Well that was left as a bit of a cliffhanger wasn’t it? Five days until due date and then no word for nine weeks… First of all you can rest assured that I’m not some kind of medical miracle and I haven’t gone nine weeks overdue. I was grumpy enough at five days over and would more than likely have killed someone by now if I was still full of baby.

To cut a long story short and avoid going into too much detail (when you’re pregnant, the simple question “how are you?” elicits a Pavlovian response to hand over a pot of wee and start discussing your, as the daytime telly adverts put it, ‘intimate area’), I had a little ‘encouragement’ from the midwife on Friday morning and labour started that afternoon. I did however, remain in denial about this (convinced that my contractions were Braxton Hicks) until the evening when Ginge pretty much gave me an ultimatum to ring the midwives or else. Eventually I did ring the midwives and (after a warm bath, some paracetamol and a TENS machine) was admitted an hour later.

The birth itself didn’t exactly go according to plan, but I assume that very few people’s plans end up with a set of forceps being wielded by a gentleman that your mum would later refer to as “Doctor Big Hands”… Personally I was well away on the gas and air, so it all flew by for me and it was poor Ginge and my mum who suffered (their hands are still recovering from the Incredible Hulk-like squeezes I gave them).

So from that initial phone call at 7.30pm on Friday, via a birthing pool, a blue-lit ambulance up the M6 (at the slightest hint of risk they transfer from the midwife-led unit to the delivery suite at another hospital), a midwife who broke half the the room, Dr Big Hands, another more fabulous less cack-handed midwife and her student, and Ginge cutting the cord, at 8.34 on Saturday 12th October we became very proud parents to a 6lb 11oz baby boy.

Hal (or as he will be referred to on here, Mini Ginge) is a lovely little chap who is very laid back as long as the milky buffet isn’t too far away. However, although he is only tiny, he completely rules the roost (and quite rightly so).

One of the reasons for my lack of posts is that I was planning to write about his arrival and then at week six, document my triumphant return to running. Unfortunately at week 6 I was being advised by both my GP and my physio that high-impact exercise shouldn’t feature in my life for at least 3-6 months. I shall explain more about this when I have decided how much information is too much information…