I’m currently pregnant with my third child. My first two are girls, and whenever people ask what we’d prefer for our third, we say another girl. My boyfriend and I have always thought, what could be finer than a house full of girls? And the reality of life with the two  girls we’ve got has done nothing to shake that conviction.

But recently, my boyfriend has come round to the idea of having a boy, so that he now professes to be fifty/fifty. “Really?” I said. “Look at it this way,” he explained, “it could turn out to be a little me. And this time, we’ll get him right.”