Thank God for the NHS and some wonderful staff at Frankie and Bennys

Last weekend was a nightmare weekend. We went away down to Banbury on Saturday morning after James' Christmas party with all the mums and babies that we go to our groups with. Nice easy drive down, lovely new Holiday Inn Express, met up with Mike's father and sister and had dinner at Frankie and Benny's (James shrieking because of the Christmas parties being in and the poppers etc going off).

Went to bed, he didn't sleep much and woke up at 4.30am but did go back to sleep but he was generally being a bit of a monkey all morning. After we'd had breakfast I was sat on the floor in the restaurant at the Holiday Inn putting his coat on and he was pulling and wanting to be running around. He broke away from my hold and turned to the right, tripped up over his new shoes (which were on his feet but they're a little bit bigger than the sandals he's had before) and fell to his knees, smashing his head on a solid wooden chair which was underneath the table next to us.

He got a huge lump and an instant bruise with a lovely purple line right across it where he'd hit the edge of the chair but after five minutes of crying he was okay and running around as normal so we went off on our merry way and visited the local wildlife park and then went to Upton House before saying goodbye to Mike's family.
We went to visit our best friends who live in Banbury and James had his tea there and then Mike and I headed off back to the Holiday Inn to get James ready for bed and to pop to Frankie and Benny's for our tea. We decided to get steak as it was our first proper meal out for months and James was sleeping and dozing off in his chair.

The food had just arrived when he sat up, coughed once and then projectile vomited everywhere. Nightmare! The staff were brilliant, took our meals back and put them on the hot plate and Mike went to grab clean clothes from the hotel while I cleaned James up and took the Buggy Snuggle off the pushchair etc. At this point wasn't really thinking much of him being sick as he'd been okay during the day. Got him changed, settled back into the buggy, food was due to be brought back and he did it again.

Only this time, he went white, lost all colour in his lips and went unconscious and couldn't be roused so I phoned for an ambulance and they were amazing, they arrived in less than five minutes. The staff at F&B were amazing too, they'd boxed up our dinner when James had been sick the second time (though we never got to eat it!) and the general manager then came over when he went unconscious and was checking him for food/choking etc and putting him in the recovery position just as the ambulance arrived. The ambulance lady just took one look at him, grabbed him and legged it for the door with Mike following and me just stood there in shock.

Anyways, long story short, I went in the ambulance with James who'd started to come round in the ambulance, they had him hooked up on a heart monitor and he was getting oxygen. We got to A&E and they took James straight into the Resus Room and weighed him and shoved all sorts of electrodes and gadgets on him and where he projectile vomited for the third time all over me!

They weren't happy with his heart rate and something else (can't remember now) and so he was put into a Recovery Room and hooked up to an ECG machine and some other machine monitoring his oxygen levels, heart rate etc and they said they were going to call out the radiologists for a CT Scan and get the anesthetist out because of him being so tiny they didn't think he'd stay still in the scanner. He threw up again and was really pale and lethargic and had this huge massive bump/bruise on his forehead and all these doctors kept coming in and looking at him and the machine's alarms kept going off.

We went for the CT Scan and I was able to stay in the room with him covered in huge radiation shield clothing so God knows what I looked like, as he was really drowsy and so they taped him down on the machine and fortunately he stayed still for it all.
Then we played the waiting game while all the various paediatricians were called out and they waited for the CT Scan results.
Fortunately it came back normal and all his other neurological tests were clear so they decided to put him under observation overnight and they checked him every two hours. Because he was still being sick, they weren't sure if he had a bug or if it was pressure on the brain/bleeding on the brain so we just had to wait and see.

Thank God, they think he had concussion which caused the unconsciousness and the first couple of lots of vomiting, then they think he possibly had a totally unrelated bug which kept him sick for the next 12 hours or that he was being sick from the stress of the bump/hospital trauma. We finally got released at 8pm yesterday and stayed another night at the Holiday Inn and then got back home tonight.

Woolly loveliness

I've been so lucky this last month to have received some amazing wool creations from various places and I've been busy trying not to buy too much because the next Buy British Month is coming up in November.
Last BBM I got some amazing things and I've just now, finally, got my last custom slot from then sorted. Mich at Woolly Wumpkins is making me some longies for James in her gorgeous Nimbus colourway.
That, along with the longies we got yesterday from Ali at Pixie Knits, who kindly knitted up the Elvira Babylonglegs Merino DK I'd bought, mean we're up to date on all things woolly with the exception of two soakers from Lisa at The Nappy Garden.

And, speaking of the Nappy Garden, Lisa is one serious cloth temptress. Just this month alone I have on the way, via TNG, a Holdens Landing LWI dip dye toddler bedbug and I still don't know whether it's going to be all autumnal colours or all icy winter ones!
Also from Lisa and on their way shortly, are two Dunk n Fluff large nappies in some fabulous hard to find fishy prints which will be brilliantly gender neutral in the event of James ever getting a brother or sister.

While we're on the subject of babies, one of my oldest friends has just given birth to her first child, a little boy, who went nameless for almost a week. He has now been given an amazing name and it's a wonderful tribute to her late father, who was killed when we were only five years old while working as a photographer for the newspaper I later went on to work for.
So, I'd like to say a huge congratulations to Amy and Alan on the arrival of Wilfred John Samuel, welcome to the world little one.

You see, it happened again

It's now October. I was sure I looked at my blog and wrote something in September but apparently not. That means it's effectively two months since the last time I wrote, or more accurately, rambled away with a big pile of nothingness on my blog.

So, what Japes with James have we been up to in the last two months. Well, I'm ashamed to say, not a lot. Mike and I went to a fabulous wedding in September but James was invited to that as it was his godfather to be getting married and he behaved impecably throughout both the service and the reception right up until the moment he zonked out asleep in his infant carrier around 8.30pm.

We've been really lucky that he's quite small for his age as he's literally only just growing out of the infant carrier that came with our travel system. It means we're now heading to Paul Stride at York to get him a rear facing Stage 1 car seat as they're so much safer.

A bit of a ramble

Sometimes I remember I have a blog and I pop along and write something. It's not always important or interesting but it helps me keep up with the idea that one day I might go back to work as a journalist and it generally helps if you can write properly.

I say this because of late it seems my conversation consists of phrases like
"James do you need a clean nappy?"
"Oh look at the Wiggles James?"
"Where have you thrown your dummy now James?" and
"Stop being a whiny child I'm only sat two feet away from you".

Now, while they are proper sentences, they're hardly going to win the Pulitzer Prize. Although I'd have to work for an American newspaper to win that anyway and that's so not going to happen. But, I digress.

James has a number of nicknames and, of course, as parents always do, you tend to refer to things by their "child friendly" name, so the cars become the papaps, the dog is a doggie or a wuff wuff, milk becomes milky and the cellular blanket is now a blankee. So everyone once in a while it's nice to remember I'm an adult to and that I can talk about things which have nothing to do with poo or sleeping or food intake or weight gain.

We have a book club that the mums who met at a number of baby groups in town get together at to be "adults". This month's book was Kurt Vonegot's Slaughterhouse 5. I have to say, it's one of the oddest books I've read but I did enjoy it in a strange sort of way. I couldn't quite get my head around what it was supposed to be, history, anti-war, fiction, factual, a good read or just plain old confusing.

Next month's book is Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. I want to burst into song ala David Essex in War of the Worlds whenever I hear this book title. You know, the whole Jeff Wayne concept album with narration by Richard Burton. Anyway, I'll shut up now.

Yet another month goes by

I really need to frame myself and remember to log into my blog more often. Then again, I have a good excuse this time, I've been on my holidays.

We went down to Green End, the beautiful house at the bottom of the New Forest on the coast opposite The Needles off the Isle of Wight, which has been in Mike's family for three generations. It's such a lovely house, a friendly house, if that makes any sense. Whenever we arrive I always think it looks happy to see us.
The house itself is a double roofed, sash windowed cottage probably built around the end of the 1700s and probably by one of the salt pan owners. It's whitewashed with climbing roses all over it and black painted windows and has about a half acre of garden laid out with informal wildflower beds and rosemary hedges.

If I could pick it up and move it up here I would love to live in permanently. Unfortunately the little village that it's located in is one of those filled with retired sailing people and hasn't much facilities, although there's a great pub called The Gun which does amazing Lymington River crab salads, and there's a bigger village just down the road which has shops and banks and restaurants.

So, we went down for Mike's family's annual do, which has been moving later and later in the year, it used to be in June, now it's July and we're expecting it to move to August next year. This year there was a very small contingent of family but we still had a lovely time. We then stayed for another week and the following weekend, had a load of our gaming mates down for a few days of beer and good food.

Where does the time go?

So it's nearly a month since my last post. Where does the time go? We've had a mixed and varied last few weeks but it culminated with the crappy crap crap news that my beloved Grandma had died yesterday morning.

My dad's mum, I used to spend my Saturdays every week with my Grandma and Granddad, I used to stay when my Granddad went off on his fishing trips many years ago, I used to ride in their yellow 3-wheeler when I was little.
My Grandma wasn't a hugely demonstrative lady but I knew she loved me and was proud of me. She used to write poetry, I think if she'd been born in a different age, she would have been a great writer. Maybe it's because of her that I became a journalist. She kept a scrapbook with all my early stories in it and she was very proud of me.

I will miss her very much.

I've found another forum to spam

I like forums. They provide a means for like minded (and sometimes complete opposites) people to get together and spout off. I like forums that provide a chance for me to get my teeth into a topic and to really say what I mean rather than having to tone it down on some commercial sites.

So, it was with great delight I followed a link from Katie's blog to the What's Your Opinion On? forum, which had been set up after a wee flounce from a commercially sponsored site that shall remain nameless but whose initials are BC.

I love this place. Here we can have massive disagreements on all sorts of subjects but without anyone falling out or getting into a snit. There's a great bunch of people on there, we don't all agree, but so far we all seem to respect everyone else's opinions and it's great!

You can find the forum here