an update
Friday, May 9th, 2008About time we did an update it seems. You may have noticed we finally (kind of) wrote up our Italy trip from last November. You might have also seen that we have been working on our website. So what else have we been up to? Not much and quite a bit all at the same time.
While we were home in Australia last September, we found out that I was about 5 weeks pregnant (most people who read this should know that already, but since we haven’t actually written it anywhere on the site yet, it seems the logical place to start our recap). We headed back to London and promptly packed up and moved house, a whole 2km away and even on the same bus route, but it has more space and is better suited to our needs.
In November, we went on the trip around Italy that we’d been eyeing for awhile, figuring that it wouldn’t be an option once a baby was thrown into the mix. On his first morning back at work after 2 weeks off, Graeme found out that his development team were all being made redundant. There was a period of a couple weeks when we didn’t know how long he’d have a job, but they decided to keep him and one other guy on for a few extra months, which gave us time to apply for new permission to be in the country (since we were here on a work permit tied to that company). Luckily, being a big international company, they offered him much more than the statutory payout (which would’ve only been about £900) so we were able to make the decision for me to not return to work, which with my dragged out ‘morning’ sickness and the unpredictability of being in a room of unknown London teenagers, reduced a lot of stress.
We had our first Christmas in London. The weather was horrible, but the day turned out pretty good. We had a very long lunch with a group of other Australians who came together because a bunch of them worked together at Graeme’s first programming job and are now living in London. We also got to spend some more time with one of the Aussie couples we had met on the Italy tour as they were doing a bigger trip around Europe. We spent New Years at home, mainly because I wasn’t up to doing anything.
In January we went to Telford. Yeah, I’d never heard of it either. But Graeme got sent out there to do some on-site client work and I went with him. While he hung out in an office, I checked out the area, including seeing some of the flooding that had recently hit and the oldest iron bridge in the world. Also in January, my morning sickness finally disappeared and we got to see Squishy actually looking like a baby on an ultrasound (as opposed to the strange-looking blob that it was at 11 weeks). We call the baby Squishy because we decided not to find out the sex and ‘it’ seems very informal - it’s kind of a reference to Finding Nemo when Dory names a baby jellyfish, but also a somewhat natural progression from Blobby, which was the first nickname Graeme gave the baby.
In February, we went to Anfield and saw our second live Liverpool match, which this time they actually won and scored goals at the end we were sitting. Since then, we haven’t really left the bounds of London, as I got bigger and slower, Graeme finished up at work and started the job hunt and we waited for the nice weather to hit (which it seems to have finally done this week). We’ve spent some time in our local park, which just happens to be Gunnersbury Park (a fairly well-known, very big green space), including playing in the snow on Easter Sunday. We finally got around to seeing the dinosaurs in the Natural History Museum, even though it took a second trip to see them because there was a 45 minute wait the first time we went. We’ve also become ‘Friends’ of Kew Gardens, some very old but cool botanical gardens, which means if you come visit us we can take you for the day and you won’t even have to pay entry.
We’re now on the final few weeks before the baby is born (due June 2), getting everything sorted and wishing it would hurry up and be over with. Graeme starts his new job on Monday.