We have decided to call our little bundle of joy Audrey Elizabeth Arnott. Both she and Karen are doing well.
I'm pleased to announce that at 07:43 this morning Karen gave birth to our second child. No name yet, but both mum and daughter are doing well.
I've been meaning to post this for a couple of weeks, but Karen is pregnant again! She's been suffering really bad morning sickness this time, which isn't so good, but other than that, she's doing well. Projected date is sometime in May, so Finlay will be two years and a month(ish). I hope it's a girl!
Finlay was one year old yesterday. We had a family party yesterday and a party for friends today. As usual he showed off a new trick today, that he really should have shown off yesterday infont of the Grandparents. It wont belong before one foot goes in front of the other...
Karen and I took the wee man to Teri Aki for lunch. Seems he has a taste for sushi!
Here are a couple of photos of the wee man that my Uncle took just after new year.
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The wee man is teething quite badly at the moment, Karen reckons he's got five teeth coming through. There's the four at the top and another at the bottom. He's been a wee angel about it so far, but last night was entertaining. He wouldn't go down and then woke up a number of time screaming his poor wee head off. I need to get some more Calpol on the way home...
A number of people (Jo) have been telling me that I don't post enough about Finlay and that I spend too much time warbling on about Triathlon. Karen pointed out today that I last posted about the wee man in August; which seems just like last week, oh how time flies!
So here are some photos that we've taken of the wee man over the last month or so. I've tried to send these to a number of people, but they don't seem to be getting them, so hopefully they'll be able to see them on the website instead.
 24/10/05 09:27:26, Finlay in his cot with drunken chicken and mad frog... |
 29/10/05 11:39:00, Finlay doing his best impersonation of a basking shark. |
 26/11/05 10:26:49, Finlay finds it's far more entertaining to hold the spoon and throw his breakfast everywhere, except his mouth... |
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 10/12/05 13:04:00, Finlay learns to stand up in his cage, I mean playpen... |
 10/12/05 16:13:00, Finlay explores the underside of his high chair. |
My wife says I post too much about Triathlon and not enough about my family. She has a point as I've been very focused lately on training for the Bedford Classic this coming Sunday. To address this I've uploaded a photo of Finlay that I took the other week.
After speaking to my Mum and Dad, who are visiting this weekend, it turns out hat I was a greedy little sod who vomited loads when I was a baby. It seems that Finlay has inherited this trait for his Dad as he projectile vomited again this morning. So the plan is to try and feed him smaller amounts, which is quite hard when you're breast feeding as you've no real idea of how much they've had.
The other trait that he seems to have inherited from his Dad, is regular trips to A&E, he's been twice now and he's only three months old! This is one trait that I really hope he doesn't continue with...
Had a bit of a scare with the wee man last night that ended up with him being taken to Addenbrooke's in the back of an Ambulance. He'd had a feed and was sleeping when he brought up a bit of vomit, it went straight back down and he started chocking. Karen picked him up and he then proceeded to projectile vomit the contents of his stomach all over the place.
Karen sat him on her lap to comfort him, but he went really quiet and after a minute or two closed his eyes. Karen was getting a bit worried by this point as he was a bit on the floppy side. I was telling her that it was nothing to worry about and that he was just going to sleep, but Karen was getting increasingly worried. After about five minutes it became obvious that something was up as he'd gone totally limp and unresponsive, you had to shake and arm or leg for around five seconds just to get him to open his eyes a fraction.
So I called the emergency doctor who then called us an Ambulance. As was bound to happen, he came round about two minutes before the Ambulance men arrived and sat on Karen's lap smiling at them as they walked in. We still had to have him talked to A&E to be checked over to make sure he hadn't aspirated any of the puke into his lungs and three hours after getting there we were on the way home.
It was all a bit on the scary side to be honest as I felt totally helpless as he lay there all limp. Even though I done the St. John's Ambulance first aid course and my Bronze Medallion Lifesaving course (twice), I felt like I wouldn't have been able to do anything to save him if it had been worse than it was. It's not a feeling that I want to experience that much in the future...
Robert Finlay Arnott was born at 03:31 this morning and weighted in at 7lb 5oz. Mother and son are both doing well, father is ecstatic!
What a difference a day makes... So after the scan and a bit of monitoring we've been told that they are going to induce after all. We just don't know when, but it's likely to be either this evening or tomorrow. One thing seems to be sure, I'll be a Dad before the weekend.
They decided not to induce the birth after all, much to the relief of both Karen and I. Instead we had been waiting most of the day for a scan and a bed on the ward; the scan is now tomorrow morning, so yet more time to get to know the staff in the Rosie.
Yes it really is that time in the morning... I'm just on my way back to the Rosie to spend the rest of the night with Karen who is being kept in. It's a long story, but it started around midnight and has ended up with the news that she will probably be induced tomorrow. As we didn't think we'd be there all night we left a few things behind, so I'm just picking them up and throwing the cats out. Just think, I could end today by being a father.
I was at a camera club committee meeting last night when I got a phone call from Karen. She was having painful regular contraction and could I come home. Well, as you can imagine I thought this was it and jumped in the car and drove (sensibly) home as quickly as I could.
As it turned out it was a false alarm, the contractions, while regular for the most part, did drop out for twenty minutes here and half an hour there and did get less painful. Although the sight of the baby thrashing about wildly underneath a contraction looked bloody uncomfortable.
We finally got the car seat and buggy today after waiting for a few months for John Lewis to get them in. There was never a problem with the buggy, it was always the car seat that was never appearing.
We first started looking for a buggy and car seat in the January sale, they can be expensive so you may as well try to save a few bob. However, we didn't manage to find one we liked, or one that matched what we wanted.
As we live down a rather potholed lane, we really wanted a chunky three wheeler that would be able to cope. We'd seen the Silver Cross XT in a couple of Karen's pregnancy magazines, but we'd failed to see it in any of the shops we'd been to; then we spotted on in John Lewis.
The only drawback to this buggy is that it doesn't go flat, so it's only suitable from three months. Because of this we decided wait until nearer the time as there was obviously no rush and it would give us the opportunity to look for a car seat, or even a different buggy.
We were told that Silver Cross were making a car seat to fit their buggies, but that it hadn't been released yet. We phoned them every month just top be told that the release date had been put back again and finally that it would be out at the end of March beginning of April.
During the last phone call they said that they'd finally got a demonstration model in, so we could at least go and see if it would fit in Karen's car; which it did. So we ordered one and a XT buggy, only top be told that they were out of stock of the buggy as well and didn't know when either was going to be coming in.
To cut a long story short, Karen phoned them a week later and was told that they did have buggies and that the car seat was in, so we could go and pick them up, which we did earlier today.
So we're now the owners of one of these, and one of these.
The community mid wife was out to see Karen today and since it was a holiday I was there to see what normally happens. It's more of a quick check up than anything else with blood pressure, urine sample and things like that. The best bit though was when she used the ultra sound Doppler listening device thingie (can you tell I haven't a clue what it's called?) so we could hear the baby's heart beat, that was quite cool.
Karen and I had a major scare last night that was all due to a cup of raspberry leaf tea. Raspberry leaf tea is supposed to help tone the uterus in preparation for giving birth, it can also be used to bring on contractions, so is useful later on in pregnancy. Evidently you can start using it from eight to six weeks to go, so Karen was right in the slot for having a mug or two.
It had been a pretty nasty week at work, so I'd bought myself a couple of nice strong dark beers on the way home and was all comfortable on the sofa half way through the second when things started to go wrong. Karen mentioned that she was having contractions that were quite painful, which in itself wasn't too worrying as she's had Braxton Hicks for most of the pregnancy.
It started to get a bit worrying when she was on her painful third contraction within half an hour. At this point it didn't seem like a good idea to be drinking strong dark beer anymore, it was also slightly worrying in that I'd already had too much to drive safely, so we were in for an expensive taxi ride if things got out of hand.
Luckily for us both the wee blighter wasn't ready to come out quite yet and after a couple of hours and a few funny positions on the sofa to relieve the pain, the contractions abated. So Karen has decided that her uterus is toned enough already and she'll only revert to the raspberry leaf tea again if the wee blighter's late.
It's probably time I stopped drinking, just in case...
Went to the Rosie this afternoon for a thirty two week growth scan. As per last time we went everything was fine and the mid-wifes were wondering why we'd been told to come back. As the wee blighter is getting so large, it's increasingly harder to get good ultra sound scan as the paddles they can't scan enough of an area to show much.
Karen and I went to the Rosie this afternoon for a twenty eight week scan, this was due to a few very minor incidents earlier in the pregnancy. The mid-wifes were wondering why we'd been referred back, as did the consultant who saw us afterwards. We managed to get a few scans of the wee blighter, the one of the face isn't as good as what we saw at the twenty week scan, so we're both kicking ourselves that we didn't ask for a scan of that.
Karen and I went to Kiddiecare in Peterborough today to check it out as we'd heard it was worth going to. We also thought that since they still have a sale on we might pick something up if they had anything we were specifically after. Now, I'm not the greatest fan of baby shops, but since I'm going to be a Dad, it's one of things that I'm just going to have to put up with.
I've already been dragged into Babies R Us in Cambridge a couple of times and it's not too bad, it's not been too busy and there has always been enough staff on hand to deal with any questions. It's also quite posh looking in that everything is very neat and new, because it hasn't been open that long. Kiddiecare couldn't be different...
As you pull into the Kiddiecare car park it looks enormous, but after wandering around inside it isn't as big as it looks. I think the reason for this is due to it being a big mail order place, so they have a lot of storage onsite so the size of the place is misleading. However, they do have very big selection of goods inside; I've never seen so many buggies in one place at one time.
The down side to having all this stuff is that it's quite cramped with not a large amount of room to manoeuvre about in, especially on a Saturday afternoon. When we got there the queues for the tills and the pick up point were massive and you could hardly your trolley without sideswiping a heavily pregnant woman; it was a complete nightmare.
It also meant that all the staff they had were busy dealing with customers, at least all the staff that we could see, which wasn't many as far as I could see. It did mean that there was no one to ask about the prices of things as half the stuff was badly labelled without a price or only with a price in a package with other stuff. It was all a bit of a nightmare...
So we bought a couple of things, a baby carrier as it was well cheaper than we'd seen else where. A bump pillow for Karen as she's finding the bump is disrupting her sleep. Karen also couldn't resist a bath robe wrap thing with glove, so we got that as well. Once we'd checked out, the queue had gone by this point, I noticed a couple of toys they were doing cheap, so we bought those as well.
It's quite wired having bought some stuff for our unborn child and neither of us really wanted to buy loads of stuff before as you never know. We're getting to the point now where if the shops don't have things in stock it's going to take four to eight weeks to get it, so we'll need to go and get a load of stuff soon, just to make sure we've got it all in time.
I can see that there will be a few weekends ahead that will be spent in baby shop hell and I'm not looking forward to it...
Karen and I had our twenty week scan today at the Rosie today and everything is fine. The scan was far more detailed than the twelve week one, although the scans we got to take home aren't as good as what we saw on the monitor. So the wee blighter is all intact but is still causing its mother some grief.
Yesterday wasn't completely ruined by the news that The Gift Registry had gone tits up as Karen and I we were at the Rosie Hospital for Karen's three month scan. Yes, I'm going to be a Dad! We're both really excited and looking forward to next April when it's due. For those of you who've know me for a long time, don't be shocked, it's probably the only thing that's going to make me grow up and be sensible.
