What’s strange at this point in the pregnancy time-line, is that she is as old as man was when he decided to emerge three months early into the world. Bump met man’s mother when we were on holiday last week and she told us all the complications of man’s passage into life – incredible that he is so normal.

On this same holiday we watched, toute la famille, the very first epidsode of Cold Feet – the one where one of the characters (name forgotten) is very pregnant, then has her baby. Bearing in mind that man’s family is predominently male, it was super embarrasing to find myself blubbing uncontrollably. I don’t even know why! It’s not like anyone died, just that, mon dieu, that’s what we’ll be going through too!

A feeling that we’re not prepared is beginning to set in. We haven’t yet visited the hospital, bought any baby items, gone to antenatal classes, and anything else you’re supposed to do. Other things like, do I have the edpidural? I hate needles, but what’s worse – the needle or the pain of childbirth? Will I do it naturally, maybe?

There’s time, of course, but the summer months are calmer, so shouldn’t we be out there spending our Saturday’s shopping? What should we get? I wish somebody would just give me a list of the essentials.

Instead of the above, I’ve been prioritising plants. Tomatoes and raspberries out on the terrasse, and spider etc plants inside. Probably not the most sensible of things seeing as before we know it she’ll be toppling the plants, earth all over the place…

Ah, well, I’m sure that by the time I write the next update I’ll be super calm about it all with a proper plan. We’re off for a scan tomorrow, a welcome chance to see babs and how she’s developing. Oh, she’s learnt to hiccup – I can feel the regular jumpy movements of a hiccup in my belly right now.

It is apparently the period when baby is still small and therefore as a lot of space to perform acrobats in the womb. Give it another couple of months and she (yes, it’s a girl!) will be too squashed in to sommersault, but not enough to pack a decent punch.

Physical changes aside, one of the biggest changes to have happened in the last month or so is a growing feeling that I can actually be a Mum. Gone – forever – is the time of disconnect with those who have children. The time when you listen to their parenting stories and reply with “oh, that must be tough”, or, “ah, that’s nice”, and hope the conversation will change rapidly since you can’t yet imagine yourself as a parent.

It’s not that I want to listen to more of these family stories, it’s that I can now see myself in those shoes.

And here’s something: I already find my child funny. All I have to do is watch my tummy moving with the kicks and turns of babs and i’m reaching for the camera to record it and giggling.

5 months pregnant and it’s happening!

Turning, squirming, kicking, awake.

Trousers no longer close, maternity clothes I should get.

Watching my belly, soft, strange, new movements

Stronger heart beating

He takes a shower, looks at my naked, pregnant form.

Different, beautiful, fuller.

Heat today, beautiful morning, evening light, but day time strength too much

Heat goes to my head, black, yellow, green vision

Give me cold ice cream now!

Crèches, crèches another new administrative journey through Belgium

Imagining leaving an as yet unborn child, I don’t yet know how powerful this pull  will be.

His hand on my belly, a bump, a tiny movement.

At four months I can now feel this thing growing inside me that up until now has been the most weirdly abstract thing I have ever experienced. A thing that caused intense tiredness, some sickness that either spoilt the whole day or were random moments over as soon as they started.

The smell of coffee, the taste of tomatoes, the chemicals in our newly renovated and new to us flat. Pollution. Uncooked fruits. Salty food now. But this all has passed, except varnish.

Now it is more real. It could be a girl, we could start saying ‘she’ instead of ‘it’ when referring to my belly over which trousers no longer close.

Planned, unplanned? A surprise for sure. Told for years it would be difficult, and then BANG, it is here, changing my life, already. How much will it change? A lot. But will our lives as they are now have to stop? The concerts, the Sunday market, the romantic, sunny week in Sevilla, spontaneous beers with friends or colleagues.

Eat more fish, less caffine, no alcohol, or maybe a sip, bed earlier, looser clothes, exercise but no jumping, yoga: “renvoie le bébé dans le dos”.

The scans. Its development from a small bean inside, to a human-like form in weeks, to a visible heart pumping fast, fingers, toes, eyes, ears. 19 weeks now, 4 months, 5 to go. October, October, what will you bring? Fear, tiredness, relationship strain, a bundle of joy? not knowing what to do, alone, just the three of us, just the two of us. When will our couple be alone again? Will the romance go? Will we cope?

Of course we will. Adapt, change, stay the same, grow.

Last weekend, as the sun was burning hot outside, but a chilly air hung around in the shadows, we wandered through the ‘Braderie’ market in Saint Gilles. In typical Belgian spirit, roads had been closed so that Saint Gilles locals could set up their own market stalls and empty out their unwanted rusty knives, scarves with holes in and broken watches. But among the junk is the occasional gem that really will make life better. Pint glasses, for example, are difficult to find in your average home-shop like Casa, but we found some that will now allow Boyfriend to fit all of the contents of a beer bottle into one glass. Even less reason to pause an episode of the Peep Show.

Exactly a week later we were on the same flat-improvement mission, this time to find a throw to cover our black leather yuppie I-live-in-a-bachelor-pad-in-East-London style sofa. After receiving a good tip-off from a friend, we headed to the Matonge area of Chaussee de Wavre, where African clothes, food and wig (yes, whole shops devoted to wigs, and there’s not just one of them) shops line the street. In a fabric shop, there were piles of brightly coloured African print covered fabric and we chose, after surprisingly little deliberation, a purple, yellow and blue pattern – perfect for draping over the sofa and adding a new light to the main room.

Lighting was another new addition. On the same Chaussee, next-door to the crazy piano shop where I learnt “jazz piano” that seemed to include a disproportionate number of Celine Dion songs, (“oh, madmoiselle, I know a song you’re going to love learning”, my teacher said opening the song book on to the page of “my heart will go on”; mine stopped), was a shop full of the most normal and the most crazy lamps you could imagine. One looked like it had been removed from a dentists’ chair, and another was a very beautiful, but expensive, floral arrangement that stretched across the shop’s ceiling. We chose a nice long light, which reminds me of a tortoise poking its head out of its shell, or of ET’s neck that grew when he wanted to “phone home”. It took the shop keeper a long time to dissemble the pieces, and I feared it would take Boyfriend three times as long to reassemble it later, having already lost a vital connecting part, but I need not have worried.

Our flat looked great by the time friends came round for a crumble and pumpkin soup (that, we all discovered, makes you fart a lot) party at the end of the weekend.

Boyfriend, however, has decided the summer calm is the perfect time to educate his musical knowledge-lacking girlfriend. When I say musical I don’t mean a broad theme like ‘you must know more classical music’, or more specific like ‘your knowledge on pentatonic scales in the blues is seriously lacking’, i mean one band only – the Beatles. Boyfriend’s true love.

This morning I was woken to ‘please, please me’. An album with some lovely soppy songs like ‘love love me do’ or whatever its title is, but I’m sure you know the song I mean. There I was off in a dreamy world with images of Boyfriend singing me this song as we sit on a cliff top overlooking the gentle sea waves break on the shore below, a field of golden corn swaying softly in the warm breeze behind us, and a huge picnic brought by Boyfriend with luscious food like tasty slices of quiche, cherry tomatoes, cote d’or ice cream and freshly picked cherries.

“And this, in five beats time, is when Ringo starts drumming,” Boyfriend interrupts.

“Really? Cool, yeah, I can really hear the difference,” I say trying to look alert and interested.

“The album cover picture is fascinating too,” he says, and begins to recount the story of the cover picture in detail. I go back to my dream world but, strangely, I like to hear his excited voice in the background telling me lots of Beatles fact and intrigue.

“Did you hear that? You’re not listening are you?”…”I am, it’s just that I’m also concentrating on those chord changes”, I say cleverly. And so he continues.

By the time summer is over, I’m sure my blog entries on return from our summer holiday will be subtly infused with Beatles lyrics. Boyfriend may well become Bad Boy. From Me To You I’ll be telling secrets about Me and My Monkey. I’ll Follow The Sun escaping from Three Cool Cats, that sort of thing.

Thank God he’s not into Metallica.

Boyfriend loves this type of weather. The sound of thunder is one of his favourite – BANG! FLASH! flash! – that first flash was lightning and the second, you’ve guessed it, a camera flash. It all harks back to his love of nature in his Welsh motherland – mountains, towering clouds, sweeping waves. So, you might be thinking Boyfriend is the type to go out with a bow and arrow into the forest and come home with a wild boar for dinner. He’d skin the animal and cook it on a fire of wood he chopped from the forest that same night. An ideal day of leisure would be spent fly fishing or foraging for mushrooms in big, open fields. He’d dream of holidays in Australia fighting crocodiles or swimming with blue whales in freezing cold oceans.

It might come as a shock to you that Boyfriend is in fact scared of the smallest insects.

‘AHHHG!’ Comes the cry from the bedroom where Boyfriend was calmly reading a book. ‘What’s that?’ I expect to see Batman coming through the window, or something equally big and exciting, but no it’s a ‘HUGE’ butterfly-sized moth innocently flapping its way over to the lamp by the bed.

‘It’s coming closer!! NOO!’ This insect with a slim brown body and gentle wings has apparently got it in for him.

‘What’s it going to do to me? Is it a daddy long-legs? ‘because I hate those’ Boyfriend wimpers.

I’ve always loved daddy long-legs. Ever since I was convinced at a young age that good father-like spirits must live in them. ‘ No it’s definitely not a daddy long-legs’. ‘Is it a mosquito?’ With that I calmly trap the moth inside a glass and tease Boyfriend taking the moth-inside-glass up to his face. ‘Why do people always do that?’ he says.

Right now I’m still living with the groaning after-effects of a day a the seaside.

From his neck, all the way down his chest, including his shoulders, and stopping in a dramatic red-white line at the bottom of his stomach, Boyfriend is a radioactive red. He has one splodge which is slightly less sunburnt than the rest since it’s the only area I was allowed to put suncream, in the shape of a slightly deformed heart. Maybe I was a neglectful girlfriend (surely one advantage of having a girlfriend is that you have someone to rub suncream into your back, later avoiding those tan marks on your back that show exactly where you could reach with that arm-over-the-shoulder cream rubbing in action) but I promise that Boyfriend assured me he had the type of skin which could handle a northern Belgian sun. I thought it would be the hairs on his chest that would act as a natural sunscreen.

Luckily, our beach day in Oostende was fun. A friend on a “booze cruise” from London had driven over to stock his car with bottles of wines and spirits, for a home ‘Dell Boy’ style cocktail bar, at the huge supermarket in Calais and headed to Oostende just up the same coast. We played bat-and-ball, flew a kite, ate ice cream and swam in the freezing North Sea.

Boyfriend was even happier since he’d brought along his camera. We now have reels of pictures of seagulls side-on facing to the right, seagulls side-on slightly to the left facing right, seagull lifting a webbed foot, seagull airing a wing, seagull foraging for chips and a whole other collection of seagulls facing to the left.

It didn’t take long for the beach happiness effect to wear off. Boyfriend started the week saying “I don’t mind being sunburnt because I had such a good weekend.” During the middle of the day he was showing his glowing chest to my female journalist friends and earning much sympathy which he adored. At the end of the day Boyfriend returned home armed with strong aftersun following a trip to the chemist – another opportunity to get his chest out. “Ooohhh” the chemist said recoiling from the heat blast as Boyfriend lifted his top, “c’est vraiment rouge ca.”

Then the painful bit started. Painful for him, and a pain in the arse for me. In an attempt to help suffering Boyfriend, I offered to put aftersun on his back – after the torrent of AGHHGHs and ow, STOP-its I decided against doing it for a second time. But worse, were his flinches every time I came near him. Would I bump into his sensitive skin? Never! Boyfriend thinks that, although I don’t mean to harm, I can go too far. Secretly, I know this is true but always deny it. This week, for a change, I’ve been good and kept my distance from his skin – but that hasn’t stopped the wimpering.

OWWW – that’s Boyfriend putting on a shirt.

EEEEEEK – Boyfriend getting into bed.

FOR FUCKS SAKE – Boyfriend in the shower.

Do I have to take the bins out? – Boyfriend claiming that sunburn exempts him from his bin duties.

But yesterday he made up for it all by cooking something good. It was a potato, vegetable, smoked-salmon dinner. I refrained from making any comparisons between his chest and the reddy-pink fish.

Living in such a well connected city is one of the biggest advantages of Brussels. We hopped on a train and one and a half hours later we were surrounded by German trying to order drinks from a cafe.
‘Ein…urm…damn, beer please,’ Boyfriend said. While I asked for a slice of ‘kaiserkuchen’.

‘Was?’

‘Ein kaisekuchen bitte?’

‘Ah! you want cheesecake not kingcake, right?’

‘Yes please, damn it’.

After ambling around the historical centre of Aachen for a while, we joined our friends in the pub garden. Germans were gearing up for a win and the atmosphere was great. Faces were painted black, red and yellow; girls wore the German flag as a dress; while boys hollored something like ‘auf gang Deutschland; shoot a goal oogh oogh’.

We tucked into our Kolsch beer, left our Spanish leanings behind (ish) and joined the vibe. And then Spain scored! The dismay! (i was secretly delighted – viva espana!). The whole crowd looked like Germany had just lost Euro 2008, and then it did.

For us, though, it was probably a good thing as it made our getaway back to Brussels much smoother.