The party can wait: being young and pregnant

It is not that having a baby wasn't on the cards; just not for another year or so.

We were getting married on 12 September and my boyfriend George was spending the summer excitedly talking about hiring DJs while my friends and I sat in various bars, drinking champagne we couldn't afford and flicking through Brides magazine.

As I pondered my sister Emily's news that she was pregnant, what started off as a niggling doubt began to weigh more and more on my mind. I decided to do a pregnancy test myself before sending off the invitations. Just in case.

George and I were soon bent over a little stick trying to determine whether the lines were too faint to indicate a positive result. After another hour and three more tests it finally dawned on me that we were going to have a baby.

A few days later I sat in my GP's consulting room while she drew blood from my arm. Obviously irritated by my over-enthusiastic questions she cast me an icy stare: "Don't get too excited — 50 per cent of all pregnancies end in miscarriage." It turned out that our baby was due on 15 January 2010, the same week as my sister's and the day before the anniversary of my father's death earlier this year. Surely he must have had a hand in this?

After much debate George and I decided that our original wedding plans would have to be put on hold. We would have a small family wedding in a registry office with a blessing in the church and a big celebration the following year.

So, at the end of July, three of my girlfriends and I prepared to go to Spain on what would now be a very sober hen week. The morning we left, the front page of every newspaper carried warnings about pregnant women and swine flu. On our flight my girlfriends giggled uncontrollably as I bolted into another seat following an enormous sneeze from the man next to me.

Emily and I, despite living on opposite sides of the Atlantic, have both succumbed to swine flu paranoia and read the advice to avoid becoming pregnant with equal horror. I battled with a mask on one aeroplane until the feeling of suffocation and an air hostess telling me I was "sweet" made me give in to the germs. My sister flew from New York to London this week with her five-year-old son and insisted they both wear masks. This caused an allergic reaction and has bought him out in a terrible rash meaning that he has to be constantly dosed with antihistamine.

George and I have just returned from our 20-week scan. While we sat nervously in the hospital waiting room we both became engrossed in "Baby TV", a series of "infomercials" about car seats and the best way to bath your baby interspersed with random facts about how a duck's quack doesn't echo. I couldn't help but think how our lives had changed in the previous few months.
As I lay down on a bed in the dark room and freezing cold jelly was squirted onto my belly I braced myself for the worst — my GP's first words resounding in my brain.

We emerged full of relief and wonder that this little thing with arms and legs and a beating heart was actually living inside me. The next half an hour was spent sitting in the car looking at a Francis Bacon-esque Polaroid trying to work out whether that white blob was an ear or a nose. My belly is getting larger by the day and for someone who has always been a size eight this has come as rather a shock. I cannot understand why I feel frumpy rather than beautiful or blooming or whatever it is you are supposed to.

My friends, all a long way off from having babies themselves, aren't very sympathetic. Jess skipped over to me at a party last Friday evening and said with pride: "Ollie didn't even realise you were pregnant!" "Great, so he thought I was just fat?" Eyes rolling, she wandered off to talk to someone else...

It is less than a week until our wedding and I have one afternoon to shop for a dress. I've decided that I want to look like Jane Birkin when she was pregnant, although after several hours of flicking through George's Serge Gainsbourg books I have failed to find one photograph of her in maternity wear.