No, it’s not that sort of announcement.  I’m not expecting, but once upon a moonshine I was and hopefully you will soon be able read about the slightly less conventional road to parenthood that we travelled in Lagos, Nigeria in an actual book.

Following on from Lisa Ferland’s anthology Knocked up Abroad, a second book, Knocked up Abroad Again is in the imminent works and I’m excited to have contributed a chapter.

Winging it in West Africa is my account of being an expectant-and-then-new mother in Lagos and trying to circumnavigate tropical diseases (a phase of shoe licking did nothing to quell my anxiety), field ‘helpful’ parenting tips from our steward Augustine and assess the perils of being pregnant in a Lagos traffic jam.

We survived shoe licking.

Augustine – bless him – was always ready with interesting parenting advice.

The only reason there are so FEW cars on the road is because of the rain. The traffic was bad, but the monsoon rains would make it impossible to get anywhere.

Parenthood is daunting enough, but hurl cultural conundrums, language barriers of life overseas and in my case, the utter craziness that life in Lagos hurls at you on an hourly basis and you end up with a melting pot of fascinating stories.  In this case 26 stories set in 25 different countries contributed by an interesting and resilient group of expat women.