Hello

Hi there! I thought I’d start this in order to keep in touch with all my fam­ily and friends back in the USA. I’ll try to keep it updated with pic­tures of us espe­cially Squidgyboo.

Squidgy­boo is get­ting big­ger and big­ger every day. She eats ALL THE TIME!! She’s gained 2 lbs since birth, which sounds like a lot for such a teeny lit­tle thing. I can’t believe she’s 5 weeks old already!!

We go for lots of walks and have been try­ing to make it to mums and babies groups. So far we’ve not been very suc­cess­ful. Unfor­tu­nately it’s sum­mer vaca­tion in Eng­land. The groups usu­ally run dur­ing term time only and end of term was last week!! Hope­fully we’ll be able to find one that runs all the time.

Wal­ly­woo and I are still get­ting used to hav­ing Squidgy­boo around and try­ing to fig­ure out what we can and can’t do with her. We tried going out to din­ner last Wednes­day. That didn’t go well!! Squidgy­boo had been sound asleep for a cou­ple of hours so we thought we’d try it. Of course she woke up as soon as we had ordered our drinks. We ended up eat­ing in shifts, I have a feel­ing this is going to be some­thing we’re going to have to get used to! Still we keep try­ing, on Fri­day we went for a walk and then stopped off at the pub around the cor­ner from us. We had our first proper con­ver­sa­tion in over a month while Squidgy­boo slept soundly in the pram next to us. YAY!! SUCCESS!! It gave us hope that even­tu­ally we’ll be able to do some nor­mal adult things!!

Birth Story
Went into the hos­pi­tal at 8am on the 24th to be induced as I was 12 days past due. The con­trac­tions weren’t too bad for most of Sat­ur­day. Sat­ur­day evening and Sun­day was hell. I was stuck in the mater­nity unit because there were no beds in the deliv­ery unit and I was only 3 cen­timert­ers so they didn’t con­sider me to be in labor. They wouldn’t give me any­thing other than parac­eta­mol and I was NOT happy. By noon on Sun­day I kept ask­ing for some gas and air but they wouldn’t give it to me, said it would tire me out (being induced and hav­ing con­trac­tions for 2 days wasn’t going to tire me out, no it was gas and air!!). Finally started to cry like a baby around 3ish on Sun­day as I was hav­ing con­trac­tions almost con­tin­u­ously and told them that I was going to “get red­neck on their asses if they didn’t do some­thing soon” I don’t think they knew what I was talk­ing about but my part­ner laughed at that a bit. Finally at shift change a mid­wife came on that could see I was in some seri­ous pain and she offered to get me some gas and air. HALL-AY-LOU-YA !! That was 30 hours into it and about 30 min­utes before they finally moved me upstairs to the deliv­ery unit. I had my waters bro­ken at 6:00 and had Esme almost 2 hours later.

I don’t ever want to be induced again!! I was a liv­ing hell!! Oh and you don’t for­get the pain!!