If this week has taught me anything, it’s that preparation is key.

For the last few weeks, we’ve been slowly but surely getting ready. Packing our bags, building furniture, cleaning out the nooks and crannies of our home, and rearranging furniture in preparation for the arrival of our first child.

It’s been busy, but manageable, and that’s largely thanks to a handwritten list my husband and I worked on together. A timeline of tasks, spread out over days and weeks, listing exactly what needed doing and when. It felt like a good plan. A calm, ordered way to approach the chaotic unknown that is new parenthood.

But that all went out the window this week.

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I woke up on Monday with a burst of energy, something that, at 37 weeks pregnant, had started to feel like a distant memory. The dishes were already done before 9am. I managed to post a parcel I’d been meaning to send for three weeks. I even trekked out to top up our electricity meter, one of our final errands before heading to the mainland in just two days’ time. The plan was to spend the last few weeks of pregnancy there, closer to the hospital, just in case anything happened early. We’d been counting down to this point.

But all day, something felt… off. Not painful or dramatic, just a subtle unease, like I’d forgotten something important -........

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