My little boy arrived on the 18th December. He was very jaundiced so we had to stay in hospital for 5 nights and I was really relieved that they let us go home on the 23rd of December (the day before Christmas Day in Germany) on the condition that we came back every morning to have blood tests done.

When we got home on the 23rd, we put our 3 ear old daughter to bed and decided to order a delivery for dinner.

I’ve always been brutally honest in this blog and this post is not going to be any different…

During my pregnancy, I ordered a fair few deliveries from the same restaurant in our neighbourhood. I didn’t eat an unhealthy amount but I was not a salad-eating, pulses and legumes type of pregnant lady in my second pregnancy (or my first). I struck up a conversation with the delivery man on one occasion because he had limped up the stairs, hardly able to walk. I’d asked if he was ok and he’d told me about a motorbike accident he’d had a few months ago. We joked about my baby bump and said that neither of us were great with stairs at the time.

So on the 23rd of December, the delivery man comes to our door. We say hi to each other and he points at my belly: “You still haven’t had the baby yet?!”. I’m very confused but we’re both speaking German and it’s not our native language for either of us. “Yes! He arrived on Wednesday. We just got back from the hospital!”.

He looks even more confused than I am and says, “But is there still one inside? Did they forget one?”. No. No, they definitely got one big baby out and it was just him in there.

Delivery man looks completely astounded. Perhaps even a little horrified. “But you’re still fat!” he says.

Yes. Yes, I still have a baby belly, I say. It’s totally normal. It might take weeks or months to go down.

I have totally shattered this man’s world. He is so embarrassed. “I didn’t mean that badly!” he explains. “I didn’t realise! I thought baby bellies went away immediately!”.

Don’t we all. We see so-and-so, the celebrity, who has done her bikini diet to get a ‘beach body’ straight after having a baby. We hear about another celebrity who has 6 children and still looks like she has the figure she had when she was 21.

After my first baby, I was amazed by my body, what it had achieved and how it recovered so quickly. I could actually feel the oxytocin, produced during breastfeeding, pulling my uterus back into place. My baby belly went down within a few days and 8 months later I had a toned set of abs again.

But this time it is different. It’s now 2 weeks since I gave birth and I still look as though I’m 5 or 6 months pregnant. It could be that I have a condition called Diastastis Recti, which is when your abdominal muscles separate from each other, or thin out, due to pregnancy and give you a ‘mummy tummy’ of soft squidgy-ness. I’ll need to wait a few weeks until I can find out and a few more before I can even think about doing any training for it. It would be great to have a flat stomach straight away but I’m not worried – my body carried an even heavier, longer child this time and we made it out of the pregnancy and birth without any injuries whatsoever. It did an AMAZING job!

But what about the new mums who don’t feel like I do? The ones who feel negative about their bodies and are already struggling with the concoction of hormones, sleep deprivation and craziness that comes with having a baby? It’s hard to deal with so much at the best of times.

So if you’re wondering – baby bellies take time to disappear, if they ever do. Don’t ask if someone is pregnant. Just don’t comment on people’s bodies at all. And remember that regular people are just humans who aren’t photoshopped or surgically enhanced. It’s ok to look and feel a bit squishy around the middle when you’ve made another human and carried them around for the best part of a year. Especially if you’ve eaten a few take-out deliveries along the way.