Pither.com

It seems that a kind soul has now built Putty for UIQ3 (which the Sony Ericsson P990i runs).

... in the eyes of the country is remarkably simple and without paperwork!

Liz phoned up a few days ago and booked an appointment with the registrar (she did at this point provide her name, the closest thing to authentication in the entire process).

Yesterday all three of us went into Reigate, found the library and kept that appointment. Upon our arrival, the registrar volunteered Liz's name, which we confirmed.

After this, we were asked the expected questions - our names, occupations, address and a few other bits. Plus of course Edward's name - she already knew his date of birth and other details from information provided by the hospital.

She printed a birth certificate and we left, it was that simple!

No evidence of anything at all was required. No proof of name or address and certainly not of occupation was required!

Well we didn't lie about any of it, honest, and now Edward is an official person! :-)

On Wednesday 3rd January, the morning after Edward was born, a paediatrician visited to give him an initial check up. One of the things she spotted was that he had quite severe tongue tie. This condition can affect a baby's ability to feed (especially breast feed) and later possibly affect speech. Further more, it almost always affects males and hence is most often inherited from fathers - so it's all my fault! :-(

Thankfully it's quite fixable.

The problem is that the membrane connecting the tongue to the bottom of the mouth extends too far towards the front of the tongue, in Edward's case, all of the way to the tip of his tongue. This limits movement (especially forwards, out of the mouth) of his tongue. The fix is "simply" to cut the membrane!

It seems that not many people/places perform this minor operation though. The hospital was good in this respect though and contacted one such person in the area and arranged for them to contact us. For a change they did this quite efficiently and the specialist got back to us while we were all still at the hospital.

We called back the specialist (who was based in Brighton) on the Monday after Edward came back from hospital and they booked us into a clinic they were holding the next day in Haywards Heath.

So Edward's first trip out of the house was a little sooner than we had expected.

It took us quite a while (perhaps an hour!) to get everything ready that we needed to take Edward out, but once that was done, the outing was really quite straight forward. Edward is generally a quiet baby and this seems to be especially so when travelling in the car.

At one week old, Edward had his first little operation. Although it was so simple it can hardly be called that. He was first checked visually and confirmed as having a 100% tongue tie. He was then taken to a second room, wrapped up so he could not struggle too much and the tie was cut with a small pair of scissors. The entire experience took no more than ten minutes and the actual operation less than one minute. He didn't seem to mind at all, only crying a little bit when he was released from the wrap afterwards.

Since then he seems to be playing with his new found tongue a little, making some strange faces. We're not entirely sure that he's quite got the hang of it yet. Certainly breast feeding doesn't seem to have got any easier yet. Perhaps that will take a few days.

This photo was taken at the hospital, just before we brought Edward home.

Liz and Edward finally returned from the hospital yesterday evening. While Edward is still a little jaundice, both are generally doing OK.

Their stay in hospital was a little longer than expected due to some bad advice, Edward being jaundice and a small dose of photo-therapy being required:

Apparently this is quite common, but we still found it to be quite a scary introduction to parenthood!

This wasn't helped by what I think was a dreadful service from East Surrey Hospital.

All of the hospital staff we met were very pleasant and helpful (with the exception of one night-shift midwife who was apparently very grumpy!). However almost everyone we spoke to had at least slightly different advice, some had totally different advice!

One of the first midwives on the ward said that we should leave Edward sleeping until he wakes up for a feed. We shouldn't worry that he's been sleeping for several hours already. Later advice was that we should have woken him after a maximum of 5 or 6 hours, probably earlier. Apparently if we had, it may have prevented his jaundice from being bad enough to require photo-therapy!

Beyond bad advice, we also regularly suffered no advice/attention/help/anything!

The maternity ward was already busy when we arrived, and shortly afterwards it was completely full. Not once during the four day stay on the ward did they have enough staff. They are apparently supposed to have 3 midwives on duty during the day, however most of the time had only 1. Even when they did have more, it clearly wasn't enough for a full ward - the bedside alarms would often be going for several minutes before anyone responded!

On the second day in hospital, Liz was seen by a midwife in the morning who said that she should be discharged that day. Soon after I arrived (partners can visit from 10am), a paediatrician visited Edward for his initial check. She gave him the all clear, although did spot that he had a tongue tie (more on that in another post). We then didn't see another member of staff until the evening when I went and found one to remind them that we were supposed to be going home.

Even more time passed and eventually a midwife came to do some final checks. However (after they'd actually completed most of the discharge paper work, including arranging for a community midwife to visit the following day!) they decided that they hadn't witnessed Edward feeding, and at this point told us that we definitely shouldn't just let him sleep, but should wake him every 3-4 hours to encourage feeding! So, they couldn't discharge them yet. This midwife also spotted that Edward was looking a little yellow and suggested that he may be suffering from jaundice. So the conclusion was that Liz and Edward must stay another night, for him to be checked for jaundice and to be witnessed being fed.

Several paediatricians and many more midwives (I'm not sure I ever actually saw the same one more than twice in the entire 4 days) later and the following day Edward was given some little sun glasses and put under a big blue light.

Thankfully he responded well to the photo-therapy and was taken off it after about 20 hours. He was still very jaundice, but out of danger. We've been told that the remaining jaundice should clear up on it's own over the next week or so.

Now, finally, Edward is home. :-)

Liz and I are very proud to announce that on the 2nd of January we had a lovely baby boy. He was 8lb 2oz and delivered after a 6 hour labour, which Liz did without any pain relief (she's especially proud of that bit!). :-)

Lots more details and some photos will follow at some point soon I hope!

Last week I officially (and finally, having stayed on from my initial leaving date in August) parted from Digitalbrain, where I have been working for over five years.

I decided to leave partly due to having been there five years and it being time for a change and partly due to the fact that my life is changing, with the imminent arrival of my first child.

Now away from Digitalbrain I have a little over a month before the baby is due. I intend to use this time for a mixture of relaxing and my own projects.

Since it's creation approximately six years ago, All Secure Domains has gone from being a three strong partnership that offered consultancy as well as Domain/Web hosting to now being a sole tradership supported only by myself. The website needs modernising, a few bugs fixing and the customer services sorting out.

Myself and some of my past colleagues are in the process of releasing a curses based keepalived configuration manager and monitor lvsadmin. This was originally written by Chris before being hacked on by Huw, Simon and myself. I intend to have the source code tidy enough for it's initial SF commit soon.

I will also be looking for consultancy and freelance work, both in small doses now and in larger ones a month or two after the baby has arrived. Please check my CV and contact me if you wish to discuss any possibilities.