Entries Tagged 'Misc' ↓

In the end we didn’t listen to any clarinet concertos, it was a pretty tricky labour to be honest but after 17 hours of very hard work from Suzey 7lbs 3oz of beautiful boy entered the world at 23:15 yesterday; Charlie Liddon Both mother and son are doing very well indeed.

Got home at 4am last night and popping back in now. Photos and more news later

Sitting here copying clarinet concertos onto the ipod in preparation for delivery. The plan was to get into Princess Annes’ at 9:15 for Suzey to be induced into labour. As ever nature makes a mockery of the best laid plans and she’s been having steady contractions since 1am, her body thumbing its nose to any artificial help. We’re off into the hospital in the next 15 mins and fingers crossed soon to meet our new child.

It was excellent to see our David James worries confounded on Saturday as Pompey went to Wembley and come home with the FA Cup.

I’m not all that up on football to be honest, having moved an awful lot in the last 20 years I’ve generally supported the team closest to my home town. That’s “support” in the loosest sense, all it usually involves is reading the match write ups and tracking their league position as the season progresses. That’s worked out pretty well to be honest having luckily decided to track teams that turned out to be on the ascendant. 4 years or watching Watford rise from the fourth division to what was then the 1st, a big gap then following Brighton and Hove Albion get to the championship and the finally seeing Pompey win the Championship to take the step up to Premiership glory.

And then I moved to Southampton but for the time I stuck with flying a flag for Pompey. The previous few years gave a bit of an insight into why people will follow a team for life and give an inkling of understanding why clubs can inspire such loyalty. Redknapp and the ever-present soap like drama that seems to follow him around is at the core of it. Getting into the premiership, the defection to Soton, the nailbiting season end as he managed to keep the club in the Premiership. Taking the team to Wembley and coming home with that excellent silvery prize. It’s all great.

On top of that I married a good Pompey girl from a family who are fans and all help keep me on the straight and narrow. So that’s kept me skate despite living amidst the red and white of Southampton for the last couple of years and I can’t see that changing

We’ve just been watching David James’s pre FA Cup interview, at the top of the Spinnaker Tower no less. Both me and Suzey reckons he’s got THE FEAR.

Fingers crossed that we don’t see him slip into his Calamity James alter ego. It’ll come clear in the next couple of hours.

Not really much worth as a blog post to be honest. It is very nice and there are some great improvements but it’s hardly earth shattering news from chez Liddon.

This is, however, a good opportunity to see if the Live Journal cross poster plug-in still works

Well that’s good news, Suze’s blood pressure evened out nicely last week so we’re off daily visits to the hospital. 1 out of the 4 readings last taken was high but the nurses decided to ignore that, one of the midwife’s had made made Suzey laugh like a drain at exactly the point the machine started measuring We were both chuckling away, the heart beat trace show’s the baby is a very lively one which doesn’t bode too well, the midwife described it as a “wrigglechops”. Which would be a good name. Both me and Suze have been described as nightmare’s as kids and it sounds like we’re in for a bit of genetically influenced karma. Great!

We’ll be back there on Tuesday and if it does stay in the bounds needed to keep the medicos happy it means she has some choice over the style of birth. Until the BP issues had popped up we were looking at the yoghurt weavers and guardian readers option: a water birth. With a bit of luck that’ll be back on the menu. We can take in our iPod apparently. My suggestions for theme music haven’t gone down well. No Prodigy, no LCD Soundsystem I’ve a list of stuff to get and as I type am downloading Mozart’s Clarient Concerto in A.

We’re on a constant cycle of hospital visits right now as Suze’s blood pressure is a little high and they want to keep it monitored. She’s at week 37 now and feels great. The worry is that it may turn into preeclampsia but right now she’s not showing any other symptoms of that except for a slightly higher than normal BP. The monitoring process is pretty simple, she gets hooked to a machine that records the baby’s heartbeat, any contractions and takes 3 blood pressure readings over 30 minutes. She also has to press a button every time the baby moves.

They use a set of two microphones to record the baby’s heartbeat and that’s played over some loudspeakers which is both spooky and good to hear at the same time. The day centre they do all this is pretty busy during the day so the room is flooded with the wooly sounds of miniature hearts beating furiously.

The printout showed a very active baby which the mid wife was very happy with and also some slight contractions which means we’re ally nearly there.

We saw the doctor yesterday and she was pretty good, explaining that Suze’s BP wasn’t high enough to warrant either taking any medication or having an early inducement which was pretty reassuring. Another positive aspect is that we’re now fully acquainted with the hospital and when the time comes we’ll know where to go and what to expect.

It’s so very close now, probably 3 weeks at the most and we are still very excited

Four quid and 11 minutes all in all. Bonzer.

Slight downside was the barber smoking all the way through despite a massive SMOKING IS ILLEGAL sign up in the window. It’s tricky, I value the short amount of time I had to spend in there but the smoking is definite negative. I asked him about the hairdressers on the other side of the triangle and he dissed them for being too expensive and, in his words, “arty farty”. I also managed to get some choice opinions on the hairdressers emerging from modern colleges (”Rubbish, only 72 hours of actual cut time to get their qualification”).

I enjoyed all that but just for the sake of balance and to avoid the smoke filled aspect of today’s experience I’ll try the guys across the way next time. Probably in 8 months time

I actually made a genuine and concerted effort to get my hair cut yesterday but a trip to Bitterne Triangle ended in failure. The first barbers had gone for lunch:

Next up the I tried the extremely cheap £4 haircut salon to be greeted by this:

Obviously this was a very upsetting and distressful experience. Fish and chips helped solve that bought from this frightening chip headed man eating his own chip brains:

Very nice though large code and chips and a drink cost £6.50, over two quid more than getting a trim. I’ll have another go today.

But I have been playing with this:

Hairy stuff