"When I first found out I was pregnant, my reaction was far from what I expected."

I thought it would take me about a year to fall pregnant the first time around.

Someone close to me had struggled to fall pregnant, and then she had trouble staying pregnant.

I was all too aware that it wasn’t always simple. So my partner and I decided to start trying, figuring that we’d be in a position to get married well before we fell pregnant or at least before I gave birth.

We settled in for 12 months of ‘trying’, dreaming of our future as parents (when I finally fell pregnant, waaaaay down the track).

I fell pregnant during the first month.

Just as an FYI, this post is sponsored by Toyota RAV4 But all opinions expressed by the author are 100 per cent authentic and written in their own words

There were so many reasons why it shouldn’t have happened this quickly.

I was young but working all hours in a stressful job, my husband was older and already had two kids and, well, we just weren’t quite ready.

The first inkling I had that I may be pregnant happened while driving home from work. We lived in the eastern suburbs in Sydney and work was in North Ryde, so I had to cross the Sydney Harbour Bridge to make it home.

Related: Men experience what pregnancy is really like. Spoiler alert: They cannot deal.

The nausea first hit me as I rounded the corner and glimpsed the steel of the bridge. As I was driving onto the decks of the bridge I accepted the fact that I was soon going to vomit on it.

I made it over the main decks and even through the tolls by taking very deep breaths and by some miracle, I managed to make it all the way home.

I ran up the stairs of our unit block, crashed through the front door (startling my partner who was working from home) threw myself into the bathroom and vomited into the toilet. He stood on the other side of the bathroom door and said a single word. “Shit.”

Yes darling, that just about covers the situation. He didn’t say it in a bad way. It was more an expression of incredulousness. I walked carefully out of the bathroom and couldn’t even look at my partner. I knew that looking at him, starring into the eyes of the father of my child, would make it too real too soon.

Related: It’s hard to imagine a better response to unexpected news.

“I need to go for a walk,” I said, and headed out the door.

And that’s what I did. I walked. I walked all over the place for two hours, stopping to lean on things and think, to try and let it sink in and to comprehend the enormity of it.

In nine months’ time I was going to be a mother. I would finally feel like part of our almost-blended family. My child and my future step-children would be blood relatives. I’d belong. What would he or she look like? What would I do about work?

Oh no, what will my Italian parents say? They were already a little out of sorts over my choice to move in with an older man with two children from his first marriage. Now I was pregnant to that man, which probably rendered their hopes that we’d break up and I’d meet someone more appropriate redundant.

I headed home, feeling the sickness building again. Really? I began to walk faster and once again the nausea subsided enough for me to make it home, but I picked up the pace anyway.

This time I crashed through the door, startling again my now incredibly excited partner. We looked at each other.

We grinned, then we hugged, and then we cried.

How did you find out you were pregnant?

Here are some celebs with their recent baby bumps.

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