New baby
So the big news this week is that Lisa is pregnant again… Of course we’ve known for a while, but Thursday was our first scan.

Scans haven’t been a particularly good experience for us up to now – with our first (before George) revealing that there was no baby, and our second (for George) giving us danger signs and making us believe George had a potentially very damaging genetic disorder…. which turned out later to be a false alarm.

Anyway, this one was better, revealing that everything was fine, and giving us our first pictures of the new baby…. The doctors measured its head, and it’s neck, and took lots of blood tests so they could give us a series of statistics involving how likely it was that our baby had downs, how likely it was to have chromosome deletions and how likely it was to fail geography at GCSE level….

To discover these things, we had to sit in a hopelessly overcrowded waiting room for four hours in front of a TV showing David Dickinson and a programme about autistic children while a succession of Nurses called our names using accents which would have been unintelligible even if they hadn’t been spoken in a low, embarrassed murmur…

Mary
My friend Mary stayed for a few days as part of a whirlwind trip from China, and we had a nice afternoon out on Wednesday. We then learnt some strange and deeply disturbing things about the London flat that she’s renting out and I’m looking after for her… this one will run and run, but I won’t say anything about it for now….

The wall
The saga of our wall being knocked down continues to roll on… George, our neighbor is knocking on our door every other day wanting to know if we’ve contacted the insurance – Which of course we haven’t because we haven’t got anything to tell them until the quotes for the repairs come in. And that’s at the mercy of the builders.

I’m pretty sure that trying to claim through George’s insurance is going to turn into a long running and pointless waste of time…. It’s never in an insurance company’s interest to pay up and while they delay, works are stopped, and it costs me time, money and energy….



All of which, I realise comes out sounding quite downbeat and weary considering I’m announcing our new pregnancy – but I’m a little tired right now….