If you should find yourself in conversation with our three-year-old, Eve, sooner or later, you will hear her say: "My mummy has a baby in her tummy."

For once, this is not one of her fantasies. I am, indeed, pregnant.

This may not come as such a shock to those who know me but hadn't, until now, been informed of our happy news. It will explain why I've been asleep if anyone has phoned after 9pm, why I've retched whenever anyone has offered me a coffee and why I'm wafting around in Vanessa Feltz's cast-offs.

I'm approaching the four-month stage and am just beginning to look more pregnant than death-like.

My husband is certainly pleased the first three months have passed, largely because his diet can return to normal. I'd previously banned all sorts of foods being brought into the house because of my all-day morning sickness.

Anything with garlic or basil was off the shopping list for weeks, as was all alcohol. I also developed aversions to chocolate and toast.

This, in particular, led to several upsets, with my husband questioning how something as innocuous as toast could cause offence and how anyone in their right mind could dislike chocolate. There is no rhyme, nor reason, to the pregnancy brain, I told him.

I have, however, had no objection to vanilla ice-cream, apples or smoked salmon sandwiches. My latest craving seems to be satsumas. I've just eaten ten of them in the past 45 minutes.

My husband has also had to put up with me being in the foulest of moods. He has, bless him, jumped to it if I've happened to mention the bedrooms need vacuuming.

And he has been begging me to have a lie down for half an hour every time I've become breathless with fury over not being able to find the channel changer.

"I'm so glad to have my wife back," he said this week when he found me cooking spaghetti bolognese and laughing as Eve squirted tomato sauce through gaps in the floorboards.

As for Eve, she has been thrilled with the idea of having a sibling. She put in a request for a sister but now understands you can't necessarily choose in these matters and, rather grudgingly, has agreed a baby brother would be an acceptable alternative.

She has asked one or two difficult questions, such as: "How did the baby get in your tummy?" and "How will it come out?". I'm hoping to have thought of some age-appropriate answers by the time I go into labour.

Of late, I've left most of the "We're having a baby" announcements to my husband. He has an unusual style. When he told his brother and sister-in-law, he delivered it in the same tone as a newsreader may have done when telling the world something awful had happened.

"Oh, err, are you happy about it?" his brother asked warily.

"Delighted," said my husband in a dramatic whisper.

This week, rather more worryingly, he came up with what he thought would be a "fantastic attraction" for the Brighton Festival next May. Namely, a public invitation to watch me give birth.

"It would be great," he said, seeming to forget that only one of us would actually be performing this feat.

"We'd really be part of the festival then. We could call it the Live Birth Show."

My husband appears to be exhibiting sympathetic symptoms of pregnancy brain.