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Dear Evelyn,

I discovered this morning that you like watching the rain as much as I do. I wish I could have stayed and watched it with you all day.

xxxxx

Dear Evelyn,

It's been a long time since I wrote to you. the inspiration tonight (3 April) was not a happy one: you woke up screaming at about 11pm, and seemed to be in pain. Thankfully you're back asleep now, hopefully the stomach ache (or whatever it was) has gone now.
We have worried slightly that we've been over-travelling you recently. Over the last six weekends, only two haven't had at least two nights away. While it's been fabulous to see so many of your family and friends, it does leave a bit of a lack of consistency in your bedtime routine, and means we seem to spend almost all our time packing! We don't currently have anything booked for weekends in June: maybe we'll gave a slightly quieter time then.
From there, to three things that you love: swings, swimming, and nomming. We first put you in a setting when Jacq, Helen S and Steve were down, and you looked so casual. See the video if you don't believe me. You've been in a few times since them, and you seem to enjoy it more each time.
We've taken you to Hatfield Swim Centre twice now. The last time, we took you under the water, and you seemed absolutely fine about it. Slight surprise, but no other ill effects. And you love the water: splashing about, watching all the sights and sounds of the pool.
You love eating: it's particularly exciting now you're on solids. The first day we were told not to expect you to eat much, but just to experience the taste. But as the video shows, you ate it all amazingly quickly, and we haven't found a food yet that you don't like. Also, I now realize why new parents talk about baby poo a lot (but don't worry, I won't here).
But really, when I say "nomming", I mean when we pretend to nom your tummy. It seems to be the thing that most consistently makes you laugh, which would brighten up any day.

All my love,


Daddy

xxxxx

I'm trying to decide whether to start a separate blog for my posts about Evelyn's development, which is pretty much all I've been posting on here recently. Let me know in the comments if you care either way. I suspect most people only come and read my posts when I link to them from twitbook, in which case it doesn't really matter.

Dear Evelyn,

You've grown so much. In the last couple of weeks, you've improved your level of interaction from screaming to smiling. You have no idea (and won't until you have one of your own) what a difference those smiles make.
Thursday was my first night alone with you. I was nervous. Very nervous. But I needn't have been (of course). While there was screaming (mostly because the milk had to be warmed up, which, it turns out, takes FOREVER), there was also calmness inbetween. We even managed to go out and pick Mummy up from the fencing Christmas dinner when she was ready to come home.
Surprisingly, not as much as I expected has changed in our lives, as a whole. A few weeks back we went to visit Jenny and JJ (who are expecting a little friend for you, and moving house soon), and last weekend we played boardgames with Allie, Jim & Marz and then went to a Christmas market and ate sausage and drank mulled wine. For that we must thank you: many people are barely able to leave the house with their child, let alone stay over at someone else's. You've also been kind to us in sleep: there have been a couple of nights where it's taken a little rocking to get you off, but that's about the extent of it. A couple of nights ago (Saturday, iirc), you went for seven hours without a feed. That's unusual, but still, at seven weeks that's pretty good.
Of course, things will continue to change fairly solidly for the next twenty years or so, but hopefully comparatively slowly, and we've feeling much more prepared now. Fingers crossed the first few weeks are typical of your easy-going, happy life.

All my love,

Daddy

Dear Evelyn,

We're now two and a half weeks into your life. It's strange to think that it's going to be another nine whole months before you've even been outside longer than you were inside.

Our life has settled down pretty well. Most of your family has visited: Mama and Grandpa Paul came down on your first Wednesday, and the whole of Mummy's family (Granny, Grandpa, Great-Granny, Uncle David and Crazy Aunt Lizzy) came down on your one-week birthday.

We've also managed to travel more than we expected: we went out for a walk only a couple of days after you were born; at nine days old we went for a coffee with Catherine, her mummy and daddy, and Charlotte's mummy (Charlotte was still inside her mummy at the time). Last Saturday, when you were 14 days old, we left the county for the first time and travelled all the way to Bracknell for Jimbob's birthday party. We were worried that you might not like the long journey, but it didn't seem to faze you in the slightest (you slept). Indeed, apart from the odd feed and change (I had to wipe some vom off the spare room floor), you slept pretty much the whole time. And of course, everyone was delighted to meet you.

I had to go back to work last Friday. It was (and indeed is: I'm on my way there now) strange, because as soon as I leave the house in the morning, it's almost as if nothing has changed. The commute is the same, the work is the same. This morning I'm posting some thank you cards for all the lovely presents you got, but other than that, it's back to where I left off. Except for the odd person offering me their congratulations! I'm meeting up with Rico for lunch today: he's just had his second, so I imagine there will be a *lot* of baby talk. So maybe some things have changed :-)

All my love,

Daddy

xxxxx

Dear Evelyn Lily Ysabelle Bush,

I hope you're happy in the hospital tonight, with your Mummy lying next to you. I'm at home, because they wouldn't let me stay with you in the maternity ward. Mummy and you had to stay for observation because you didn't show yourself until just over 24h after her waters broke, at 15:06 this afternoon (and even then, not without persuasion).
We were so glad to see you: it had been 38 hours since Mummy started getting contractions. I cried three times during that time: once when you finally appeared, of course (do you remember that  the doctor handed me the scissors to cut the cord, and I had to wipe my eyes because I couldn't see anything?), but twice because your Mummy was writhing in agony, and I could do nothing about it. But don't worry, we won't hold that against you: even half an hour after you were born, Mummy said she'd already forgotten all the pain. That should give you some idea of the power you hold over us.
You've been with us for six hours, and already we love you immensely. And we always will.

xxxxx

Wow, we've been busy this weekend. I left work on Friday, secretly thinking that I may well not be in on Monday morning, due to progeny. It is now Monday morning: I am not in, but am on my way in, and it had nothing to do with babies. Long story short, Leeloo has a dislocated hip, has been in hospital since Saturday night, and this morning we transferred her to our vets so they can operate. Add to this the fact that we decided (still not quite sure why) to fix the toilet on Sunday and spent the whole day with the water turned off (I was dreading what would happen if Helen went into labour: bear in mind we're hoping to have a home water birth). In case you're interested in the outcome: plumber coming at some point this week.

Update, Tuesday night: Leeloo is now back at home, and has already "escaped" (we've been told to keep her in for a couple of weeks) . We didn't think she'd try to leave the house for a few days she's been so tired, so didn't bother to lock the catflap this morning. She didn't get far, but it's very heartening to know she's so active.
The plumber has now been, and everything is fixed: this is particularly good because this morning Helen noticed that the hot water feeder tank was overflowing. Everything really does seem to come at once.

So, today's the day. Helen is 40 weeks today, and as predicted, we're still waiting. I think we're now completely ready: the table has been moved out the dining area to make room for the birthing pool, which was the last thing that needed doing.
We keep doing the odd thing for the baby or her room, but it's all things that could easily have waited for a few weeks after birth. Things like putting up the sign on her door, sawing the end off the shoe rack so that we have a dedicated buggy area by the front door.
Once the baby arrives, I imagine I'll be tweeting about little else for at least two weeks. For that I apologize to those not interested. It does, however, mean that those who are interested don't need to worry about missing the news: we've been getting a lot of "is there any news" type communications. Believe me, when there is, you'll be hard pressed to miss it (and you'll probably end up wishing I'd shut up about it).
Just waiting.

Just over a year ago I had a twinge in my back. It felt similar to the way it felt when I first slipped a disc, so I visited the osteopath that served me well then. Though there was little he could do for me (he's since emigrated to Australia, to get away from me), he said one thing that I'd heard over and over again: "you should swim". Pretty much every health professional who had advised me to do anything in that painful period of my life had advised me to swim. It's aerobic exercise that strengthens the core abdominal muscles, manipulates the spine and is low impact. I realized that if everyone was saying it, there must be a good reason for it. Finally, on September 19th 2010, I bit the bullet and started going.
To begin with, I went with Helen to Hatfield Swim Centre, but I could only really go at the weekend if I went there, and it seemed like a waste of valuable weekend time. Thus I did some investigations and found Marshall Street Leisure Centre, which is very close to both Oxford Circus tube and my work.
The problem is that I'm lazy, and stingy, and have a short attention span. In order to go before work, I have to leave the house at 07:10, as opposed to 07:45. Marshall Street costs £5.30 a session, plus I get the tube there which costs another £1.90. Finally, it's BORING. So boring. I therefore knew that I needed some way to keep my interest up if I was going to go on a (reasonably) regular basis.
Enter my geekery, and weird love of logging things with spreadsheets. Ever since I started, I've kept track of how often I go and, more importantly, the running average of how often I go. This means that if I go a week without swimming, I can almost feel the graph taking a downturn, and it spurs me on to go.
Do I enjoy swimming now? No, not really. It doesn't bother me anymore (I've never been a particularly strong swimmer, and when at school this meant that I dreaded swimming), but I still find it boring. There are some characters that go, and they amuse me slightly. For example, there's one guy who goes quite regularly that I've nicknamed The Thumper, because he does crawl and one arm slams down on the water so hard that I can hear it as soon as I enter the changing room. But people-watching only entertains so much; I've come up with various other things to keep me entertained. For a while, I did calculations in my head, but I soon realized that this distracted me from how many lengths I'd done. I tried basing the calculations on the current number of lengths, which worked for a while but eventually stopped that too. More recently, I've been doing something that's slightly strange: each length I do, I visualize a different room from the house I grew up in as a child. It works pretty well, because there's lots to see in each room (or, I suppose, lots to remember), and I go through the house in the same order each time. This means that if I lose count of which length I'm on, I just have to think "have I been in the dining room yet?" or similar.
The spreadsheet that I've done haven't shown me anything particularly surprising, but it's interesting to see. So far I've spent nearly £370 to swim just under 55km. Sounds like a long way, until I realize that nowadays I'm swimming 1km per session. You see, that's what spreadsheets do to me: must go more often!