Scandal

Dot writes: autumn makes the neighbours restless. They look up at the swallows on the powerlines (admittedly I haven’t noticed any – it’s mostly magpies round here) and resolve, like them, to flit. Our immediate next door neighbour, a builder in his fifties called Danny, is remarrying and moving to Trim; he left earlier this [...]

Plant food

Dot writes: nicknaming our baby ‘Sprout’ has left me rather short of witty titles for update posts about his growth. We should really have called him ‘Piglet’. When he was first born and I was trying to feed him I was discouraged to find that initiating breast-feeding was almost as hard second time around as [...]

Now we are four

Grandma and grandpa are staying this week and as we don’t have a spare room they are staying in a large tent in our garden. It was very considerate of Frank to be born in (relatively) warm weather.

Birth story

Dot writes:
I’m not sure where to start with this. The beginning, obviously; but I don’t think I can convey what it was like just by saying what happened. It was such a straightforward birth and it all went pretty much to plan, even though (as last time) it took me at least half the labour [...]

Francis Victor

And here he is, named at last.

New Arrival

New baby boy (as yet unnamed)
born 18 September 2009, 9:28am, at home, weighing 3.18kg (7lbs).

Dirty Dancing

Dot writes: so, the news came through yesterday that Patrick Swayze has died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 57. I remember him chiefly, as many must, for his role in Dirty Dancing. An awful film, if you think about it – a thin, contrived plot that manages to treat an extremely serious issue [...]

Jitters

Dot writes: 38 weeks 1 day. I’ve been feeling pretty crampy. Lots of Braxton Hicks (not painful, but tight all round the belly and lower back, coming on promptly with any sort of exercise). Yesterday I had – not exactly a bleed, but some staining that wasn’t how the books describe a ’show’. I rang [...]

Vocabulary updates

Dot writes: I’ve added some updates on how Hugh’s vocabulary is increasing in the form of comments on this post from a month ago. This is for my own benefit, mostly, because I like to look back on old blog posts and see how Hugh has progressed.
It is a bit hard to decide exactly [...]

Sprout update

Dot writes: we now get weekly visits from the midwives, and they came this morning. Happily Hugh was in good form. He engaged the midwives (Niamh, the senior midwife, and Aoife, a trainee) in conversation as best he could while I nipped upstairs to the bathroom; which is to say that he pointed at the [...]