French pregnancy diary part 1

Nine months in Normandy

From scare to scan: weeks 0-12

• Surprise
• What's French for sore boobs?
• How do they have babies in France?
• Someone's smiling down on us
• The horror, the joy, the excitement...

Find out how life is treating Sue now that she's a busy mum in the first installment of Life with Alex ...

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-to-be, Nicholas, a ballroom dancing teacher. Language barriers, an innate fear of driving and an uphill struggle against French bureaucracy are just some of the hurdles she now finds herself up against...

If we'd just had a little longer... I could have got my French up to a standard where I could talk confidently about fallopian tubes and congenital abnormalities, overcome my fear of driving enough to get myself to hospital appointments without turning into a gibbering wreck, and generally be a slightly more independent mother-to-be than I find myself at the moment!

But there you have it - it happened a little sooner than we'd planned and I'm a bit floored by the challenges that lie ahead. It was quite a fitting end to last year though, to find out we were about to swell our numbers. After all, we'd crammed a lot into 2001 - given up our jobs, made the dramatic leap of moving from London to rural France, launched my freelance career and planned, from scratch, a French wedding for 80 people from all corners of the world. So to find ourselves in the family way just four months after our honeymoon shouldn't have come as any surprise. It certainly has to go down as a record year in our lives so far!

Our official date for falling pregnant is 19 October - the first date of my last period. My due date, however, is 2 August as they give you an extra week in France - they must have cottoned onto the fact that first babies in England are usually late!

Finding out we were expecting a baby was the usual lightning bolt. I'd only been off the pill for a month and was trying to clear out my system. Our intention was to start trying in earnest after our first anniversary. Little did we know how fertile we both were!

Nicholas came home with the test, my stomach lurched in anticipation and I dutifully toddled into the downstairs loo. We did this the day before a scheduled work trip back to England, not thinking for a moment it would be positive. But there it was, that unmistakable pink line. Gulp!

It wasn't until we got back from England that we were able to head off to the local doctor and become initiated into the French maternity system. I've had some doubts over the last 12 months about our move to France (just because I really miss London and crave the shops, the cinemas, the South Bank...), but now that I'm pregnant, I'm so glad we've got all this space,

Dr Largenton was nice. We'd seen him in the run-up to our wedding because, bizarrely, you have to get tested for all sorts of things in order to get married here - the idea is that you both go into the marriage with your eyes open, knowing whether or not your blood types are compatible for procreation and whether either of you has any nasty diseases.

We knew, for example, that the doctor spoke a token amount of English, which would make me feel better if I ever had to attend an appointment without Nicholas - he's lucky enough to speak fluent French, by virtue of having been brought up near Quebec. My French, by contrast, is still the disjointed and badly pronounced kind bred by northern comprehensive schools.

Our first appointment was much as it would be in the UK - when was my last rubella jab?...Any nausea?...Blah blah...Toxoplasmosis... Incidentally, the toxo thing is very common in France - I will be tested for this every month as it seems I don't carry the antibody (unlike 90 per cent of the population here).

I didn't feel any real anticipation about the official confirmation, since I was really in no doubt as to why I was now (already) piling on the weight. And so we passed into the Christmas festivities without much further thought to the growing baby inside me.

What I needed next was evidence that there was a living being inside me. Friends here told me I might get this at my next doctor's visit, since the doctors here have a device for monitoring the baby's heartbeat, which can apparently be heard from about eight weeks. This, however, was not to be. When I asked, the doctor looked at me as though I was mad and told me it was much too early for that. We'd have to wait until my first ultrasound (the first of three), which we now had to book.

In France, the health service is a bit fragmented. A friend had warned me that because of this I might have to do a lot of the leg work in booking appointments and keeping on top of things. There's also heaps of paperwork, not least to make sure all the upfront consultation and prescription charges are reimbursed. Great - something else to cope with in a foreign language!

The upside, though, is that you get to choose who does what, so we have elected to have the baby in the hospital at Fougeres, which has won all sorts of awards for its maternity unit. It's a 30-minute drive from home, along a straightforward and usually deserted A road, so I reckon I can probably do it if I chant calming mantras to myself all the way. I've got till May anyway before I have to do this alone, as that's when the antenatal classes start - unfortunately, Nicholas isn't allowed to come, which is quite scary from a French-speaking and a driving point of view.

Our first experience of the hospital confirmed the good things we'd heard, and made me feel less wobbly. We had our 12-week scan there a couple of weeks ago and it was so exciting. Not only was the gynaecologist a lovely, patient man who just happened to be an anglophile who speaks fluent English, but he gave over an hour of his time to us, explaining everything and writing our notes in English for us. What luck!

What's more, I came away with all my next prescriptions for blood tests, plus all my dates for antenatal classes, so I feel very organised. We were so enraptured with Dr Richard that we decided to have all further check-ups with him.

Next on the list, aside from the standard monthly tests, is a further confirmation of my blood type and that special blood test to determine my chances of giving birth to a baby with Down's. Armed with the results, we'll head back to Fougeres in a fortnight.

If I was to sum up my first three months of being pregnant in France, it would go something like this: excitement, horror, fear, joy, trepidation, rushes of panic, rushes of delirium, uncharacteristic calm and a general sense of peace. Nicholas has been fantastically supportive and is thoroughly excited about the pregnancy, which is a great relief given how early we got caught out. We're also very lucky to have our new lifestyle, which means we are both at home 24 hours a day. Nicholas is currently renovating our property - a large, unwieldy watermill - with a view to running dancing holidays from here in due course.

We have a lot of hurdles to overcome - not least how we'll manage financially now that I'm freelance and not entitled to any kind of maternity leave. I also have to grapple with my own personal challenges in grasping the local language and realise, once and for all, that 33 is plenty grown up enough to be able to drive a car! But we'll get there (I hope!).

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.

Where to next?

• Nine months in Normandy - read the rest of Sue's adventures in France
• Create your own pregnancy diary
• Pregnant? Talk with other mums-to-be on our discussion forum
• Find out more about your pregnancy, use your personalised planner on babyworld
• If you're working in pregnancy, read about your maternity rights
• Start saving for your baby with the help of our interactive money tool