Grandma comes to town!

Jack is three weeks and one day old. Feels like he's been here for much longer.

Grandma Jackie arrived on Wednesday. After a brief but frustrating delay getting the luggage off the tarmac and a few tears in front of immigration:

Immi: What are you going to be doing here for 17 days?
Jackie: Meeting my grandson for the first time.
Immi: Oh how lovely!
Jackie: Yes...and I haven't seen my daughter since..(starting to lose it)..sob..sob..Christmas...

In view of the Qantas incident which happened two days later on the same plane and flight it could have been much worse. For those of you who don't know, an explosion tore a hole in the luggage hold of the plane. The pilot was forced to drop the plane by 20,000 feet as not all the gas masks were working and managed to land the plane in Manilla. If they had been further from land they would probably have crashed. Everyone survived but the luggage is being held as part of the investigation.

Mum brought my noooo Bugaboo stroller from England in a suitcase. Two days later and she could have ended up in Manilla with my new Bugaboo stroller being held as evidence. Either that or it might have ended up in a Philippino village (if you don't know what a Bugaboo is - like, where have you been??!).

Anyway she made it and is looking after us all. Apparently whatever you eat whilst breast-feeding, an hour later the baby gets a taste of that food. Which is how babies develop their palate. Jack is developing a very English palate having had a roast lamb milkshake tonight and an English fry-up milkshake this morning.

We are starting to get the hang of things here. For now, Jack's main hobbies remain mostly limited to sleeping and eating. He does also quite enjoy staring at faces and crying in his new stroller.

It is also very tiring. If you breastfeed and a feed takes up to an hour, and you feed 8 times a day, that's a full time job already! Any sleep you have is broken into 2-4 hour chunks. Combine that with nappy changes, picking out cute outfits, mopping up sick and getting him off to sleep. In between are brief windows for keeping on top of a mountain of dirty washing, taking a shower, eating and of course checking facebook and writing a blog. Well it doesn't leave much 'me' time.

Luckily he is just cute enough to ensure his ongoing participation in our family. It is amazing that a 3 week old can have such high entertainment value due to a incredibly wide range of facial expressions, strange sounds and just being generally adorable.

Thanks to our new babysitter Alexis and I went for our first post-birth dinner date yesterday. It was great! It didn't feel at all weird to leave the baby - quite the opposite. But I guess there's a big difference when you leave your baby with family. We hired an industrial breast pump so we could express a feed for him and escape for longer. There's nothing like having a baby attached to one nipple and pump to the other to make you feel more like a human cow. We came home to find Jack asleep on Grandma. Apparently she had spent most of the night unsuccessfully trying to get him to sleep in his bassinet. He would sleep for about ten minutes then wake up and realise he had yet again been palmed off and start crying. In the end she gave up and let him snuggle on her chest.

Too tired to write more.

More Jack piccys on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=3565656&l=0bdd9&id=855875421