One of Me, Three of You

Despite being my eldest, this is the birth story it has taken me the longest to write. I have finally got round to doing it, partly because I wrote it on my blog plan and partly because it has been on my mind again as I start to think about birth number four. It's fair to say W's birth was not the birth I had hoped for and I still put a lot of that down to my lack of confidence in my ability to have a baby. The early stage of labour was very long - a weekend of twinges which may or may not have been early contractions and generally feeling a bit uncertain about what was going on. We had a trip to hospital on Sunday night because I thought my waters might have broken (not the gush I experienced with my second son, just a slow trickle) but nobody was really sure. We went back again on Monday night as my contractions were much closer together. We stayed in for a couple of hours as they worried about whether or not I had pre-eclampsia but were cleared of that and told to com...

This month has gone from one extreme to the other with the tuff tray - for our first one in February we had bowls of snow and the last one was outside because the weather was so balmy. We did miss a Tuesday in February as we had birthday cards to make but we're doing pretty well with sticking to #tufftraytuesday. Snow! As much as I love the idea of snow, the logistics of getting three boys kitted up to go outside and stay out for longer than the time we spent getting ready mean there are some definite benefits to bringing the snow inside! We had pink rice for our tuff tray in the week of Valentine's Day, inspired by a friend who was staying with us. We don't have many heart shaped things in the house but I did manage to find some red and pink accessories to go with the rice. A bonus tuff tray one weekend, mainly for smallest boy. He has been standing up at the sink and trying to feed things through the holes in the container that holds the cutlery so we h...