A year in the Gulf

I've just passed my one year anniversary of expat life. So much has happened since I arrived here. It's been one hell of a ride on a crazy rollercoaster, lots of ups, lots of downs. I'm not sure I'd like to do it again! But I AM proud to have done it, and I'm very proud at how well my husband and I have made it work, despite all the things life has thrown at us in the last few years - redundancy, infertility, moving continents, and a terrible bereavement. I'm glad we couldn't see any of it coming, I must say. Sometimes it's just better to live day by day.

It's also sometimes the small things that make life better. Today, for example, I managed to buy Marmite at the supermarket (clumsy pregnant me managed to break my last jar!!) and then a friend came round and brought me British cakes and chocolates her pilot husband had just bought specially for us on his latest trip to Heathrow. I was so touched.

Anyhow, one year on, and we're still here, about to become a family of three. It's an amazing miracle which we will never fail to be grateful for. I had a check-up this morning, and the baby's still breech (so what's new?!) but apart from that, things are fine. I am SO grateful for that. My husband took a picture of me at eight months pregnant which I put up on Facebook, and I was amazed by how many lovely comments people have been kind enough to leave! Clearly I don't look as much like a beached whale as I think I do...

One inevitability of being pregnant is that people will come up to you with all kinds of unsolicited advice. My mum has been feeding a lot of it to me via her friends back home. Yesterday, she came up with a real cracker. Apparently, someone she knows also had a breech baby, and had such a brilliant suggestion for how she managed to get her baby to turn, that I thought I'd leave you with it.

Apparently, she played loud pop music in her pants...