Less is more when it comes to nurturing the next generation.

My baby’s due any moment now. Officially I have a month to go, but it’s heavy enough at 7lbs to be full term. Its head is slicing into my cervix, making walking feel like I’m the Little Mermaid, having painfully sprouted legs.

I’m more disabled than I remember from my previous two babies, and my gung ho plans to work until 2 weeks before my due date look increasingly foolhardy. I’m unwieldy, occasionally uncomfortable, and my emotions have been riding a rollercoaster of calm buoyancy vs crabby tears. I’m ready. My fear about being a mother once more has receded, though I’m more terrified by the shorter-term pain in store, than perhaps what my sometimes unstable mood may be storing up for later.

I try to relax, but it’s no good – the enforced gentleness of yoga and meditation make me hot and irritable; my nearly teenage son is testing limits in and out of school, and as always, there’s just so much to do.

A couple of days off in our Devon cottage spawned a cacophony of jobs: part maintenance, part careless guests, which Tom is tackling with forbearance, trying to shore up time for later on; but we are happy, much more so than previously. Surging oestrogen has made us content and woken the protective instinct that had grown dormant through tired-and-tetchy day-to-day challenges. And without the financial woes of years gone by, we have the freedom to make life more pleasant for everyone- a new car; a holiday to Florida booked to see us through February with some (any!) grandparental support and Disney light relief from the chores of early parenthood.

Life then, is better, albeit, possibly temporarily; and typically when things are going well, opportunities abound. My masters is giving me food for thought and my head is spinning with material that I can only dare to dream I’ll have time to write on maternity leave; a chance encounter at work has resulted in a job opportunity that I would have leapt at a year ago, but now need to carefully consider around my, and my new baby’s, wellbeing.

Still, better to have options, and by getting childcare on board sooner rather than later, I can hopefully keep some of them open for when I return from a few months of intensive mothering. The pressure’s still on though to make the most of my relative freedom- next week holds a work shadowing opportunity (perhaps, again foolhardy after a planned flu jab to keep ill health, at least, at bay) and which I need to fit in around classes and work. But once this week is over, I’m throwing in the towel.

I won’t get much chance to rest afterwards, so I may as well front load on sleep as much as jobs- selfishness has become a sensible priority. One cannot, as one childless (though 12 weeks pregnant) female leader stated at work last week- always do more. And with small children, the slow parenting movement is advocating less is more ever more clearly. I enthusiastically signed my unborn child up to a childcare practitioner in the Forest School mode, that advocates kidcentric free-range wanderings in all weathers, despite said wanderings being amid the insalubrious environs of Bethnal Green Park (“we do scout for syringes” the nursery nurse told me, helpfully). But as a mother of three, it’s not so much that my standards have dropped (they have), but that I’m realistic about what anyone can achieve- and that’s that good enough may actually be better all round than perfection in the end.

But it’s only once you get to this stage of pregnancy that doing less seems far wiser for everyone’s sake. I just hope in the meantime, this wisdom is appreciated by everyone to whom I’ve committed my last little bit of time and energy before I can give myself up to my new baby daughter, for a little while, at least.