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Claire and Daniel were released from hospital yesterday which was a nice suprise as we thought they’d probably be in a while longer as Claire had a section. We’re now adjusting to life with a fulltime baby (well, Claire had him fulltime anyway in hospital, I just got to escape in the evenings). Quite a steep learning curve for us and Daniel but we slowly seem to be getting there. We were worried the cats would take exception to him but they’ve shocked us by actually really taking to him. Nibby especially likes to check he’s okay when he cries, though he has pinched the Moses basket when it’s not in use

It was Claires’ nans funeral today as well and we weren’t sure if we’d be able to make it as Claire is still recovering and we’re getting used to looking after Daniel. In the end we went as we didn’t really want Claire to miss it. As we’d disturbed Daniels afternoon routine he was rather grumpy so I stayed with him in the car while Claire went to the service. He behaved really well considering it was his first big trip out and after I managed to get some wind out of him he promptly dropped off for half an hour until everything was finished

Nothing planned for tomorrow and it’ll be nice to have a fairly easy day after rushing about for nearly a week!

Finally after a fairly traumatic labour Daniel finally came into this world at 15:37 weighing 8lb 1oz.

It wasn’t an easy day though. I got a call at just after 08:00 today Claire had gone in to labour ward, which sounded like good news as it meant things were finally progressing. However when I got there it turned out they’d moved her to start her on Oxytocin to try and get things going. This started around 09:30 and continued all morning and in to the early afternoon with Claires contractions getting more painful but unfortunately she still wasn’t dilating enough. Around 14:00 Claire had had enough of the pain and asked for an Epidural, this was sorted and she felt a lot better. Around 15:00 the midwives became more worried about the babies heartbeat which had been dipping during contractions for a while, and even I could hear it was getting noticeably slower. After the Doctor had a look they decided to do a crash C-section and within 2 minutes Claire had been rushed off to theatre. I then had the scariest 20 minutes or so of my life while I waited in the recovery room for news of Claire and the baby. The staff were brilliant though and kept checking up on my and let me know as soon as the baby was born and kept me up to date on how Claire was as well. After they’d got him cleaned up they brought him through to me and I got to sit and hold him for half an hour while Claire recovered.

He seems to have come out of his rather traumatic birth fine, and the Doctor said afterwards that now they’d tested the blood from the umbilical cord it probably wasn’t such an emergency as he wasn’t doing too bad, but at least it got it over with I guess

So far he’s a very content baby, barely crying even when he got his Vitamin K shot. He does do a great grumpy face though I’m hopeful this will last but it’s probably the drugs in his system keeping him dozy

Claire is well too, though she’ll be in hospital for a few days recovering. There are a couple of pictures of Daniel below for the interested

I’ve just nipped back home after spending the day with Claire at the hospital and I’m afraid there is still no major news!

The unit ended up being really busy overnight so Claire didn’t get her second dose of Prostaglandin until 11:30. This bought on contractions every 5 minutes or so after a while and these were still going on when I left at 17:45 to grab some dinner. Claire is getting checked again at 19:00 and at that point they’ll decide whether to break her waters (in which case I’ll be off back to the hospital) or whether they’ll just give another dose of Prostaglandin in which case I’ll probably be waiting for a phonecall. Fingers crossed things will get underway tonight though!

Update

They couldn’t break her waters so Claire has had another dose of the Prostaglandin. Hopefully that’ll really get things moving, even if it does mean a phonecall in the early hours of the morning

I’ve just left Claire at the hospital, though I’m afraid there is no exciting news yet Claire has been assessed, the baby was monitored for a while and the first lot of Prostaglandin applied. Claire noticed some increased contractions but nothing spectacular so after a walk around Claire headed off to bed and I came home to get some sleep.

Claire will get another dose of the Prostaglandin around 06:00 tomorrow and another 6 hours after that if nothing happens. I’m heading back up at 10:00 to keep her company. I’ll update the blog with info if anything happens and when I next get a chance

I’ve recently being trying to get my part in the mail hubs finished before heading off on paternity leave for a month. I had great fun today trying to get Mailscanner and Sophos syslogging properly. I’d installed all the software, stoked it up and found that though it was running nothing was getting logged. After checking sysylog.conf and running logger it seemed that the problem was with the perl Sys::Syslog module. After much fiddling around I upgraded it to 0.18 from 0.13 and Sophos started logging, which was great. Fired up MailScanner again but still no logs

I decided it was time to delve into the logging code for MailScanner and I noticed that if the OS was detected as Solaris it set the logging mode to udp. This won’t work on our Solaris 10 zones so I altered the code to use native mode. Fired it up again and it worked! I always seem to have to fiddle with MailScanner to get it to log properly, so I’m making a note of what I got up to here so it’s easier in a years time when I have to fiddle again