Baby born

The phone rang at 7 o'clock this morning. Baby born at 1.45 a.m. She weighs 8lb 11oz. Mother and father are home and resting. We didn't tell J&R immediately, cos they were still in bed asleep but the phone woke J so she came down and asked what the news was.


Lunch time: there are photos of mother and baby on the family web site. It appears near the top of a google search list if you put in two of our surnames. Big brother and sister have gone home to meet their new sister.

No news of baby

Baby is now more than 10 days overdue, so eldest step daughter went into Stoke Mandeville hospital this morning to have it induced, while older sister and brother stay with us but we still have no news.

India trip booked

We've booked to visit Ahmedabad in time for Zenobya's grandchild's navjote on 30th December this year. That's a parsi thread ceremony that happens when the child is around 7 to 12 years old. Her son, Kaizad, emailed about a year ago:

"see if u can make it to india in december next year, would be grt to have u with us on such an occasion."

It's 31 years since I was there with Vera McNamara - I wonder where she is now - I lost touch when Australia had its postal strike.

Husband and I will fly out to Ahmedabad 27th December, leaving the 'children' in charge of the house and each other. Son and daughter will have to get themselves back to uni in January as we shall still be away. After the ceremony, we are going to Kerala for a tour round Kochin, Munnar, Periyar and other places, staying in hotels, a cottage on a tea estate and a houseboat. I think it looks wonderful on this web page.

And I get ayuvedic massages, any massage pleases me, and husband will have the chance for massages too, and we get to see the wild life. (I could give the tigers a miss though - I'm quite happy to see them from a distance).

Our trip isn't quite the same because we are arranging our own transport (and a right hassle that has been - the JetAirways web site doesn't show you everything so we got down the wrong names on the tickets twice and had to cancel and rebook. And we couldn't book the internal flights on line, but only over the phone, but they don't take credit cards over the phone. It is cheaper to arrange your own flights but easier if you get an agent to take on the hassle.

More or less

Step son Tim is about to start a radio programme called "More or Less" on radio 4 from Monday. Do listen.

No news

For those of you who know that there's a baby due, there's no news. As soon as there is, I'll let you know.

Bedtime rituals

I wonder what people do when it's time to leave company and go to bed.

Yesterday son-in-law, eldest step-daughter and I had this discussion about how we say good night.

• I now like to sneak off without bothering anyone, not draw attention to myself, but there was a time when I'd say 'goodnight'. My parents brought me up to say 'goodnight and god bless'.
• Late husband used say, "I'm going to bed now; you can come if you like."
• ESD says that when she was little, her mother used to get the three of them to say good night prayers, but that somehow that habit disappeared when they were older, perhaps when they moved house. That reminded me that we used to do something similar: prayers next to the bed when I was very small, and later we used to kneel in the sitting room to say family prayers. Like ESD's family they were along the lines of "God bless Nanna and Aunty Thing and ...", so almost a ritual.
• S-in-L says that he has to say 'good night' to everyone, and may be hug them. The conversation started from his expression of love and care for his son.
• S-in-L's Italian father gets very upset if someone goes to bed without saying 'goodnight', perhaps because his own father was so undemonstrative, and would retire without a word.
  
  These rituals might be a continuation of a family tradition, or a reaction to a tradition that someone didn't like. What did you do? What do you do for a bedtime ritual?

Autumn

The garden is beautiful. Here are our first vine crops. Son tasted one of the grapes last weekend and said they were really sour, but then they were still green. He understood the term 'sour grapes'.

Holiday photos

Here is the promised photo of the fountain of shame, with the various figures, which I assume are Roman and Greek gods.

Then, something that didn't get into husband's diaries earlier, was the puppet show. Apparently puppet making is a dying skill in Sicily, but there was a time when the makers vied to make the biggest puppets, which they then used to tell old Sicilian tales, such as this one that we went to see about brave knights who killed a dragon and all sorts of other invading baddies - probably not now politically correct - the story of Rinaldo and Orlando (Roland and Oliver).

See this blog for a good description.

And here is a very short video of one of the many fights in the story.