I bumped into Susie on Monday afternoon in Boots – she was stocking up on gripe water and Infacol, and had a bottle of Calpol in her hand.

‘So much for being an earth mother then,’ she smiled, embarrassed I had witnessed her with a basketful of drugs. ‘Turns out that oxytocin can’t cure everything.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Anything to stop them suffering, right?’

‘Right,’ she said. ‘It’s so much harder than I imagined.’ Her eyes were sunken and she looked tired.

‘I know,’ I reassured her, glancing down at Joni, secretly glad I seemed to have a baby who was fairly contented, compared to Charlie. But I wasn’t stupid enough not to know that that could change at any moment. I had only just got my head around what had happened in the delivery suite when her heart rate dropped. Things could happen so quickly when they’re so tiny.

‘Leaky boobs,’ I said, holding up the box of breast pads I’d just put in my basket. ‘I’m getting through an industrial amount of these pads right now. The glamour.’

She cracked a smile.

‘Are you in a rush or do you fancy a coffee?’ I asked. I’d been planning to get a takeaway from Starbucks to drink on the way home – I was making the most of being able to consume caffeine again – and Susie looked like she needed some too. I thought she might appreciate the company.

She looked at her watch, then to baby Charlie, sleeping peacefully in his pram, and nodded gratefully. ‘Ironic that he sleeps when I go out. Why can’t he do it when I’m in bed too? It’s a conspiracy,’ she muttered. ‘Let’s do it, I’ve got a couple of hours before Lin will be home. It was her first day back at work today and she’s missed him like crazy.’

We walked with our strollers to the nearest coffee shop, a cute French café on the edge of Clapham Common, and took the window seat, nursing steaming hot mugs of frothy coffee. Joni was asleep again, and Charlie had woken but was happily cradled in Susie’s arms, staring at a black and white image of a butterfly on a fabric book she had managed to prop up next to him. They looked sweet together so I captured the moment on my phone and sent it to the rest of the Baby Group with the caption, ‘Susie and I bumped into each other in town – aren’t these two adorable’.

We treated ourselves to slices of carrot cake and soon the colour returned to her cheeks.

‘It’s funny,’ she said, leaning towards me, conspiratorially, ‘I thought that I was going to be the one fixated on homeopathy and doing things nature’s way, but I’ve been the opposite. I’ve got a secret stash of pain relief at home, and I had a can of Coke this morning – my first in two decades. I had a McDonald’s yesterday and I’ve been bingeing on Mini Eggs for energy. I’m too ashamed to tell Lin.’