I love food. Before pregnancy, I had the appetite of a hungry shire horse and could eat platefuls of pretty much everything. But as soon as I hit that 6 week mark, things started to get weird.

I am pathetic about throwing up. Psychologists would tell me it stems from vomiting in front of the whole school in assembly at 4 years old and the trauma that went along with that. Morning sickness was the part of pregnancy that I was dreading and I had heard my best friend’s own horror stories from her pregnancy.

Luckily for me, I only had one ‘incident’ (my body told me I had a craving for orange juice. I really shouldn’t have listened to it). But in place of actual vomiting was a feeling that I would throw up at any second. It lasted until week 14 and only went away when I ate something, which meant having to eat entire meals EVERY HOUR. I’m not talking about a salad here. The only way to quell that nausea wave was to eat potato based products, egg, bread and more potato. Meat was way off the menu. Cake was on. Fried breakfasts were good. Olives, hard goats cheese and biscuits were all fine.

This went on 24 hours a day. Ginger nut biscuits became my constant bedtime companion as I sipped water and took the tiniest of bites in the hope that I wouldn’t be sick on my boyfriend (he was more bothered by the rustling biscuit wrappers).

Kate Evans has written a fantastic book on pregnancy (more about that later) where she describes it as being like a daily fruit machine, where you don’t know which food item is going to come up as the one you want or which one will make you feel sick.

I do worry that my baby will look like a chip and have an egg for a head because that is pretty much what it is built out of. Scans seems to show a regular looking human baby though so we’ll just have to wait and see.