hospitals, which I am feeling much better about now, as nobody within the NHS has sent out a lynch mob just yet.  My brother has amusingly referred to the whole process as me being like a salmon, returning to the land of its birth in order to breed.  Hopefully this doesn’t mean I will not at some point in the future get away again, rather than be trapped forever as a house guest in single bed in my teenage bedroom which still has pink shelves on the wall which I adorned with glitter, and a door which, in a moment of arbitrary teenage madness and overexcitement at opening of local Ikea store, I painted purple, and which most tellingly of all still bears the blu-tac scars from the eighty-three pictures of Alessandro Del Piero I once festooned upon it.  At least the pictures themselves-lovingly cut out of the pages of the Gazetta Dello Sport no less-are not still there.

Where exactly the baby is going to sleep at this point remains something of a mystery.  My mother has kindly purchased a Moses basket, so he may well have to sit in it in the middle of the room like a bit of furniture or a suitcase no one quite knows where to put.  Alternatively there’s his car seat, which I have to admit looks very comfortable from where I’m sitting.  Many’s the time I’ve been tempted to park my expanding posterior in there, but I doubt I’d ever get out again and I’m not sure the safety tests are quite rigorous enough to see if the contraption will withstand overexcited parents trying to climb in with the-probably erroneous-belief that it might be more comfortable than a trip in the front seat with a neck pillow.  Come to think of it, babies do have pretty nice lives.  My brother has even expressed an interest in borrowing some of the Little One’s clothes, although quite how he will look in a woollen sailor onesie from Le Petit Bateau is a matter of some debate.

Lastly, the only other noteworthy thing that has happened (it’s been a slow day) is that according to the ancient scales in my mother’s bedroom, I have lost three pounds.  Either that is an error on the part of the scales or I have stopped expanding and this must mean that the baby is ready to be born, right?

Watch this space.