French pregnancy diary part 3

Nine months in Normandy

On the road back to normality: weeks 16-20

• Food glorious food
• Pierre ou Anique?
• Retail therapy
• Hello, brain?

Week 16 brought what I'd hoped to get from week 12 - a returned appetite and the ability to stay up beyond 10pm! Relief. Although I'd been lucky to escape morning sickness, I'd been more faddy than usual about food during the first trimester, which is tough when you're vegetarian and living in one of the least veggie-friendly countries in the world. Already, pregnancy had imposed a ban on soft cheeses, and now I had gone off things like pizza, macaroni cheese, frozen mushroom pies and chips to boot, which left me with a diet of Special K (red fruits), All Bran Apricot parcels, yoghurt and fruit. In short: baby food.

Now I'm slightly less faddy, and have also discovered (duh!) that most of the soft cheeses you buy in supermarkets here are in fact pasteurised, so I could have eaten them all along. People keep asking me if I have cravings. I don't crave meat, certainly, so that's been a blessing (as I have a good relationship with our local heifers and couldn't look them in the eye again if I caved in at McDonalds), but I have been going through obsessive waves The first was cereal bars, followed by yoghurt drinks, and then more recently plums, Golden Delicious apples, and avocado, mozzarella and tomato salads. What typically happens is I buy these items in bulk, then get completely sick of them after the second week and watch guiltily as they rot in the fridge.

We're now at the stage of trying to put our minds to choosing names. I keep leaving our growing collection of Baby Names books in the downstairs loo, hoping this will inspire us to dip in regularly and establish some recurring favourites, but we're both useless and don't seem to like any name enough to give it to someone for a lifetime.

Even having the additional possibility of French names is little help, since I'm wary of calling our child something that will seem alien to its English/Canadian relatives. On the other hand, we don't want to give the baby a name that's unpronounceable in French. It's bad enough that I've just discovered that our surname is rude in French ('ta bitte' means 'your dick'), which kind of rules out Max as a first name for a boy - we'd just be asking for trouble...

A related dilemma concerns the baby's nationality - will it be French, English or Canadian? That's assuming we can choose. We think we'd like it to be English. A close friend who had her baby son in Germany chose British nationality for him so he could escape national service. We're pretty certain this no longer applies in France, but we're going to make sure.

Work has continued to improve, which is excellent news, though the more I hear from my friend Emma (the one who had her first baby here a couple of months ago), the more I'm wondering how on earth I'm going to juggle full-time work with new motherhood after August. But for now the extra income facilitates minor spending sprees, and I find that I've really got into catalogue shopping.

I was a shopaholic in London and have always said since we moved here that our set-up would be perfect if only there was a bus route to Oxford Street at the end of our lane. The shops in our immediate vicinity are a bit pitiful really, but online shopping has opened up a world of new possibilities. I've just placed my second maternity order, and this one also includes our first baby sleep-suits (you know - those new-fangled sleeping bag outfits that are designed to replace duvets).

I wasn't going to 'waste' money on maternity clothes, but you think differently when you're a big fat blob and are prepared to try anything to feel feminine again. (Luckily I haven't got to the stage yet when I have to ask Nicholas to shave my legs for me...) As I write, I sit here a cliché in my denim dungarees. I said I wouldn't get any but Nicholas looked disappointed, so I consider these a treat to him. My other maternity clothes are pretty summery dresses. We've also bought our first bit of expensive baby paraphernalia - the car seat.

Oh, and the baby has started to move now, bang on schedule. Like everyone else, I mistook this for wind when it eventually happened. This was after several attempts at having long baths, thinking this would be how I'd first activate those tiny flutters. 'Between 8 to 10 o'clock at night?' asked the gynaecologist at our last appointment. 'Yes!' I said, surprised at his accuracy. It seems I'm having a text-book pregnancy.

This is certainly how I explain missing my Mum's birthday for the first time in my life. My scattiness seems to have reached alarming proportions. Forgetting to grill my bread when making beans on toast was one thing, but forgetting my Mum's birthday was unforgivable. I've heard of worse, but it does make me wonder what's going on in the space where my brain resided.

And so the weeks tick by. Reaching the halfway mark at 20 weeks feels quite significant, not least scary (though to be accurate I won't be halfway till 20.5 weeks, since they calculate the birth date at 41 weeks here).

Nicholas is busy ripping out the nursery, uncovering more alarming damp patches that seem par for the course with this big, unwieldy mill, which had been left empty for two years before we claimed it. His plans for the baby's room are quite something. Before long it will be the best room in the house. Wonder what I have to do to get a carpet and fresh décor in our bedroom...

But time, it seems, is fast running out. And once the baby's here, and I'm back at work full-time, Nicholas will have his hands full with the new infant, so I'm not sure how far the mill renovations will progress for a while after that!

Sue Tabbitt, 33, is a freelance IT journalist, who moved to the outskirts of Normandy 12 months ago to start a new chapter in her life with her Canadian husband, Nicholas, a ballroom dancing teacher.

Tune in next month for Sue Tabbitt's latest instalment of Nine months in Normandy...

Where to next?

• Nine months in Normandy - read the rest of Sue's adventures in France
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• Find out more about your pregnancy, use your personalised planner on babyworld
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