Have you considered the future of giving birth? No silly, I’m not talking about anything sensible like advances in medicine or the ability in the future to give birth through a much bigger orifice (for me personally I’d have to nominate my mouth). I mean live tweeting, webcams and #crowning. Emojis of pregnant bellies and women contracting. Actually come to think of it they may have already nailed that – I think I looked a lorra lot like this ????.

This totally normal train of thought came about when I was discussing the irrelevance of some emojis in depth with my husband. Once you start thinking about it there are some quite obvious omissions – why is there no emoji for flicking someone a ‘v’ when you’re feeling all angsty and listening to Alanis Morissette? And what the bloody hell is the French horn thrown in there for. Now if you play the french horn I have absolutely nothing against your hobby – I’m simply saying that you probably don’t make up a significant amount of the population (is this the point in my life when I find out that everyone has dabbled in a bit of French horn, a bit like the recorder? Or that it’s just a useful way of a French person telling their other half that they have the horn: ‘Hi babe, i’m on my way back and just so you know I have the ?’)

And then I remembered my 3rd birth. I was feeling a little casual, cocky one might say, about getting this baby out. Let’s face it – I’d had 9 months of people saying ‘this one will just walk out’ and the ol’ ‘one sneeze and she’ll be out’ jokes. So after being overdue for 2 weeks when I went into labour and started contracting I was SO excited. Bring. It. On. Mother Nature.

So I was WhatsApp-ing my friends and letting them know the progress- and I thought, to hell with it, why not live WhatsApp the whole affair. After all, I felt a sneeze coming on and the baby will apparently already be able to walk. I can make it nip down to costa and grab me a coffee whilst I find the right emoji to demonstrate how I feel (I was thinking ?if you’re interested) and then I could apply loads of make up and take my ‘just after birth picture’ and wait for the ‘you look GREAT for someone who has just given birth’ comments to roll in.

I must admit, ever since I have told anyone how sure I was of an easy birth third time round they’ve all nodded sympathetically and said ‘tricky third baby?’. And I’ve been like WHAT? No one told me that was a thing. Even the midwives were like ‘yeah they are notoriously tricky’. Thanks for the heads up guys. I was pretty pissed off afterwards but couldn’t exactly explain that the reason behind the anger was because it cocked up my live WhatsApp plans.

Anyway – here it is in all it’s unplanned glory:

(NB To help you follow the conversation this was a group of eight girls, my input is in green and Roger is a pseudonym given to the UK’s most inattentive midwife)

So that was the lot. My input was fairly minimal but it’s pretty interesting to look back on it a few years later. And I guess, for all the ridiculousness of the ‘gram, the trolls on twitter and the haters on Facebook, the main advantage with developments in technology and communication is we can have a record of some pretty bloody special times ?.