I fell asleep while burping Dylan last night...or rather this morning. I remember being woken up for his feed, feeding him, burping him in the middle of his bottle, and being woken up again by his cries a couple of hours later. He was still on my shoulder. I suppose you could say that the lack of sleep is finally catching up with me.

Dylan is an exceptionally good baby. But then they all are at this age. He just sleeps and eats. The sleeping is great. The eating every 2 hours isnt so great. Especially when he is a grazer/snacker who takes aaaaaages to finish 2 ounces. As Doug says, it is like watching grass grow. So it takes him an hour to ninety minutes to finish his meal and settle down..then an hour later he is up again for his feed. I find breastfeeding too painful (just as it was with Sasha) so while I try my best to at least put him to the boob a couple of times a day, I tend to pump the milk out and feed him with the bottle. This is also less time consuming as he tends to take breaks at the boob and it drives me crazy when he takes thirty to forty minutes per boob, taking into account snoozes. So in between feeds, I pump, play with Sasha, cook, tidy up, etc. Of course some of this overlaps with feeds so I find myself telling Sasha "Mummy will (whatever) after Mummy feeds Dylan OK" at least 5 times a day.I am pretty sure even Sasha is wondering why this little thing is just continuously eating. But all is good.

When you have a new baby, the first thing people want to know is "How was it?". It being the labour. So for the record, I shall just say that the second time round was worse for me. Not traumatic, but pretty much reaffirms my decision to stop procreating. I put this down to the docs expecting it to take less time than my first labour, which was 14 hours. So they didn't provide sufficient medication during the epidural. I am sure if my cervix had cooperated and allowed me to push after 7 hours of labour, all would have been well. But it didn't, and after 8 hours, the medication wore off and by then I was fully dilated and absolutely screaming for the epidural top up. I remember Doug asking me a few times if I was OK...and I remember telling him that I am about to push a freaking bowling ball out my vagina so I was NOT OK. He also kept saying "How exciting...we are about to have a baby" to which I responded I KNOW ALREADY. Then he cracked some jokes...and all I could think through the haze of pain was "I am pretty sure Jerry Seinfeld must have been bitch slapped by his wife during her labour." I remember the anaesthesiologist coming into the room, doing something, and asking if I still felt pain. I grunted yes, to which she said "OK, now we are putting in the real medication." At that point I do recall thinking "What the fuck, if she just gave me a placebo I am going to sue her bloody ass". The drugs finally worked. I was allowed to sleep until noon, then the docs informed me that I had to push as the baby was coming, but if I couldn't do it then I would have to go under the scalpel. At that point I was so drugged up that I could not feel anything down there but I was not about to give up so I just said I could push. And 15 minutes later, a baby popped out. To be perfectly honest, I was so wrapped up in the pain management that I had totally forgotten that the end result was a baby..I remember looking at Dylan on the bed and thinking..."Ah yes, so that's why we are here." And 24 hours later, we were home.

We spent yesterday afternoon getting an emergency passport for Dylan. We are leaving for Amsterdam and Milan in 3 weeks. My main worry was that we would not be able to get a passport because we have not been issued his birth certificate, and we really don't have any form of ID for him. Luckily for us it was less painful than we thought and all that we needed to get from the City Clerk was a travel letter which details his registration of birth, which I did online a week ago. So, with that we are able to get a 6 month passport which will be renewed once he gets his birth certificate. What a relief because the tickets have been bought and our meetings scheduled. We even booked a tour to see the Last Supper in Milan on the day we arrive. Apparently, since the Da Vincci Code, this is an extremely popular site. Great marketing at no cost to the Vatican.