Although he was still putting in the extra hours where he could, I understood why. In fact it got me thinking differently about Jason’s motivation for all the overtime and late nights he did at work during my pregnancy. He must have felt such a pressure to earn more money once he knew we were to become a family. He had told me that his request for a pay rise had been declined; maybe it had dented his pride more than I realized. It can’t have helped when my dad kept sending us a few hundred pounds by bank transfer. I didn’t have a big issue with it – it was Dad’s version of a baby shower after all – but Jason had taken it personally; he saw any offer of help as a slight against his ability to provide for his family and it took me a while to convince him that we shouldn’t just send the money back. But now I saw things differently, I understood that his strong need to provide for his family was as innate as my desire to carry our child.

Because I was awake so much at night – Joni was still asking for a feed every three hours on average – I’d taken to sleeping when she did in the early evening, knowing I’d be awake again at eleven-ish to give her a dream feed and then every few hours through the night. According to Tara, it was a good idea to start getting into some kind of routine about now. Jason had considerately started sleeping on the sofa in the living room or in the nursery to allow me to feed her without worrying about waking him up. Or he would use the opportunity to work late again. We both agreed that he might as well use this time to clock up some overtime, and that we could take turns with the night shifts over the weekends. It felt as though we were really sharing the load.

But one evening, when I began to fill him in on my day as I often did when he’d been on a long work shift, he appeared distracted.

‘Joni loved sitting on my lap on the swing in the park today,’ I told him.

‘Sweet,’ he said, not taking his eyes off the TV and shovelling some stir-fry into his mouth.

‘And I successfully managed the routine – she took her naps like clockwork. I just hope this will eventually translate into sleeping for longer stretches at night,’ I went on.

He didn’t register what I said, making me feel like the world’s greatest baby bore.

‘And then she did some one-handed cartwheels all around the playground.’

Nothing.

‘I was thinking, Jason, that I would like to sleep on the sofa tonight,’ I continued, more loudly. This wasn’t something I had said before, so it at least got his attention. ‘Okay with you?’ I added, although, from my tone, it was pretty clear I wasn’t going to take no for an answer.