Family

Born 12:02 on Saturday 7th August 2010, we now have a little son William. He was born in Campbelltown hospital (after Camden's maternity ward was closed after we had signed up there) with the assistance of the amazing midwifery staff there and primarily our midwife Linda.
Liz once again amazed me with the way she gave birth - this time not even taking the two Panadol she had birthing Phoebe. It was all very natural, in the water, and in retrospect about as relaxed as you could expect such a process to be. Although I'm sure she wouldn't describe it using that word!

Being very close to choosing a homebirth originally, we were intending to leave hospital as soon as possible as it's never the best place to be for what we feel is a very natural, non-medical process. However the hospital staff had some concerns about his well-being and he and Liz ended up staying two nights in various tight spaces amongst the amazingly busy maternity ward. We were extremely happy to be given the all-clear to return home on Monday morning, and have spent the time since coming to terms with two little people living in our house.

Neither Liz nor I want to jinx the process, but thus far he's been very settled, feeding well (almost constantly!) and sleeping contentedly. Time will tell if this excellent state of affairs continues.

Phoebe is doing really well, understanding that our "family cuddles" have grown from three to four people, being gentle, and at least trying to understand when we can't give her immediate attention all the time. I have two weeks off and with luck this will continue after I return to work.

As you may expect, our little man has his own website at williamgould.net, currently containing a selection of pregnancy and birth photos.

His middle name Claude honours my mother's father, and the first name we chose on its own merits, but also ties in nicely with grandfather Claude's surname - Williams.

Many people asked if we knew what gender we were having - we didn't this time - and then whether we wanted a boy to "balance things". Neither of us believed this was in any way necessary, but now that we have our little man, we wouldn't change him for anything.

Welcome to the world, William. We're so happy to have to have you in our family!

We've just spent our first night in a new house. No, not our new house we intend to build, just a different rental property.

The one we moved into in December when our previous house in Picton was sold was a significant compromise. Given only two weeks to find a place and move out, we didn't have a lot of choice. But we were told at the time that the owners (one of who lives on site) were planning on selling it at the end of this year. So, this move was to preempt that while the newest little bubba is still inside, but also to get around the issues we had with the place.

The landlords were almost completely unresponsive, only wanting to do the bare minimum, and reneging on promises they made to fix the place up. Paying for 5 acres but only feeling we had the use of the house and immediate surrounds due to the landlady living (illegally) on site was another. Lack of garages or any external storage when we have two cars, a trailer, a ride-on mower and a caravan to store was starting to be a big hassle too.

So, we took the hit of pain and moved. We're back in Picton (well, north-west of it really) on 5 acres again, but this time with the landlords safely away in Sydney somewhere. The move was about as painful as you can imagine. Actually no, it would have been worse without the help of our parents - thanks to Margaret, Mum, and Dad (Happy Birthday!)

The owners had locked more locks than they gave us keys for, and then when we finally did get in the the place looked like a bombsite. It took three cleaners all day yesterday to make it acceptable. Not a good start.

But the setting is gorgeous - tucked in a valley. It's so picturesque that today AAMI are shooting a commercial there. Not sure if it's one of those dodgy driver ones, but if so then the approach road is certainly a good setting.

Hopefully this will have been an overall good move, and the last we make before we move onto our land.

Our neighbour asked us to get our boundary fence up as he wanted to start storing vehicles for his business on his land, so that was incentive enough to get that organised. We decided against doing the front fence at this stage due to the money that could be better used elsewhere, but even the process of getting two more sides fenced has been most exciting!

The pre-subdivision use of the land had a strange garden that we can't quite work out which stretched across our boundary, so the first task was to clear a path through that for the fence to run:



Then to get to the old wire on the rear fence, I had to hack huge amounts of overgrown grass and blackberries from the farm to our rear:


Once this clearing was done, a week or so later the most excellent fencers turned up and made quick work of getting holes sunk:



And posts in:



Liz even stopped by near a fresh post to show off her baby bump! :



A couple of days later, and we had 300-odd metres of fencing done - the side brand new and the rear rewired:



We happen to think the result is rather attractive:

Well we decided yesterday not to find the answer to that question whilst having our 20 week scan. It's not all that relevant in light of the news that all is 100% healthy.

At one point the sonographer had trouble getting a view of one of the baby's hands as it was behind the head. The comment was made that this is usually a parental trait. Moments later I discovered myself leaning on their comfortable couch watching the big-screen view of our next child, arm behind my head comfortable on the wall.

I've got some video to come once I edit it down, and also a "4D" (hate that name) picture that they did all as part of the excellent service. We have a printout of this to stare at, however for me at least it's still not very real that come August our family expands by one!

Phoebe knows that there's a baby in mummy's tummy, but hasn't really grasped what that might mean to her life we think.

Now of course I have to choose from twice as many baby names and come up with two short-lists!

We're spending a reasonably amount of time just mowing our block of land, and the associated bills with no real benefit are driving us to focus on saving to move on there!

The first structure went up some time ago - I built a compost bin! Compost is rather difficult to move between properties, so our previous two have been left with a nice supply thanks to all our kitchen waste. There wasn't much point doing that again, so a bit of research and time later, and our land was no longer 5 empty acres.

We've cleared some of the fallen trees and turned it into firewood, discovering our local wildlife in the process.

Not long after we purchased the block, there was of course the question of how to tend so much grass. The answer was served up courtesy of an eBay-ed large commercial ride-on mower (diesel to run on 100% biodiesel, of course!) which we collected from the Hunter Valley thanks to the impressive grunt of the VW and a trailer we decided to buy to do the move ourselves. Both of these have proved great investments, even with a bit of repair work we needed to do to the mower.

Starting this coming week our fencing starts to go up. The neighbor we are sharing the fence with unfortunately started the relationship off on a less-than-optimal note by reneging on a deal we had, however this is hopefully behind us now.

The neighbor on the other side is a far different story - it turns out I used to work with him back at Strathfield Car Radios 13 years ago! One of those real small-world stories, and enough to completely overpower the let-down of the other neighbour. He fenced his block with the help of his father who lives around the corner, running an olive farm. This means he can borrow farming equipment as needed, although yesterday he had broken his slasher. The fact that he was slashing at given he has sheep on there shows just how much the recent rain has made the grass grow. Our block has sure taken some mowing in recent times!

For the fencing we have to clear out a section of odd fenced garden that is mostly in our property but goes into the block next door which we want to separate ourselves from with the fence, this is tomorrow's task.

The back fence is somewhat intact so we've asked the fencer to keep what he can to help keep our costs down, and I spent some time clearing away the blackberries and other overgrowth from the farm behind us with another new piece of gardening equipment we're going to need - a petrol whipper-snipper (using our electric one when the nearest power point we own is 3-4km away was proving a little difficult).

We have decided for reasons of cost not to fence the front for now, instead waiting for a final decision on where our driveway is to go (there's a drainage ditch which if we are careful we can drive across but this won't work in the long-term for delivery trucks, etc.)

Once that is done, we're pretty much done with the first phase of our project - get land and boundaries established. After that, the next phase begins - Services - where we get power, sewerage, water, hot water and phone available on the block in preparation for the following phase. This will be when we put up the barn with kitchenette, bathroom, heating, etc., then back in the caravan we purchased as cheap bedrooms and kitchen that we can sell later (currently sitting outside our rental property), and move onto our land!

Current hopeful plan has us there in spring, after the new baby comes along. We could be there far earlier but have to pace our spending according to our earnings.

I have a flickr set called Build on Razorback where I'm putting pictures of the process, and am also working on a more specific website to showcase our crazy plans as they evolve.

I'm most excited to announce that Phoebe will have a little brother or sister come mid-August!!

We've just returned from the 12-week scan with an all-clear verdict, and as such can now stop biting tongues and being secretive. How exciting and amazing! The little wriggler was tossing and turning in mummy's tummy, arms and legs flailing - a family trait Phoebe has certainly carried out to the outside world with her.

Depending on how you measure it, we're either looking at the first or second week of August as the due date, although nature of course will decide that for us. Booked in for care at the small Camden hospital and birth at the larger Campbelltown hospital - hopefully in the Birth Centre again which we felt very comfortable with last time.

This is a great moment for us as a family, because just like many more people than you would be aware of, we have had two miscarriages before making it this far. Society doesn't have a place in polite conversation for such things, but all we really wanted was to talk to other people who had experienced the same and understand that it's all ok. I feel strongly that we should be mentioning it so that people know two babies didn't make it to the world, and such that others who experience the same thing can know they are not alone.

Current thinking is that we may not find out the gender this time around (last time we knew, but nobody else did), although such plans are subject to change at our next scan when we can find out!

Here's a belated Christmas post with some updates on our life.
Phoebe had a great time on Christmas day, exploring Santa's presents, and those from her parents, grandparents, and other great friends. Having our family together for the day was great - Phoebe really loves being around people she knows.
Favourite presents vary from day to day, but between boxes of Duplo, wooden train set, a play house, and piles of In the Night Garden books and a talking doll, there's plenty of entertainment.

The sale of our land has gone through - pics shortly - and as such we are now planning how to move on there and start building as soon as possible. Our current rental property being only five minutes away has turned out to be basically the only positive of it - the previous tenants' seven puppies appear to have left a legacy of an impressively robust flea population. These things are sent to challenge us.

Since we now own the land and are planning to get into temporary accommodation there quickly, we've decided not to do much unpacking here (hence the boxes in the picture). Exactly what form this accommodation will take is still up for discussion, but we may yet become trailer trash :)

Lots of recent pics up in the usual location.

So our little girl is two today. Wow.

Recent progress means that she is now largely sleeping through the night, perhaps with just a wake for a drink or nappy change. What a difference from the Phoebe of old!

She has also largely opted to toilet train herself in the last two weeks, such that for the last few days she only wears nappies at night time or when going out. Around the house she's happy to wander off and find the potty and look after herself!

Her speech is amazing, understanding so much that we say, stringing long sentences together, and comprehending more and more complex topics daily. A real little knowledge sponge, and so much more than either of us expected from a two year old.

Right now the cute little thing is in front of me playing with her new kitchen - birthday present from Liz and I. All the little girls we know seem to have managed to get these for their second birthdays but in defense of our originality we bought this one months ago!

We're celebrating with family today and friends on Saturday at the zoo, all of which I'm sure she'll love.

We love you so much little Phoebe, and look forward to watching you continue to grow over the years.

Uploading the latest batch of photos has given me a chance as doting father to view Phoebe's recent rate of progress, which I thought I'd share here for those who may be interested.

Phoebe recently graduated from her first swimming class! I was there camera in hand to catch the first time she decided to let go of Liz and swim only assisted by her bubble. The next lesson she was approached to move up to the next class - making Liz's time in the (at times poorly heated) pool through all worth it.

Silly smiles are now available on demand, which is an amusing way to spend your time with her. Recent simultaneous sickness for her and Liz has meant more time than we'd like watching TV, but at least - like right now in fact - it's the amusing for young and old Shaun the Sheep that is most requested. In fact yesterday she managed to find a disc, turn on and open the DVD player, replace the existing disc and then ask for us to do the rest. Given the number of buttons on the home entertainment gear I'm very impressed. She did get the disc upside-down, but hey, that's just details.

Sentences at the moment are two nouns and a verb (eg. "Dadda eat cheese. Phoebe eat cheese too!") which is pretty good, and improving every day. She can pick shapes quite well, knowing stars, circles, squares, hearts, etc., which she has learned through being the second person in the house eyeing off my iPhone. There's lots of great baby entertaining apps available for it which helps out amusing a curious and easily-bored toddler. She picked up plurals with no help from us, although it highlights just how broken English is when she says "one sheep, two sheeps", but she's wrong.
Favourite things at the moment include swings and slides (which she can spot a mile away), swimming, walking, and learning new words which are quickly parroted back at us, such as "pine cones", yesterday.

Every day is a new adventure with our little girl, and she's not even two yet. Mind-blowing.

I'm absolutely overjoyed to have my girls back home again! They returned safely Friday morning (no thanks to Malaysian Airlines' website with wrong times on it, nor the airline in general with indifferent service and poor treatment). The trip was a great success, with them visiting friends and family in many parts of England. Photos to follow once I've seen them first :)

It's been a rather busy weekend since then, starting with me getting to know Phoebe again. I'm so happy that she seems much more attached to me now, perhaps absence makes even the young hearts grow fonder. It certainly has done for me, for both of them.

While they were away, I went shopping for land to build a house on. Where we are living now is a truly fantastic house, in a great position, but I'm glad we tried out the place before buying because, in ways we almost can't articulate, it's not really "us". It's too ostentatious, not energy or water efficient enough, has a tennis court that disagrees with my knees, and which is also part of the problem of the backyard. One acre is big enough to grow food and/or graze animals, but not really when a good deal of that is taken up with a tennis court.

So, we've all but decided that we want to build. I originally was on the lookout for land right in town at Picton, but have branched out across Razorback, which has the benefit of being closer to work, friends and family, and also being cheaper for the same size block. Not to mention that there are much larger blocks available, such as our current favourite that we're researching after I took Liz there and she concurred - 12.5 bushland acres close to a great little Primary School. Phoebe had a great time chasing animals and spotting ducks on the dam, so I'm sure she'll love it there too.

It is however in a bushfire-prone area, but I have new-found confidence that we'll be able to design to cope (and plan to get out) in that worst-case scenario, after yesterday putting out a fire in a neighbour's backyard. They were burning off something or other, and the high winds carried some ashes across into their garden. Nobody home, nor anyone in the house between them and us, so I went in, called the fireies for backup and found that their garden hose just reached long enough to drench the area. If I hadn't have had the day off work, and Liz wasn't home either, then the outcome could have been much worse. Fireies arrived just in time to say "nice work mate, that'll do it" and left a calling card for the owner to get in touch with them.

Burning-off is crazy at the best of times, but with gale-force winds predicted, and so much dryness around, it's pure idiocy. Luckily Liz had the car packed and Phoebe ready to go for a worst-case scenario. Which we both hope to never see.

Unfortunately that car almost remains packed, with one of my grandmothers suffering a heart-attack up in Nambucca. I'm on the train to work now but might be off for a quick drive up the coast later today or this week, depending on how that progresses. She's stable but heavily impacted last I heard.

So a very eventful weekend, let's see what this week has in store.

Liz and Phoebe are currently in the UK with Liz's mum Margaret, traveling to a memorial service for Margaret's brother who was lost at sea 30 years ago. Having traveled so far they have of course elected to wrap the trip in a month or so re-exploration of the Kingdom.
They've just spent a week in London and have literally just collected a car, off to meet up with Margaret's other brother Peter. I know this because due to the magic of Skype, Dad and I have just had a great video call with Liz, Phoebe and Margaret who purchased a hash brown or two to use McDonalds wifi in Orpington! McDonalds is branching out, not content with being the world's most convenient and locatable chain of public toilets, they now offer free wifi under the same banner!

Anyway, from what I saw on the video, and the great photos Liz has been taking (thanks to Skype's screen sharing), Phoebe is bigger, cleverer and generally having a great time back with her spiritual ancestors in the UK (and some squirrels, ducks and pigeons too). Unfortunately there's still sleep issues and now without me to take over in the middle of the night it's harder on Liz, but they all appear to be having fun.

Of course, I miss them terribly, and while the video is absolutely fantastic it just brings it all to the fore again, and I wish that my girls were back by my side. Yes, I think even in some convoluted way I miss the broken sleep, just because she is my little bubba. She always seems a little confused but generally very happy to see me on the screen once Liz and I get the chat going, and this time with Grandpa too!

We're all feeling rather ill with cold-like symptoms (Liz is quick to point out they are not flu-like, and having dealt with suspected swine flue cases in quarrantine at her work I guess she'd know).
This has brought a return to the horrible nights of no Phoebe sleep, although worse because she screams for her mum who herself needs about a week of sleep.
We're mostly through this, having had Phoebe sleep through from 7:30 until 4am today, which is a huge improvement so we aren't complaining (much). Unfortunately we've missed a few occasions due to not wanting to go anywhere to spread our nasties around - sorry those we had to cancel with.
There are recent pictures added, with more coming soon (especially now that my new Macbook has a built in SD card slot, and I'm having a great deal of fun with the new 35mm 1.8 Nikkor lens ! ).

Naked DSL, for those who are not aware, is an impressive-sounding piece of technology that promises to free you of expensive phone bills.

In summary, since you can now run Voice-Over-IP (VOIP) phones which actually route your phone calls over the internet rather than the phone system, the next logical thing to look at is why have a "normal" phone at all? However, today you need a phone line to run your DSL connection over.

So, you pay say $30 to Telstra to give you a phone line, then $30-60 to your DSL provider for bandwidth, and then run free phone calls over the top of that.

See that $30 number at the start? It's paying for a phone line with the ability to make phone calls, which you now no longer need.

Enter Naked DSL. It's just a raw phone line no longer capable of making phone calls, it is naked in the sense that all it can do is host a DSL session. Cost savings abound.

This much information you can find out anywhere else online, such as most Naked DSL provider's websites. This far I had read before deciding to save the mother-in-law some money and set her up with a connection through iiNet - itself a nightmare but the root cause goes deeper than that.

The core problem with Naked DSL in Australia is that Telstra techs don't understand it.

Four times now she has been disconnected by Telstra (NOT iiNet) who, when probing around in either the local junction box or the exchange for free lines to connect other customers, find hers, and perform their standard check of whether a line is available - look for a dial tone.

But, from the brief explanation above, you will probably summise that Naked DSL does not have a dialtone!.

So, techs disconnect her, connect some other now-happy customer insted, and move on. Our poor heroine in this story is left with no DSL connection, a DSL provider who correctly insists that they have done nothing, and, for kicks, no phone to even call and complain.

Once for this to happen is excessive - especially when iiNet insisted that the end-user had to change the modem, check all the cabling, find the non-existent MFD on site, etc. etc. This took a month and a half.

The second time I was furious, but it only took them a week to get her reconnected. Each time now it takes a few days, but to get through to them takes a long mobile phone call or two, and then a report from iiNet to Telstra, which they act on lazily, in their own time, despite it being their techs and outdated practices which caused the ungodly mess in the first place.

Despite the cost savings, I simply can't recommend Naked DSL today. I told this to a few friends who signed up anyway. Last I spoke to one of them, the exact same thing had just happened to him...

Trying to break the blogging drought, bear with me!

The rest of our driving trip (photos here) went really well - a few weeks driving north along the coast, getting as far as Harvey Bay, then a couple of days quick drive home inland. All the while Phoebe just loved all the new places we stayed, things to see, pretty much everything really except the beach (she loves pools, but not sand). Car went well - a packed station wagon returned 6.0 l/100km for the trip!

Phoebe's sleeping has really improved to the point where I'd call it 'normal' from what I hear other parents' experiences are - most nights sleeping fine from 6 or 7 through to 6-ish in the morning. Some times she wakes for a drink, but settles back quickly. We still envy the parents who tell us "wow, well our baby slept through from two weeks!". So happy it was that easy for them, but, well, life had something different planned for us.

Now she's a competent climber, runner, and parrot. Her talking is also getting more understandable, with her recent favourite word being "More!". This is still cute since it's usually more food - and remember how long she wasn't interested in that for? What a change!

Easter was fun for her - both as the Easter Bunny at home, and then for her first trip to the Easter Show, accompanied by the grandparents. (Grandpa took these photos).

We've recently weaned Phoebe too - quite late by modern Western standards it seems.

I'm writing this after watching the sunrise over Coffs Harbour - we're taking my belated Christmas Holidays and seeing some of our beautiful country.

Thus far we've stopped in some obvious and not-so-obvious places with the rough goal of visiting friends in Brisbane and then turning around again. Our parents have taken the opportunity to borrow our house and live in the country for a little while - good for them!

We were a bit apprehensive about how Phoebe would cope with the travel - but we shouldn't have worried. She's fantastic in the car, loves exploring the rooms each night, and delights in finding familiar things like her bag of toys amongst the sea of new experiences.

As for sleep, well that's improved out of sight in the last two months, but is still a challenge at times - as evident from the fact that I've been up an hour now and Liz had a very broken night's sleep. Compared to where we were for over a year with her waking randomly every hour or so though, it's a world of difference. Most nights she now sleeps through from 7-9 through to about 6:30 with either no or only minor wakings due to a lost dummy or similar. We've seen how bad it can be, and this is heaven!

Traveling, we have no fixed plans each day - perhaps to Byron Bay tonight, stopping at a few interesting sounding little places we've heard of but never been to. On the way south from Brisbane (or as far as we get with cyclones approaching) we'll most likely take the inland road to see some of the great country towns there.

Pictures are all here.