Wives and Daughters is hosting a Mummy Bloggers Carnival offering the chance to win 100 free pairs of tickets to the Ideal Home Show, plus the opportunity to be be Real Mum of the Year. This includes all kinds of extra goodies, including a VIP experience at the Ideal Home Show, some beauty and pampering treats, lunch in Aldo Zilli Cafe and afternoon tea inside the Alice In Wonderland themed ‘Mad Hatters Tea Party’ Heck, that’s quite a challenge, so while I mull over the merits of being a ‘real’ versus an ‘unreal’ mother, here are the rules. Write about your Top 10 Most Surreal Mummy Moments, and ping your offering over to Wives and Daughters. Here are my top ten, though I could easily have written 100.

1)      The outlook is bumpy… It’s a shock to discover you become public property the moment you start to show. Friends and family voice opinions about how big or small your bump is for your stage of pregnancy (tip to anyone who hasn’t been pregnant: calling someone ‘enormous’ is never wise), whether you’re carrying a boy or a girl, depending on your shape, while complete strangers pat your tum and tell you their (usually gruesome) birth stories. Strangely, though, your bump becomes invisible the second you step on to a crowded Underground train.

2)      What a babe… The baby arrives. And no one will be able to convince you that he or she isn’t the most beautiful creature the world has ever seen. You feel sorry for friends who must be jealous knowing their own babes aren’t as cherubic, and you daydream about being stopped in the street by a  casting director for a Pampers advert. Six months later, you look at a photograph and realise that your baby looked like a yellow wide-mouthed frog.
3)      Introducing the world’s strongest woman… Anything or anyone tries to hurt your baby, and you know there is nothing you wouldn’t do to protect them. It’s terrifying to realise how much you love this tiny scrap of helplessness, and how you’d try to bat the world aside to reach him or her if, say, a tiger attacked. Which probably isn’t very likely in south-west London, but your maternal dreams start to include such madness.
4)      Getting ‘em out… I’ve never been one for topless sunbathing, and don’t go in for showing off the cleavage. But start breastfeeding, and to a certain extent, forget about keeping the boys to yourself. I learnt to breastfeed on park benches, airplanes, while working on my laptop and, most surreally of all, on the Buzz Lightyear ride at DisneyLand Hong Kong. No wonder my children are all so well padded.
5)      Anyone seen a brain…? After about four months you eventually learn to leave the house before midday, and only forget nappies, sun/winter hat (delete for as appropriate the season), and handbag. You gradually realise you’re suffering from a condition that apparently could stay with you for decades – it’s called ‘preggie brain/new baby brain/mummy brain’.  
6)      How can someone this small create this much chaos…? Baby becomes toddler. House becomes playpen. Pre-baby you swore your house wouldn’t become a primary colour and plastic filled style vacuum. Now you barely notice treading on Lego with bare feet.
7)      Thank goodness for sofas. How simplistic to have only seen them in the light of somewhere comfy to sit down and watch EastEnders. Nowadays their use changes daily, morphing from pirate ship to jail for baddies, secret castle to bounce machines. Occasionally you even put the cushions back on and watch television.
8)      And your specialist topic is RevdAwdry. You know you’re vaguely thinking straight again because you can tell the difference between all the characters in Thomas the Tank Engine, including (and you’re particularly proud of this) trains that are the same colour. Other skills you never knew you’d need include being able to pick Play Doh out of hair and carpets, learning the words to entire Noddy stories so that you can recite them in traffic jams, and creating princess castles out of little more than an empty Weetabix box and a couple of pipe cleaners.
9)      Mummy two. Possibly the most surreal mummy moment is when you accept that you have become your mother. Phrases such as ‘Because I say so’ pop unbidden out of your mouth, and you realise why leftover mashed potato is only a meal waiting to happen, rather than something that should have been thrown out of the fridge weeks ago.
10)   Love is all you need. No matter what is thrown at you (and this could be anything from reflux vomit to soggy pants) nothing stops you loving the little person in your life more and more each day. Which is just as well, because if anyone had told you that you’d regularly leave the house with your shoulders smeared with yoghurt, or you might not get a full night’s sleep for years (sob) on end, you might not have got into this in the first place.