Mum’s the word

A baby and a wedding for Antonia and Dan

It was late last year, just weeks after she’d moved into her dream home with her new fiancé, that Antonia Prebble started to feel “subtly different, like I was in a slightly altered state”.

Sitting around the kitchen table with her husband-to-be, her Westside co-star Dan Musgrove, the actress said, “I think I might be pregnant.”

Smiling, Antonia tells Woman’sDay, “It was just a feeling, but Dan thought I might be too. Apparently, I was a bit more mellow than normal!”

Excitedly, she ran off to the bathroom to do a pregnancy test, but the result was inconclusive. Antonia, 34, explains, “If it’s positive, two parallel lines should show up and if it’s negative, just one. We got one line and then a perpendicular line right through it, which should’ve been impossible.”

Dan, 36, continues, “She came running out of the bathroom, going, ‘I’m pregnant, I’m pregnant!’ and I just jumped in the air, I was so happy. But then that second line disappeared and she was like, ‘Sorry, hang on, I’m not.’”

Still convinced she was expecting, Antonia took another test, but not even the first line came up this time. However, both their instincts were proved right when that precious extra line turned up on a third test later that day.

Now in her second trimester, Antonia smiles, “Having children was something I had always imagined would be part of my life, but until recently, it always felt like it was far off in the future. Then suddenly, for both of us, it felt right. We were engaged, planning a future together and talking about starting a family. We were elated.”

But that excitement was tempered when Antonia started feeling very ill as she hit the six-week mark. “Morning sickness?!” she laughs darkly. “I was fine in the mornings, but I’d get progressively worse every day from about 3pm.

“I felt like I’d been poisoned and I could only really eat carbs – toast, rice, pasta and burgers. I had one anxious night hosting TheProject when I was worried I might vomit on live television, but luckily that didn’t happen. It was challenging.”

However, it was nothing compared to what lay ahead. Early one morning, just a few weeks after the nausea set in, Antonia was pottering around their Auckland home when she heard a really loud banging on the door.

She remembers, “I thought it was just an aggressive courier, but it was a passer-by saying our garage was on fire. It was the craziest, most unexpected thing, but sure enough, there was smoke billowing out of the garage, which is connected to our house. I literally had to say to Dan, ‘You need to get out of bed – the house is on fire!’”

The actor continues, “What a way to wake up! Suddenly it was all on. I threw on some clothes, grabbed both our laptops and then went out on the street to join our neighbours watching the fire spread.”

Antonia adds, “It was surreal. We were filled with adrenaline, which I think stopped me from feeling particularly sad. I remember thinking that on the scale of life crises, after someone you love getting badly hurt or passing away, your house burning down is generally considered one of the worst things that can happen.

“And I thought, ‘Yeah, this is awful, but we’re going to be alright.’ I recognised the difference between a tragedy and just a really unfortunate event. We lost some precious memories, including a whole bunch of press clippings I’d been keeping since I was 12, which was upsetting, but no-one was hurt, which really is the only thing that matters.”

Nodding, Dan says, “Knowing we’re going to have a child has shifted our priorities. We feel lucky it didn’t happen after the baby was born. But at the