expectant

My friend Asdis rightly said in her comment, it is like discovering you are pregnant. You want to crack open the champagne except you mustn't be too excited and besides it's best not to drink at this early stage; You want to (and i did) buy loads of big floaty pregnancy outfits; You want to share this miracle with everyone you know..

However, a lot can happen (and it did) in the first two months.

Talking to a new friend who is an adoptive mother, we agreed that, despite their very unhappy and premature endings, we were both glad we celebrated our pregnancies. Julian and I received the flowers and the congratulations gladly, and I would never send any of them back. Even two months of being pregnant is an incredible thing and, even if I never got to play the Mozart opera for sixteen weeks with a foetus growing in tune with the cello's vibrations, there was magic (as I sat and breathed in to my pregnancy in front of our Inglenook fireplace, surrounded by our four Sussex wattle and daub walls) that I am glad I have known.

And now, with an 'agrément' promised but not in our hands, some people, especially bureaucrats, are being weird, like people are weird when you tell them you are pregnant before your first trimester is up; like it's bad luck or something.

Julian and I are both people who celebrate every step of the way. We mourn but we don't look back. We are planning a trip to Mali in November or December. It is the journey I have longed, all my life, to do. For some reason, because my best friend had a desire to trek in Nepal, or we were on tour in Singapore and it was a short hop to Bali, or I was travelling solo so opted for a course in Indian singing in Kerala, I always went elsewhere on my travels. If our journey leads to a better understanding of the culture from which our child might come, all the better. If it leads nowhere but itself, that's good enough for the moment.

The temperature, meanwhilehereinfrance, has dropped twenty degrees from 29 to 9. The terrace, finished at last and having hosted at least a week of breakfasts, lunches and aperos, is blowy and wet. It is time to light a fire, or time perhaps for an adventure...