And slowly, but surely, we passed the milestones. The early scan at the clinic where they were utterly unbothered by the previous week’s bleeding and said that sometimes these things just happen and any reason is gone without trace by the time they’re scanning. The viability scan at ten weeks, and the Harmony test that is no longer called the Harmony test, but is the same sort of test for genetic abnormalities. The midwife booking in appointment. The 12 week scan. And it wasn’t that I wasn’t thinking about it. Or that I wasn’t anxious. But, unlike when I was pregnant before, there were so many other demands on my time, and my attention.

There was work, a house renovation project and, the baby, who I realised I had to stop calling the baby because, all things being well, there would be an actual baby. (Do you see that? “all things being well” It’s my talisman, my touching wood, my note to the gods that I’m taking nothing for granted, that I don’t, can’t, won’t ever assume that it will happen perfectly in the way that it should.)

And for all that I was delighted, and I was, if also daunted, by the prospect of being a mother of two, the guilt had already started. “I feel so sorry for this one,” I’d say. “Before I could tell you exactly what size fruit or vegetable he was. Now I can barely remember how many weeks pregnant I am!” And it was half true. What a privilege, what a luxury to be able to joke like that. But I wasn’t only feeling guilty about that. I might have joked about second child syndrome, but it worried me.

I thought we had an awful baby first time around. I don’t think we did, I think we were just incompetent parents. And when I say this, people think I’m joking, or looking for validation, I’m not. I genuinely think, with hindsight that — as every first time parent is — we were utterly unprepared for parenthood, and were really rubbish at it as a result. What if the next one, assuming that they arrived safely, really was an awful baby? Because to say that B and I hadn’t enjoyed the newborn phase would be a massive understatement. As I’ve written before, we hated it, we thought we’d made a terrible mistake.

As it turns out, the one that I thought was an awful baby was now a great toddler who (mostly) slept, and was sociable and happy, and liked food. Our lives were, if not back to where they’d been before, at least back to some semblance of normality — we could go out, go on holiday, interact with this (now not so) new person who was a part of our family. How could a newborn — however awful or non-awful — possibly compete with that?

And then I worried about all the things that could go wrong. Part of the reason I’d wanted a sibling for my son was because of my age when I had him. I wanted him to have the possibility of someone to share the burden if I got ill. But what if this baby had additional needs? What if I was landing him with yet another burden?

In hindsight, I can see that the “normal” neuroses of pregnancy were exacerbated by a really stressful building project, which led me to worry about EVERYTHING. When B went to America for a work trip I worried he’d get shot, when he went out on his bike, I had to tell myself not to anticipate the call from the hospital telling me he’d been hit by a car. I wouldn’t blame you for thinking I was only happy if I had something to worry about.