Little man is here, there isn’t a more splendid looking fellow on this earth. Noah joined us at 00:57 on Sunday 17th January after a very traumatic two weeks of anxious waiting, contractions and false starts. Wondering what all that entailed? Let me explain…

It all started on the 31st December when Katie’s labour had (officially) begun. Around 8pm that evening, Katie had noticed that she had a “show”, signs that the membranes around the cervix were making way for little man to start is descent into the real world.

To prefix the rest of this story, at this time Noah was around 32 weeks gestational age.

So, on New Years Eve, we ventured to the hospital and were taken to a bed within what was known as the Central Delivery Suite. This ward was for mums looking to advance from the early stages of labour into full on delivery. Laying on the bed, Katie was strapped up to a baby monitor and we could visibly see the machines indicators picking up uterine contractions. The midwives were sure labour was about to progress so Katie and I were moved into a private room where we chatted with the consultants and pediatricians about what was about to happen to us. At the strike of midnight, we were in a ward with each other, listening to the nurses sing in the new year.

Later that night, Katie’s waters broke and contractions became more frequent and intense but nothing happened. Summarizing, Katie endured 6 full days on contractions with no delivery, limiting her ability to eat full meals, walk around and generally confining her to her bed. On the seventh day, she was allowed to return home with the express condition that she was to remain in bed as much as possible and take her antibiotics to stop mother and baby contracting an infection from the lack of waters in her womb.

A week passed.

Around the 13th, Katie contractions came back, this time more frequent and intense. We were admitted to the same ward and made ourselves comfortable. For two days Katie’s contractions remained but nothing ever materialized. Consultants would come and go, reiterating that because Katie’s waters had broken, it would be ill-advised to let the baby risk a serious infection so they would need to induce her delivery.

On the Thursday, Katie was administered with a gel to help get things moving. Nothing happened. Over the next day and a half, stronger and more aggressive induction methods were used, pills would be placed into the lining of the cervix to help induction of the baby. Again, these didn’t do the job.

The last treatment was to sweep the cervical membranes, this brought with it some success. Katie’s contractions were strong enough to be moved back into a private room and things started to progress quickly. As she had become more and more dilated a drip was added to engage the Uterus and begin very intense contractions. This did what it should have done, so much so that Katie’s pain became unbearable and she requested an epidural to ease the pain.

The epidural actually turned out to be a good move in a very panicked and surreal sequence of events. After the relief was introduced, Katie’s pain was still localised to one side of her body, in short, the epidural wasn’t at it’s full effectiveness. I requested the help of a midwife just as she was coming in to alert us to something she had noticed about the labour.

As I explained the situation, the midwife has indicated that for every contraction, the babies heartbeat was dropping dangerously low. Wanting to get a second opinion, she sought the advice of the consultant and he concurred that the baby was in quite a bit of distress.

Cue the most surreal 19 minutes of my life.

The midwife immediately set about preparing Katie for an emergency C-Section. I was instructed to keep the baby heartbeat monitor on Katie’s stomach while they unhooked her from machines, requested her signature to authorise the operation and changed into their theatre scrubs.

I changed into my scrubs and accompanied Katie as we were wheeled into the surgical room, a monitor was continually attached to Katie’s belly whilst the surgeons prepared their instruments. The epidural administered earlier had allowed the team to introduce a spinal block quickly and effectively but we could hear that the heartbeat monitor was becoming very faint and beats very few and far between. We could sense things were seriously wrong.

Suddenly the midwife shouts “Code Blue”, something we later learned meant that the babies heartbeat was dangerously low, so much so it was a race against time. To make matters worse, the surgeon wasn’t present in the room, so the consultant had to quickly scrub in and perform the procedure himself.

The procedure was started at 00:55 and Noah came into the world at 00:57. There was an eerie silence as we waited for the baby to cry……we waited and then a garbled cry came, relief and joy spread across our faces. It transpired that the umbilical cord has become wrapped around his neck three times, hence the ultimate rush to get him out.

He was placed into the early baby unit as a precaution. I was allowed to see him a few hours later but Katie was confined to her bed being so fresh from the surgery.

Fast-forward to today, Noah is in a nursery room in his own little cot. He is for all intensive purposes a normal baby, even though he was born 6 weeks early. Noah weighed exactly 6 pounds though you wouldn’t think to look at him.

He is now in the ward knocking back as many bottles of milk as he can physically handle. All he needs to do is gain the weight he initially lost (which is normal) and become used to feeding a large amount every 4 hours and he is home. It’s a frustrating time for Katie and I but we know he is in the best place and receiving an unparalleled level of care. We get to bathe him, feed him, change him and do everything you would at home, except for now it’s in a ward at Southend Hospital.

It’s what we are putting in our Christmas cards (the title). Yet another year has passed, this one being the fastest in known memory but things are going to be a little different in the coming year.

Katie has been doing her incubation thing and is whipping up a child of epic proportions. We know that we are having a baby boy and our due date has consistently come down from late February to, quite miraculously, two weeks away. This isn’t a major cock-up on behalf of the lovely people at the NHS this time, it’s the fact that the baby has grown so much in such a short amount of time, it might just mean that Katie is unable to deliver naturally.

We were presented with all the above information by a lovely young consultant who Katie has been visiting every-so-often to make sure that the baby was developing fine and that she was healthy throughout her pregnancy. He also told us that if the little one continued to put on a pound a week (like he has the past three), Katie would need to be booked in for a C-Section in the New Year.

So, here we are. Our consultant appointment is a week away and if confirmed, the surgery would be booked for exactly a week from then.

Whilst this drama unfolded, we came to the stark reality that we had arranged for all of the babies nursery furniture to be delivered in the new year. This meant we would need to pay, re-schedule and assemble the items as soon as possible, before the Christmas deliveries stopped. Luckily we were able to get it all booked in and said furniture was built as soon as it arrived:

Much fun has been had in the snow, the cats are finding out what it’s like to be out in the tundra for hours at a time (they were only 3 months old this time last year). They have been jumping around like little snow foxes, scared of their own shadow most of the time.

A few days back I paid the price for walking to swiftly on the frozen pavements. Picking up my car after leaving it at a friends for the night, I slipped in an alleyway taking a bush with me and leaving my keys, phone and dignity strewn about the tarmac.

I don’t know if it’s just me but I love driving in the snow, it’s not that I like being without control in the ice, it’s quite the opposite. Whilst people are having problems, I like trying to to get from A to B, albeit slowly, without letting the conditions be a hindrance to me.

Christmas Day is barely days away and it’s going to be our last by ourselves. For this reason we have decided to see the parents after Christmas, spend the day alone and make sure we enjoy the day without any interference of interruptions.

Merry Christmas to you all, expect the next news to be somewhat jubilant!

I don’t know about you but I love me some clever marketing. The past couple of days I have seen a few television adverts highlighting the release of a new Freeview Channel called Viva. I’ve embedded it below for your viewing pleasure.

Not only is the casting of the two lads brilliant, the subtle actions and timing are right up my street.

What do you think?

Pregnancy, it seems, is a difficult thing to quantify if you are the NHS. As the weeks have rolled by, the scanning department at our local hospital have done all they can to keep Katie’s baby development at the same stage. When I say this, according to them, Katie has been at twenty weeks of pregnancy for the past three weeks. Using our own dates, we aren’t far past that stage, with our guess being at least twenty-two weeks.

We are both very lucky to be at this stage so even if the hospital were right, we would be happy to wait until the little one decides he is ready come join us.

Life has consisted of a few developments at work, we get busier and the deadlines shorter. I have been lucky enough to be rewarded for my work over the year so I can’t complain. Katie and I have also taken to eBaying a lot of our spare clothing, electronics and games to free some space in the house and get a little extra money to kit out the nursery.

I have been lucky enough to secure another writing gig at TheNextWeb.com, a very popular technology and startup blog that allows me to showcase my writing skills to a wider audience. This has meant that WillINeedIt has seen an upturn in referred traffic and the subscriber count is steadily increasing with more people taking the time to comment also.

On a completely different note, the cats seemed to have sensed Katie’s bump and are rallying to make sure they aren’t forgotten. There have been scenes of constant badgering, sleeping across her bump, meowing at the slightest bit of attention and they never seem to want to leave her side. Whether they can hear the movements in her belly or they can just sense it, the cats have never been so loving, perhaps they think they will be kicked out when the baby is born!

You sing for your life, you manage to get into the last 24 acts of the competition. Just as you find out which X Factor judge will be your mentor, you overcompensate and faceplant into the carpet of the finalists holding room.

Whilst it’s wrong to laugh at other people’s misfortune, I found it bloody hilarious.

For the past two weeks Katie and I have been “surviving” without internet. By surviving, I was able to fix my neighbours wireless router in exchange for piggybacking on his connection (a warning for everyone else, don’t use a low WIFI channel when your router is next to a cordless phone).

The resulting connection, whilst good, would randomly disconnect, load pages quite slowly and completely disappear from a wireless search meaning any web design work or research was very hard to do.

The reason for the disconnection you ask? It begins with “B” and ends in “T”.

One random day at work I was on my lunch break when I received an email to my Gmail account telling me that my ISP were suspending my service. My first thought was “WTF?!” followed by a re-reading of the email to determine that BT had instructed my ISP that we no longer had a valid BT phone line.

After a phone call to BT, they politely instructed us that we had an account in arrears, something that we found really hard to believe since we have paid every bill since we se up the account. Further questioning revealed that when we activated the line and we received our phone number, we were due a charge for setting it up, something that I asked and was told would not be charged to us.

Fair enough, there may have been a mistake, how about we just pay the charge and be done with it? No, say BT, we must disconnect your phone line (without telling you) first, then you can moan about it later.

So there we were, without a phone line or internet. I call up, pay the charge and ask them to activate our phone line, so we can keep the same number and go on our merry way. “Certainly Sir”, says the Indian Call Centre Rep, “that will take 4-5 days to activate for you”. We wait 4-5 days, sure enough our line is restored, however the phone number is completely different.

We can’t reactivate our internet without the same BT phone number, this means another call with BT. “Certainly Sir” says a different Indian Call Centre Rep, “this will take [another] 4-5 days”.

We wait the allotted time, sure enough the number is restored and our internet provider could be called to re-activate our service. Without wanting to continue a theme here, how many days have we had to wait for this to go live?

Yes, you guessed it, 4-5 days (and a £25 reconnection fee I hasten to add). It should be going live today. Or maybe it could be another four or five days…