Sofia update - 3.43kg and immunised

Bouncy cradle 2, originally uploaded by Racmol.

According to the growth charts in Sofia's red health record book, our daughter is smaller than 96% of eight-week-old babies. She's also smaller than her brand new friend Millie (Angeline's baby) who weighed 9.5lbs at birth on Tuesday.

However, Sofia's doctor says she's healthy in all other respects, even though he wants her to come back and be weighed again in three weeks time.

You can see why little kids don't like going to the doctor. First you have all your clothes taken off so you can be weighed by the weighing person, then you get dressed again only for the doctor to take off your clothes again and poke you all over, then you get dressed AGAIN and get sent through to the nurse, who takes your trousers off and jabs you with a needle in each thigh...

In other news, we're hoping to exchange contracts on the flat in Queens Park on Tuesday but this all depends on whether I can convince the bank to fax the mortgage offer to our solicitor tomorrow.

The vendors of the house our vendors are buying suddenly announced on Friday that unless we all exchanged contracts on Tuesday, they would be putting their house back on the market. So I had to ring the bank and see why our mortgage offer hadn't arrived yet and it turned out they hadn't even printed it out yet, dsespite saying the previous Tuesday that it had 'gone to offer and would be in the post'. So it's looking like it could be a stressful Monday and Tuesday on the phone at this end.

Here's hoping it all goes through OK, or Sofia and I will be pounding the streets, trying to find a new place to rent before we have to move out of this one. Which should be just about doable in the three weeks available.

We're all a bit stressed - can you tell?

Growing things

Herbs in a tub, originally uploaded by Racmol.

Yesterday I planted out the first of my new herbs for the herb garden and this season's tomatoes (Italian plum tomatoes, this year).

The new tubs and herbs are a present from Sue, who went with me to Homebase on Wednesday to get all the tubs, compost etc. In the end we decided to leave Sofia watching the cricket with Harold and we just took the pushchair without the baby as we thought it would be useful for carrying everything home in.

Well, it was VERY useful but we did get some hard stares from passersby. I'm sure some of them thought we had a baby under the 60L bag of compost!

I'm also going to grow some purple basil and oregano from seed, and plant a tub of mixed salad leaves.

And the great thing is - this year noone will be speculating about whether all these tomatoes mean that my reproductive instincts are kicking in. I think we can say they have well and truly kicked now...

Out and about in southeast England

Family snapshot - Cambridge, originally uploaded by Racmol.

We had lovely weather over Easter and took the opportunity to introduce Sofia to Whitstable, Rochester, Cambridge and Colchester. Nanny and Lolo also went to Stratford on Avon while we had a day off at home.

Here is our first family portrait, taken in the gardens of Clare College, Cambridge.

Sunday morning bath

Bathtime 2, originally uploaded by Racmol.