he is a very bad man

Even though I rarely get time to sit in front of the computer for longer than ten minutes, I still want to know that our blog is here and people are still visiting each other and interested in each other's lives. I want to be part of that, so I hope we manage to sort the whole domain thing out and reappear as soon as possible and in the interim I'm going to see if I can get a few minutes to catch up with everyone else.

i am a bad man...

We have had a lovely afternoon. Mrs McMuffin's parents came over to look after Babycake for a couple of hours so that we could go out together. This is the first time we have been out together in 9 days. Of course, I have been out by myself several times, but poor Mrs McMuffin has been trapped indoors all of that time. She seemed a little bit overwhelmed by the pace of modern life. Everything just seemed faster than she remembered and there seemed to be more people too. I'm sure she will get used to it all again in no time. We went for lunch at an Italian restuarant in Bluewater. It was a gentle, pleasant meal. I made the mistake of asking for a glass of house red with my meal. The waitress looked at me blankly and said, "we don't do house wine." Fair enough, I thought, so I looked at the half dozen wines on offer, and I didn't recognise one of them because my Italian is crap. I asked the waitress if there was one that she would recommend. Again, she just looked at me blankly, and muttered, "I dunno..." In the end, I had a glass of Chianti, a large glass, which looked like a fairly small glass to me. It cost me £7.80. I know that this is how restuarants make their money, but it bothers me.

I have returned home to find that I have been lazy and ignored my emails from Typepad warning me that I had to remap my domain. I quickly set about this, but it appears that the new Typepad system may not be supported by my domain management company. Typepad is changing tomorrow, so there is a very real chance that we will disappear for a few days while I get things sorted. I haven't told Mrs McMuffin yet...She will not be happy. Please, dear friends, spread the word that we will be back, and do not forget us.

By the way, Babycake is becoming more lovely every day. I didn't realise how satistfying it would be to take his screaming, twisting, body from his grandfather, and for him to immediately become calm and still when I spoke to him. So this is attachment and bonding.

the return of the king

I was aimlessly filming Babycake today when suddenly he smiled. I thought you might like to see it. All I can say is, long live the King.

hello world

I have managed to swaddle the boy and get him out of my arms for the second time today. I miss normal life and those leisurely half hours reading blogs. I'm sure I'll get a chance again over the next couple of years. The boy is lovely, but I am knackered and finding it very hard to reconcile the advice with the reality. How can you sleep when the baby sleeps, if he will only settle on you and he's only supposed to sleep on his back in a crib, so you feel that you have to stay awake so you don't smother him? Mr McMuffin is far more relaxed about it all and reckons we should just go with what the boy is telling us he needs. So far that's a giant breast attached to a human pillow! It can't be all bad though as I still feel we've been blessed and find myself just staring at him for hours and hours. Bye.

still got time...

While poor Mrs McMuffin is already suffering from a lack of sleep and any time for herself, I have been finding the whole parent thing relatively easy. I get woken up a couple of times every night, but I can soon get back off to sleep. Babycake has decided that he cannot bear to be parted from her breasts. Apparently this is quite normal behaviour and goes on for a couple of weeks while he trains her to produce enough milk to meet his needs.

Having a baby hardly seems to have interfered with my routine at all. I get up at about the same time and play on the computer for a while. I go out shopping for a couple of hours every afternoon. I have decided that Mrs McMuffin will go shopping at the weekend for a couple of hours and I will keep the boy at home, and suffer any consequences for that.

Well, enough of all this baby stuff, this has been a good week for technology. I got myself a lovely Lacie external DVD writer. The Superdrive that is fitted into the Mac is now three years old and only burns at 1X speed, which was driving my a little bit mad. The new machine burns single layer discs at 16X speed and dual layer discs at 8X speed. A disc that used to take 50 minutes can now be burned in just under 4 minutes. The best bit is that it only cost £79. Wonderful.

I have also got us the new IPEVO phone, the first Skype phone for Macs. It is very cool looking and seems to work brilliantly. The only problem that I can see is that taking my telephonic technology into the future appears to involve a step backwards into the past. I now have a wired phone again. Surely it can't be that hard to make a bluetooth version of the phone?

Finally, I have found a really cool app. It's called CoverFlow. It does fantastic things with your iTunes cover art. You have to see it to believe it. You can download it from here.

poor slinky

We have tried and tried to make sure that Slinky doesn't get left out. He mopes around the house with a slightly depressed look on his face. I feel really sorry for him.

internet folk are lovely

First we get lots of people dropping by to wish Babycake and us well, then the presents start arriving! I am just so touched by it all. You are all lovely and I thank you all. Mind you, you're not quite as lovely as we are, but you are lovely just the same. Now that I am a parent I have started to worry about the risks that poor little Babycake may be exposed to as he grows up. I have already started to train him not to talk to strangers...unless he has met them on the internet, of course.

As you can imagine, this little boy's first few days on earth have been closely documented. We have been taking quite a few photos of the boy. We even made a movie of his birth. Of course, I won't be posting that, but here is a bit of audio stripped from the movie. It's the sound of Babycake's heart beating inside Mrs McMuffin a couple of hours before he was born.

thank you...

...so much for your kind comments. As you can imagine it's all been a bit of a shock to the system, but we're gradually getting used to having the boy around and he is good at letting us know when we're completely useless parents and take too long to do the simplest things. He really is a lovely little chap and Mr McMuffin is already using him as an excuse as to why he doesn't need to hoover or change the bedding, apparently we're just too busy! So far, the boy has been a real pleasure to have around, so we're not going to send him back, but we have reminded him that he's still on trial.

I have to say the biggest thank you ever to the midwives from my local health authority and raise a glass to the NHS, they did me proud. I was blessed to have two lovely women who understood my determination to have a home birth and went beyond the call of duty to help me to have one. Mr McMuffin and Gypsy Tart were amazing and sustained me through the whole thing.

I have to confess to an enormous amount of stupidity about birth. I thought that you were only in labour when you couldn't hold a conversation between contractions and they were coming every five minutes or so. Not true. By the time the midwife came out to me, she told me I was fully dilated and immediately offered me gas and air. I thought I might as well try the drugs seeing as they were free, but actually felt a bit of a fraud as I thought I should be in much more pain to have pain relief. Now bear in mind I'm no kind of high pain threshold martyr type, but I really had swallowed some of the horror stories about labour and because I wasn't drooling with agony thought I wasn't even close to the event. Anyway, the midwife thought the boy's arrival was imminent, but we had about another eight hours to go because he didn't want to untuck his arm and come out normally. Needless to say it wasn't pleasant and I was knackered, but again not as bad as I was led to believe. However, if I'd been told at the beginning that I'd be nineteen and a half hours in labour, I probably would have screamed for a caesarean from the start and who's to say that wouldn't have been a lot more sensible.

So, anyway we have the boy and he is just gorgeous despite his funny little hairy ears. Part of me can't quite believe that we get to keep him and I really hope that we can give this tiny little person what he needs to have a happy life.

welcome to the world

Babycake McMuffin was born today at 11:23. He weighs 7lb 12ozs. He is in fine health, with enormous feet. I suspect Mrs McMuffin of having an affair with a Hobbitt. Mrs McMuffin is knackered, but doing well too. Ms Gypsy Tart has been a brick throughout the whole affair. I am happy.

pushing and pushing

Good grief, she is still pushing. The threat of going to hospital seems to have worked wonders. The baby has crowned. He really will be with us any minute now.