From the sofa on Sunday evening, back screaming from neck to coccyx, arms leaden, belly taught and Heavy, and feet and ankles approaching the size of fully inflated pufferfish, I conceded to The Writer that I might, at seven and a half months Pregnant, be coming to a point where I may need to start slowing down.

I’m not good at sitting back, not being involved, letting other people shoulder a burden while I don’t pull my (ever-increasing) weight and since the autumn, my mantra whenever someone has suggested I don’t do something for whatever reason has been, “I’m pregnant, not ill,” (barring the unfortunate incident with the broken rib, when I had to concede that maybe I was, for a while, both. That's still mending, by the way. Don’t break ribs, kids. Interferes with schedules something rotten).

So up until this point, I haven’t really let being pregnant factor into the doing-things equation. I continued to ride until I didn't want to push Fate any further; I've built a metric fuckton of furniture since moving back to the Home County; I remain on work's overnight on-call rota, and much to the face-pulling of my midwife, plan to work until I'm two weeks from my due date. I've made progress on the garden; I continue to practice yoga (if more sporadically than I'd like); and I'm quite capable of continuing general life admin, be that cooking, walking up escalators or nailing a picture hook into a wall. I'm pregnant, not ill.

But I'm slowly coming to accept that, even though I might not be much different in my outlook, habits or ambition, my body is different in its capabilities. It's got other stuff on the go and apparently doesn't have the patience for my crack-on-regardless attitude. These days, I overheat easily. Putting on trousers is an act that leaves me out of breath with embarrassing regularity. And turning over in bed now requires the meticulous planning and heavy engineering kit you'd find in a Crossrail tunnel.

And so my body needs me in bed early, in order to get any sleep as I vacillate between chronic hip pain, internal wiggling and an incessant need to pee. It needs me to realise that I can't make it from the office to the station in record time any more and should leave earlier because I simply can't force myself to move that fast what with carrying several pounds of small person and 50% more blood. And it needs me not to spend Sundays alternating between wrapping my bump around a u-bend before hauling myself up onto a chair so I can paint the entirety of a downstairs loo (both coats, in Pumpkin Pie) while TW is at a conference on longform journalism if I don't want to be physically punished for doing so.

And so I'm finally accepting that what my body says goes. A little more sitting. A little less commuting. A little more sleep (I can but dream) and a little less doing. Pregnant, not ill - but very pregnant, and finally willing to accept it's not just a state of mind.