Thursday, August 28, 2008

Lewisham hospital maternity - second time around

Well, I think things have improved since February 2007. Or perhaps I was just more prepared this time? Or perhaps a bit of both.

Again no gripes at all with the delivery side of things. And still very grateful to the midwife and student midwife who picked up that Claudia was breech, thus saving me a lot of pain and hassle. The elective c-section went really well and recovery seems much better than from an emergency section.

What I would say is don't go for an elective section on a Friday. None of the things that run during the week happen on the weekend, so the on site breastfeeding support isn't there when you need it, which could really be an issue when the first few days matter so much to success. Really unimpressed with the paediatrician wanting to top her up with formula on day 3. And thanks to the midwives who all supported me in not doing that.

I don't think 2 nights/3 days is long enough to be in after a section and I'm glad I stayed the extra night to sort out feeding etc. The midwives can still be a bit brusque but I handled it better this time I think. It would be nice to have a bit more empathy on night 1 when you can't get out of bed and baby is crying, rather than saying, leave her crying in the cot! Apart from that no real complaints all things considered.

Monday, August 11, 2008

Mountsfield Park

musical

Visited the new wooden play area at Mountsfield Park yesterday (at least I think it is what's new!). It's ace. J really enjoyed toddling around and there are plenty of places for 38 weeks pregnant ladies to perch and watch (unlike Forster park where there is one bench too far away from the equipment to be any use). This is a pic of him playing the xylophone with Daddy - they both loved it! J also loved the slide, though he preferred it when he was being helped down by Daddy rather than just let go (ahem!)

All we need there now is a cafe and a toilet and we will be sorted. Is it in this area where the cafe is planned for or has it been built in another part of the park and we just didn't find it (very possible)?

Sunday, August 03, 2008

A bit of fun

Read this on Blog my Wiki. It looked interesting, so I thought I'd have a go.

“Someone” [she doesn’t say who] reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. It’s not the Big Read though — they don’t publish books, and they’ve only featured these books so far. In any event . . .

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you started but did not finish.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 or less and force books upon them.

1. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
2. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
3. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
4. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
5. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
6. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
7. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
8. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
9. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
10. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
11. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
12. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
13. His Dark Materials (trilogy) - Philip Pullman
14. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
15. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
16. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
18. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
19. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
20. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
21. Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
22. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
23. Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
24. Animal Farm - George Orwell
25. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
26. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
27. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
28. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
29. Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
30. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
31. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
32. Complete Works of Shakespeare
33. Ulysses - James Joyce
34. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
35. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
36. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
37. The Bible
38. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
39. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
40. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
41. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
42. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
45. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
46. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
47. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
48. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
49. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
50. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
51. Little Women - Louisa M. Alcott
52. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
53. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
54. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
55. Middlemarch - George Eliot
56. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
57. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
58. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
59. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
60. Emma - Jane Austen
61. Persuasion - Jane Austen
62. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
63. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
64. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
65. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
66. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
67. Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery
68. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
69. Atonement - Ian McEwan
70. Dune - Frank Herbert
71. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
72. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
73. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
74. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
75. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
76. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
77. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
78. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
79. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
80. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
81. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
82. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
83. Dracula - Bram Stoker
84. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
85. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
86. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
87. Germinal - Emile Zola
88. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
89. Possession - A.S. Byatt
90. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
91. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
92. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
93. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
94. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
95. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
96. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
97. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
98. Watership Down – Richard Adams
99. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
100. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

So- how did I do? I have read 43 out of 100. Not too bad really. Of those I loved 10, which seems quite a high proportion, so maybe I am too generous. I've started but not finished 6 of them. Some of those I have no intention of ever finishing - every book of the Bible? Unlikely. The Complete Works of Shakespeare - nope. And the Hobbit, forget it. The others I might try to battle through....

There's a few on there I own but haven't read yet too, plus some I'd like to get. I need to get my books out of boxes!!