Capturing the moment

We decided to do some children footprints (this home-birth thing means I'm missing a lot of normal stuff for the baby book so have to make up for it!)

Tristan loved it...

...especially as we let him do Samuel (Sam's face tells you his reaction!).

This was the end result!

We then decided we ought to do a family picture for posterity. With four of us there's even less chance of us all looking nice - I got sacrificed this time!

Brothers

We are starting to settle down and Tristan now alternates between being very devoted and completely forgetting about Sam.

We tried out the buggy with both of them for the first time and they both fell asleep at the same time (typical, it would be when we were in the middle of town and no chance to join them!).

Tristan considers Samuel's moses basket as fair game for him to use - here he is with an inpromptu 'row row row your boat' (Sam might be the oar?!)...

More week 1...

People always say that the second child never gets any photographs - I'm determined to avoid this - although Tristan manages to get into most of them!

Samuel is proving to be a pretty chilled baby, he feeds well (to the point of making himself sick!) and is now starting to spend small periods of time awake and assessing his environment - not too sure what his thoughts are on this...

Sleep is still at a premium but I think that will get worse when Manu is back in work next week. Tristan alternates between being very interested in Samuel and completely ignoring him, and seems unimpressed at his rate of progress in being interested in toys.

Our division of tasks is as I follows: I am responsible for input, Samuel for throughput and Manu for output - yes my sheet is clean so far, I have avoided every poo-ey nappy (I think the whole missing the birth has given me extra bargaining power!)...

More first experiences

Samuel had his first bath - following a particularly grim nappy (papa dealt with this - I'm milking the whole birth a lot!) - he was not impressed at all (could it be the pink bathroom?)!

Samuel met his future best friends, William on the left (nearly 3 months old) and Awstin centre (9 months old) - again not too impressed with this experience...

He seems happiest when sleeping or feeding (he's proving to be another very keen breast man).

Our first family outing

Samuel's present to knight-crazy Tristan was a sword and shield (this will probably be used to fight Samuel with so perhaps not the best present but they are foam!).

We popped up to Donnington castle to get the setting right for wearing them.  Manu rediscovered how to work the baby carrier and Samuel slept through the whole experience!

Labour Day

Tuesday 1st May 2012 at about 9.30 am. 5 days before the due date we went to hospital as I had some bleeding. They sent us home saying that the baby wasn't engaged and it could be another week... I got Manu to take a photo of me just in case this was it (I was having random contractions).

Manu went back to work and I used the tens machine that arrived as we had come back from hospital (I was so sure the baby would be late after my 10 days late with Tristan experience that I hadn't booked it any earlier). After an afternoon of contractions roughly every 10 minutes at about 4.50 I suddenly felt terrible and after a bad few minutes my waters broke. I couldn't get hold of Manu but my friend, Jo,  who lives round the corner had said if my waters broke to call her immediately. As well as being a great friend she also happens to be a midwife which is just as well as she gathered up her 2 children while ringing 999 and ran down the road arriving 5 minutes later to deliver the head and then the rest of our new baby boy, Samuel.

 Jo and Samuel - the towel is a bit of an upgrade as his first swaddling cloth was kitchen roll! He was born at approximately 17.20 - no-one was paying too much attention to the time though. The ambulance arrived a couple of minutes afterwards.

He's a big baby 4.3kilos (or 9lbs 10ozs) - so I was glad he was early but could have done with quite a lot more pre-warning.

 Manu arrived 20 minutes later unaware (they had had telephone reception issues) that Sam was here! His part in the action was to dress the baby! I didn't go to hospital so no hospital tag - in fact the baby book is going to be quite light on a lot of stuff.

Jo's husband took Tristan away for a few hours then he came back to give his new baby brother a quick cuddle before bed. This makes it sound quite but serene it wasn't and trying to avoid all the what-ifs is taking some work, also our floor is not particularly hygienic it seems so I've had a few complications which are now being resolved!

Samuel's birth certificate - Samuel Joey Giddings Baudoin - his middle name, 'Joey', testifying to our friend.

Everything is now getting back to normal (apart from sleep)...

Baby's room

This is the final bedroom needing to be done.
In it's original state. There has been wallpaper to strip, an electric heater to remove (no dead pigeons found this time), a sink to remove a new ceiling to put up walls to replaster and (somewhat obviously) a new carpet required too!

It's been quite unrewarding doing it as we've had to keep it hidden from view as it would have revieled the gender - some people have openly confessed to being at least as excited to see the decor as to meeting the new baby. One of the only people to know the gender was our old neighbours who did the wallpaper (we can't do wallpaper or it would cause a marital breakup!).




We've had to dig out the old baby things and sneak things out of Tristan's room. This is Manu contemplating the cot fixings/ life in prison.



And the final finished room - yes we have gone space themed (we had quite a few things to avoid not to rouse Tristan's jealousy - fire engines, diggers and tractors were all definitely no-nos).

My favourite bit is the little solar system light (I had bought it thinking it would be a main light) - it has a remote control to make the planets spin and the sun glow (pluto has apparently been downgraded so they could make a cost saving as there's now only 8 planets!).