Pither.com

It would appear that the sleepless nights, stress and hard work haven't taught Liz and me anything!

I'm proud (and scared, again) to announce that Liz and I are expecting our second baby around the middle of January. :-)

The first scan was a couple of weeks ago and everything seems to be fine. Although I think the baby's going to be another stubborn one. After quite a few minutes and various approaches to getting the baby into the right position to be seen, we got sent off to have some sugar and take a walk around the hospital! Thankfully that did do the trick, at least just about for long enough to get the information required!

This week really hasn't gone to plan, in any way for any one.

Monday started out innocently enough. I had some out of hours work to get done during the evening, but it wasn't anything major.

When I went to bed at 4am on Tuesday morning, I was of a different opinion. Monday was a disaster! The work was at least all done and finally working but had taken far, far longer than expected (I personally blame the syncrepl system in OpenLDAP 2.3.27).

Tuesday started at the normal early time and progressed in a generally normal and pleasant way. I even managed to get today's out of hours work done early in the evening, leaving time for a little dancing.

However it was again all a terrible trick! This time it was Edward's turn to break. This was his worst night ever (so far) for sleeplessness. After an initial series of 30-60 minute naps up until around 1am, he just wouldn't go to sleep at all. In fact he spent most of the night not only awake but screaming about it.

On any night this would be rather unpleasant for us all. But on this night I had just packed a bag ready for a two day business trip to Guernsey. For which I had to leave at 6am to drive to Southampton for a flight.

I eventually took myself downstairs, removed the gate from the lounge doorway, closed the door, curled up on the sofa (it's not long enough to do anything else) and tried my best to ignore the screams from upstairs.

Edward eventually settled for another short nap about an hour before I had to get up and I managed to doze off fairly soon after the screams stopped. Then my alarm went.

The trip to Guernsey was pleasant enough, I quite like flying on such a small plane (9 passenger seats). The work was busy, with a slightly late finish on the Wednesday but at least there was a nice hotel afterwards.

Liz and Edward had a significantly worse day of it though. After a morning of Edward mainly screaming and not seeming to want to do anything else, Liz took him to the doctors. He was diagnosed with an ear and throat infection and prescribed antibiotics (which came with the added excitement that he might be allergic as Liz is). Liz was warned not to expect any sleep that night!

As expected neither of them got much sleep.

Thursday I worked while Edward developed a rash and returned to the doctors. They couldn't identify or find a cause for the rash though so just told Liz to keep an eye on it.

I left Guernsey on time and caught my flight back (descending from 6,000 feet to 1,000 feet completely surrounded by thick clouds is really quite strange).

Sadly there was still a strange PHP/OpenLDAP problem outstanding that was causing PHP to segfault on exit if a referral rebind callback had been setup. But hopefully it's just a PHP/OpenLDAP version mismatch that can be easily fixed (I shall post again when I know the answer).

Anyway, I got home to a very tired family. Edward did seem to be quite significantly on the mend though. He was actually smiling occasionally and starting to try and crawl and play around again.

He even managed to go to sleep (admittedly very late at around 11pm) and slept most of the night with only a couple of fairly short disturbances.

With Edward's rash spreading from his bottom and legs up his back and stomach we returned to the doctors on Friday afternoon. He got another check and it was confirmed that his ear/throat infection was getting better, although the cause of the rash was still unknown. The doctor didn't seem too concerned though and said that if it's still there Wednesday next week to bring him back again.

Saturday and Sunday have been gradually returning to normal and while we haven't managed a good night of sleep, they have certainly been better than earlier in the week.

We sadly had to miss a party on Saturday night, but it really wouldn't have been fair on anybody to leave Edward with babysitters. While he was clearly getting better, he was still very tired, rather grumpy and had to be manhandled to practically force feed him his antibiotics!

While still tired, today he has certainly been showing us that he's feeling better. He has been playing, walking and most notably climbing (pulling himself half way up the side of his play pen).

As for my biphasic sleeping plan, let's just start again from tomorrow.

I'm a little late with this entry as Edward was Christened just over a month ago now! However I did want to say that we did all survive, even Liz managed not to have a heart attack from the stress!

It was actually a lovely day, for the weather, the service and to see so much family and a few friends (sadly we didn't have space for too many) join us to celebrate Edward.

Thank you very much to Liz's parents for hosting and to Liz's Mum for preparing much of the food.

Just for the record here we are in our posh frocks...

As one would expect, shortly after Liz discovered she was pregnant, a (community) midwife was assigned to her. During the following eight(-ish) months Liz saw him (yes, not what I was expecting either) twice(!) and one of those was at the hospital after they had incorrectly told the community midwives we had already been discharged!

I think twice for any single midwife was matched by a couple of others, but stayed as the record.

Now this wouldn't be too bad if they all provided consistent advice, shared opinions on jaundice and could actually keep appointments. But it seems they can not!

Edward has had trouble putting on weight, it seems due to difficulty breast feeding. While they all seem very happy to promote breast feeding, they do not seem to be able to agree on the details - like the best positions or how long it should take or how long to spend winding, etc, etc. None of them volunteered to actually witness and check him feeding. Nor did any of them mention the option of changing to formula feeding.

They did, quite promptly, after a couple of weeks with Edward having lost so much weight and not shaken his jaundice, arrange for an appointment at the hospital for him to have a number of further tests.

They also told us that they would not discharge Edward to the health visitor until he was back to his birth weight. The trouble is that they also told us that they normally discharge people before referring them back to the hospital. And that they don't wait for birth weight, just for an improvement!

Worst still though, they didn't keep their (expected) final visit - no warning, they just didn't turn up. We had to call them to arrange another visit. At which point a midwife (who we'd seen while Liz was pregnant, but not since) turned up and said "are you able to visit the hospital today for further jaundice tests" to Liz, who was at home on her own at the time! After that fright, Liz managed to advise her that we'd already had the tests done and were just waiting for the final result. Now actually looking at our hospital notes, she changed her story too "slightly early (ie 37 week) babies often take longer to recover from jaundice, the other midwife sent you to the hospital a week too early, you really didn't need those tests"!!!

Arrgghhh!

We are now finally discharged from the midwife madness though. Our first health visitor appointment seemed to go well, but we'll have to wait and see how things last.

A few friends and family (who I clearly don't talk to often enough) have recently asked me who Liz is. Not that a photo can really introduce someone, but as a start here is a snap of Liz and myself taken in April.

I'm delighted (well, actually alternating between incredibly excited and amazingly scared) to announce that Liz and I are expecting our first baby, around 19th January 2007!

We went to our 12 week scan yesterday morning...

Our baby is all there, a good size (almost unbelievably small at about 6.7cm long) and apparently likes wriggling a lot. :-)

We've kept this fairly quiet for the last couple of months, until we reached this first milestone of reassurance. Now we're here, we're slowly telling the world!