www.torkington.org

After 7 unsuccessful orders and at least 30 phone calls, Telstra have finally enabled our cable internet so we’re finally back online.

I’ll set up Sara’s Skype etc tonight.

We’ve got lots of photos to upload over the next few days, but in the meantime here’s a new video clip of Charlotte, who has just started on solid food this week.

Edit: Music on the video clip is by The Lancashire Hotpots.

We’ve still got a bit of unpacking to do, but we’re now settled in our new house.

After being here for almost two years and looking at literally hundreds of properties, we finally found a house that we wanted. It’s in a place called “The Basin”, which is a quiet, leafy suburb at the foot of Mount Dandenong in eastern Melbourne. It’s a lovely spot, right on the edge of the Dandenong Ranges National Park yet only a 15 minute drive to work and a 10 minute walk to the shops (and pub).

The house itself is quite quirky. It’s a typical 1970s Aussie brick house, but the previous owner — another British ex-pat — has extended it significantly and rendered the outside to look like a Tuscan villa. It currently has five bedrooms, two of which are in a self-contained apartment above the double garage which we intend to turn into guest accommodation. It has a workshop under the house, a home brewery and a large garden with a heated swimming pool.

It has “hydronic” heating, i.e. a boiler and radiators, which is very rare in Australia but suits us perfectly — our previous house had feeble hot-air heating and poor insulation, so it’s really nice to be warm and cosy on these crisp winter mornings.

There’s a lot of work to do though. Although it’s perfectly liveable, it needs some modernisation — out with the avocado and purple bathrooms, open up the kitchen and redecorate throughout, including getting rid of the Artex plaster that is on virtually every wall — but there’s no hurry, we can do it at our own pace.

The only urgent bit of DIY we have to do is replacing the back garden fence, as Victorian law states that swimming pools must be surrounded by a fence that can’t be climbed by children. We have 30 days from moving in to rectify the situation otherwise the council can force us to drain the pool and, with water restrictions still in force, we’d probably have to pay to have it refilled by tanker. So over the past couple of weekends me and Andy have ripped down the old trellis-clad range-style fence and started to build a new child-proof one. It’s bloody hard work but it’ll all be worth it in summer when we can just chill by the pool.

I’ve added a new photo gallery showing pictures of the house. We’ll add more pictures to it once our cable internet is connected, hopefully by the end of the week if Telstra don’t screw up the order for a fifth time.

Three weeks ago we moved into our new house. It’s fantastic.

Unfortunately we’re still waiting for Telstra (the Aussie equivalent of British Telecom) to connect our internet service, so we haven’t been able to blog about it yet.

Hopefully we’ll be online by weekend so I’ll post a full update then.

Edit: In the meantime, I’ve added another four pages of Charlotte photos to the album.

It’s been nearly a month since our last blog update, so I’d better do a quick round-up of what’s been going on:

Charlotte is now 14 weeks old and is developing her own little personality. As well as letting us know when something isn’t right — hungry, wet, tired, etc — she now smiles and chuckles when Sara and I do as we are told.

Charlotte still runs the show — she likes to get up very early in the morning; she likes to play for an hour after feeding; she likes a long sleep in the evening — but we’re learning to work around her.

I’ve put together another video clip (21Mb), click here.

I went to the CeBIT Exhibition in Sydney last month. Sara and Charlotte flew up to join me for a few days, it was a nice break. We watched Manchester United win the Champions League at the hotel. John “Captain Courageous” Terry missing his penalty was hilarious, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Thanks for all the funny texts and emails, sorry I haven’t replied to any — it’s been hectic at work this past couple of weeks.

We’ve had a nightmare month dealing with things back in the UK. We’ve been trying to remortgage our house in Oldham so that we can buy a property out here — more about that soon. Barclays assured us that this would be a simple process and all would be completed within 6 weeks; 11 weeks later and it still wasn’t done, meaning that we were in real danger of losing our new house and incurring severe financial penalties.

On top of that, the estate agent managing our property in the UK, Key Moves, ceased trading last week. No great loss, they were shocking. But as yet we haven’t had any correspondence from the new company who have taken over their affairs. The tenants seem OK though, so we’re not too worried about that at the moment.

It’s a public holiday here on Monday — the Queen’s Birthday — so today we’re going to head over to Mornington for an event called “UK Fest” to sample some traditional British Fayre. Sara should be able to stock up on crisps and I’ll sample the “Three Lions Pub”.

Edit: UK Fest was pretty poor, definitely not worth the $20 entrance fee. There were only three or four stalls, selling overpriced stuff we can easily get elsewhere. The “pub” was a draughty hall with $8 cans of John Smiths sold through a serving hatch. The live entertainment — Morris Dancing and a Magician — wasn’t our cup of tea either. At least it was sunny. No chance we’ll be returning next year unless they change the venue and drop the entrance price.

Today is Mother’s Day in Australia. It’s celebrated on the second Sunday of May here.

Charlotte bought mummy some nice Thornton’s chocolates and took her out for dinner at the Switch Lifestyle Bar & Grill this evening. She was also planning the whole breakfast in bed thing, but decided to get up at 4:30am instead.

So it’s been a long day already and we’re planning to stay up to watch the Premiership finale, kick off is at midnight our time.

Edit: Daddy would like to point out that Father’s Day is celebrated on the first Sunday of September in Australia. Socks and underpants will not be acceptable.

We’ve recently found a new local pub.

We originally thought that The Acorn on Forest, a few doors down from The Oak Tree, was just a restaurant — we had a meal there last year. But it turns out they also have comfy leather settees, regular live entertainment and a large, sunny outdoor deck which is perfect on a lazy Sunday lunchtime. They do a cracking breakfast too — the full monty, including black pudding and HP sauce if you like.

One Friday evening after work we found ourselves chatting to some of the regulars who come from Chester, Widnes and St Helens — there seems to be quite a few ex-pat Poms in The Basin.

While I’m blogging, here’s another video clip (18Mb) that we’ve put together this week. Charlotte is now 7 weeks old and weighs a whopping 8lbs 3oz! There are another 20 pictures in the photo gallery too.

Edit: Speaking of local pubs, this article made me smile when I read it. Will we even recognise Oldham when we come back for a visit?

This weekend we’ve been trying to take a photograph of Charlotte, so that we can get her an Australian passport. We need this a.s.a.p. in order to book flights for a trip back to the UK later this year.

The rules state that a baby born in Australia to parents who are both Permanent Residents is automatically an Australian Citizen by birth, so she needs an Australian passport. We can also get a British passport for her in due course.

We downloaded the guidelines and set about trying to take a photo that meets the requirements:

• Must be taken against a neutral coloured background
• Must be looking straight ahead
• Eyes must be open and no red-eye
• Mouth must be closed
• Photo must be clear of other distracting objects (arms, camera flash, etc)
• Some rules about dimensions

How hard can that be?

Well, it took us around 200 pictures over three days to get something suitable!

Here are a few of the out-takes:

We got there in the end, we think. Hopefully it will be accepted and we’ll see you in sunny Oldham in late September!

Edit: She seems to have slightly red hair in some of these pictures, but this is an optical illusion. She is not ginger, nosiree! And even if she was, it’s just a phase she’s going through.

Well we’ve survived the first three weeks of being parents without killing Charlotte — although judging by the volume of her screams sometimes, you’d be forgiven for thinking that’s what we were trying to do to her!

We came home from the hospital on day six and then rushed around buying baby things we didn’t realise that we’d need — we actually drove from the hospital straight to Baby Buntings (Aussie equivalent of Mothercare), Sara and Charlotte even still had their name tags on their wrists.

Once at home we quickly established a routine. Charlotte’s now going about 3½ hours between feeds, sometimes a bit longer during the night, and she often stays awake after her morning feed. In between feeds, assuming Charlotte is settled, we rush around cleaning up, preparing formula, sterilising bottles, endlessly washing clothes, blankets and bibs.

Now that I’m back in work, Sara is taking care of the night-time feeds. If Charlotte wakes early in the morning, I tend to just get up and stay up with her. Although we’re both tired, it’s not half as bad as we thought it might be.

The midwives visited us at home a few times initially, but now we take her to the local community health centre. She’s growing daily and at last weigh-in was just over 3 kilos (6lbs 10oz).

I’ve added another 30+ photos to the gallery. There’s also a short video clip here (10Mb).

We’re just tidying the house up, ready for a barbecue tonight with Andy, Johanne and all the family. No work tomorrow because it’s Easter Monday, so I’ll take care of the night-time feeds (hopefully whilst watching United vs Liverpool) and Sara can let her hair down tonight — it’s her birthday tomorrow.

Charlotte Louise Torkington was born on Saturday 1st March at 6:25am.

I’m sorry it has taken so long to post this message, it’s been the most action-packed week of my life and we’ve barely had a moment free. Anyway, here’s the long version — minus most of the gory bits — for those of you who haven’t already spoken to us…

Sara started having contractions last Thursday evening. We drove to the hospital on Friday morning where the doctors examined her and confirmed that she was in the early stages of labour and prescribed some pain relief and sleeping tablets before sending us home again for a few hours.

By mid-afternoon the contractions were much stronger and more frequent so we called the hospital. They told us to come in, so we checked in to the Delivery Suite. Another doctor confirmed that labour had definitely started but said it could still be a long wait. Sara was in a lot of pain so they gave her a dose of pethidine which allowed her to get some rest before the big event.

There still hadn’t been much progress by the time that wore off, even though Sara was still having strong regular contractions, so the midwife gave more pain relief and sleeping tablets and settled us down for a couple more hours of rest. It was probably around 2:30am by now, Sara had been in labour for more than 32 hours and was pretty spaced out from the drugs and pain.

Sara woke up at sometime around 5am, in a lot of pain, saying she thought she might be bleeding. When I checked it was like a horror show, she was lying in a *big* pool of blood — I called the nurses straight away. The next hour or so is a bit of a blur: numerous doctors, midwives and nurses went to work on Sara like a Formula-1 team changing the tyres on a racing car. They strapped monitoring equipment on her (showing baby’s heart rate rising and falling dramatically), put in intravenous lines, saline drips, catheter, paged Sara’s doctor and the on-call obstratician — the speed and quietness with which they worked and the expressions on their faces told me this was very, very serious. I felt completely helpless, terrified.

The obstratician arrived on the scene and he basically said “Baby is in distress. She needs to come out very quickly. The quickest way is a caesarean. You need to give consent, sign here.” Within minutes Sara was prepped, wheeled into the operating theatre and anaesthatised; I was dressed in scrubs, looking through the theatre window until they allowed me in. They told me to expect: baby would probably come out looking blue and limp, they might need to work on her to get her breathing, she might need to go straight to intensive care.

Happily it wasn’t half as bad as I expected. Within five minutes they beckoned me into the room and passed me my newly-born daughter. She was tiny but wasn’t blue or drowsy, she seemed fine. I certainly wasn’t expecting to be the one to hold her straight away as soon as she was born, but it just felt fantastic and I seemed to automatically know exactly what to do.

Her little nostrils were flaring slightly because she was struggling to breathe, so they wanted her to go up to the special care nursery in an incubator. Sara was still unconscious, but everything went OK, it would be another 30-40 minutes before she would recover. So they let me wheel baby up to the special care unit and sit by the incubator, waiting for Sara to be returned to a room on the maternity ward. I just sat and watched her, it was amazing.

By the time Sara was brought back upstairs, baby’s breathing had settled down and she had been weighed and checked. Even though she was very small, she was perfectly healthy so they said it would be OK to join Sara in her room.

In turns out that Sara suffered a antepartum abruption haemorrhage, where the placenta comes away from the lining of the womb, potentially life-threatening for mother and/or baby. Although we still have a few questions about whether this should’ve been spotted sooner — there were earlier signs — we have no complaints at all about the fantastic medical attention received or the superb care and facilities afterwards. Mother and baby are both absolutely fine.

I’ll blog separately about our first week as parents when I get a chance. In the meantime I have uploaded about 50 pictures taken in the first couple of days. You can find them here in the photo gallery.

It’s been more than six weeks since the last proper blog entry, so I’d better do a quick catch-up post:

• Sara finished work just after Christmas to concentrate on daytime TV baking Boo Boo. Maternity leave in Australia is very poor by British standards; Sara is allowed up to a year off work but it’s completely unpaid. We do, however, receive a one-off “baby bonus” from the government. I’m allowed to take some unpaid leave, but even that’s at the employer’s discretion.
• We’re booked in at the Angliss Hospital. Last weekend we attended the ante-natal class, which was interesting and informative but the videos were a bit grisly. I can’t begin to tell you how much Sara is looking forward to the actual birth.
• We’re also booked on the “parenting” class this week.
• Sara’s “Nesting” phase is now out of the way. The whole house has been cleaned from top to bottom and the nursery room is ready for action.
• Thanks to generous gifts from family, friends and colleagues, Boo Boo has a fantastic selection of clothes for the first 3 or 4 months. In fact, she’s got more outfits than Sara and I combined. I’m sure she’ll get through them though.
• We obviously still haven’t thought of a name for Boo Boo.
• Sara hasn’t had any real cravings. Although she’s been quite partial to a bowl or three of ice cream and the odd bag of imported pickled onion Monster Munch, I don’t think this is pregnancy related. But we’ve certainly been to Sweet Meck in Bayswater a lot more often than usual.
• We’re still looking at houses, on and off, but can’t seem to find anything we like. Melbourne house prices have rocketed by 25% in the past 12 months, so we’re actually looking at worse properties than we were a year ago. Following this trend our landlord has just increased our rent too.
• Andy & Johanne have sold their house in Ferntree Gully and bought a huge place in Boronia. It’s only about 1.5kms from us, which will be handy for barbecues etc.
• My hands have now healed nicely following the accident on New Years Eve. If you look closely you can see my left hand is paler than it should be, but I’ve got to stay out of the sun for another 2 months. I’m just relieved there was no permanent damage.
• You might remember me saying I was going to write to appeal against a speeding ticket I received in December? Well it worked, they decided to let me off with a stern warning instead of the points and fine!