Settled

It's quarter to 8 at night and both our gorgeous kids are asleep in their respective beds. Tom's cooking dinner (bless him!) and all is good with the world from where I'm sitting. We've had a great week and it feels like things are settling down with adjusting to baby Barney becoming part of our family.

Highlights from this week - On Tom's last day of paternity leave we went to Featherdale Wildlife Park. This place is fantastic both for tourists visiting Oz and for kids. It's small enough to only take a couple of hours to stroll around but there's loads of wildlife to entertain and it's really hands-on. Beth got to pat lots of koalas and wallabies and get up close to echidnas, crocs, dingoes, emus, tassie devils, turtles, snakes, lizards, pelicans, all kinds of birds, farm animals and more. She loved it. Tom's got some great photos on his flickr website of us there. It was a great way to end our time together as a family before Tom had to return to work the next day.

Friday - the early childhood nurse, Deborah, visited Beth, Barney and me at home to see how we're all going. Barney is already 200gms heavier than his original birth weight of 3.6kgs. This was really good to know since Beth took a while to regain her birthweight as a bub and it caused us needless anxiety at the time. I'm glad Barney's getting what he needs from my breastmilk and hope that continues. All of Barney's other checks were fine and Deborah's comments were that he's thriving. I like that word for describing our son. I then took Beth and Barney to playgroup to show him off to my friends from mother's group. Everyone thought he was adorable and he slept beautifully through our time there whilst Beth raced around with her mates. Friday avo, Mum brought Beth's cousins Alex and Annabel around to visit. Beth just adores Alex (he's 8) and follows him around like a puppy. Alex is great with Beth. They found some musical instruments and formed a very noisy band procession that went all around the house which amazingly Barney slept through. Annabel made Mum and I food in Beth's toy microwave. Then I got Barney up so that Alex and Annabel could see him before they left. I think Beth is much more fun for them right now but they'll enjoy Barney more as he wakes up a bit more.

Saturday - Spent the morning at my folks place, Tanglewood, catching up with Dad who'd just arrived home from business overseas. It was a gorgeous, sunny day and it was so relaxing to hang out on their verandah out the front looking out to the garden. Beth had a bit of a kick around with the soccer ball with Dad, Alex and Annabel. Barney slept - are you spotting a pattern here? My best friend Dani dropped around with her fiancee Todd Sat avo. Then we had a family "quiet time" that Beth managed to sustain for over 2 hours! So we felt quite rested after that and ready for the evening of movies and night feeds. Tom and I watched Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey - still funny after all these years. I went to bed at 10pm but came down to join Tom at 11.30pm for Barney's feed and to watch Arsenal V Tottenham on the telly. Arsenal won the game 3-1 and Tom was ecstatic! It's incredible how much his mood depends on the victories and defeats of his team. So I'm really glad they won - the goals were brilliant. But I also feel sorry for our mate Nick who's a Tottenham supporter and was at the game in England.

Sunday - We had lunch with our friends Mark and Tanya and their son Ollie at a family friendly pub that has a kids playground and clowns on sundays. Beth played with some other kids apart from when she ate hot chips for lunch. She also had her face painted by the clowns and was very excited about this. Barney slept the whole time. So we seem to have worked out being out and about fairly well. I'm still not keen to have too many feeds when we're out; mainly because I'm not great at breastfeeding discreetly yet and it's harder to do this when the babies are very little. Since Barney feeds about every four hours it's been pretty easy to plan feeds around when we're out.

So that's our life at the mo. Tom's back at work tomorrow and Beth's in daycare so it's just me and Barney at home. I think we'll head out for a bit but I'm also thinking our back garden and particularly our hammock will play a major role in my day tomorrow. Life is good!