Dita De Boni: Any day now

Dita De Boni says apart from the likes of Gisele Bundchen and Pippa Wetzell, 'the rest of us don't always blossom into Boticellian visions of delight when up the duff.' Photo / Thinkstock

I've been eating hot curries, taking the occasional hot bath. I've toyed with raspberry leaf tea, and thought hard about how many pineapples I could eat without being sick in one go. It's all following a range of advice, kooky and not-so-kooky, in the service of shifting this last, as-yet unborn baby from womb to cot.

To no avail.

This week came an added bit of impetus to get the baby out. My doc told me that he or she had essentially stopped growing, a statement which didn't seem to bother him overly much but did set off alarm bells in my head, as you might expect.

Partly I was horrified to think that my baby had stopped growing, and partly, I confess, I was aghast to think I might go through the process of induction all over again - like the last time, an episode that still gives me cold sweats to think about.

But the truth is that if your placenta has stopped providing baby with everything it needs, the little one is better off out than in.

However, before I submitted to an induction, I figured I still had a few tricks up my sleeve. The next day, I walked from Mt Eden to Newmarket on an unseasonably hot day, hoping to get that baby's head "engaged" - basically, fixed into the starting block for birth.

It took two hours there and back. The only thing I seem to have got out of that episode was to reposition baby right on top of my bladder, which meant as soon as I had got home and sat down I started visiting the WC in 20 minute intervals and haven't stopped since.

Still, for me, not a twinge, not a cramp; no waters breaking. Lots of moaning, but not of the birthing variety.

There are still a few things on my list left to try in order to wedge the baby out: mowing the lawn, and hot sex.

Mowing the lawn will be difficult, as we have damp grass, a rotary mower built in about 1925, and very little grass ... Yet I predict that mowing the lawn would be easier to achieve than hot sex. I suppose the sex part could be achieved, the 'hot' might be a bit more difficult.

Because despite no end of well meaning friend and fellow kindy and school mothers telling me I look "fantastic", "ripe", "lush" and "blooming", unfortunately it falls to none of these women to have the hot sex with me. That role falls to my husband who, when I reported that women in the vicinity thought late-stage pregnancy was sexy, snorted loudly, in that way that married men do before they've had a chance to engage their 'so whipped' filters.

He snuck a vaguely apologetic glance in my direction but I was actually more inclined to agree with him then my well-meaning friends.

I mean, yes, Gisele Bundchen and Pippa Wetzell are gloriously beautiful when pregnant. But those women would be beautiful in almost any state imaginable.

The rest of us don't always blossom into Boticellian visions of delight when up the duff.

If I was my husband, I wouldn't find a lumbering, beach ball of a woman with swollen fingers, ankles and feet, and hormone-hammered frizzy hair, sexy.

I would wonder, with a wife who wore a wrist splint to bed each night, precisely what could be achieved with such an invalid. Groaning is all very well in 'hot sex' but doesn't actually work so well when the groaning is a result of slowly splitting ligaments and having to visit the loo 13 times a night.

So, am I a vision of fertility?

Yes, if the vision one has is of the Hottentot Venus. Hot sex? Not so much.

So, unless the lawn dries up pretty soon, I guess I'd better start stocking up my pineapple drawer.

* Dita is taking a few weeks' break from blogging as she awaits the arrival of her third child.