Yup – he’s got the hang of sleeping again. This morning he even made it through to 7am.. quids in!

I take it all back – he slept through the night!!
Well, if you count waking up at 6.15 as sleeping through the night (which we do!)

G’rrrrr – five times in the night – FIVE TIMES
And three times the night before.

Ben the master sleep-depriver strikes again.

One more before bed. It’s always been said that it’s great to be a grandparent or aunt/uncle because you can hand back kids when they start screaming.
What I haven’t appreciated before is that the parent probably also wants you to hand them back when the start screaming. The chances are you weren’t the cause of the screaming, and if baby is upset he/she want’s familiar arms, and the chances are also that the parent will be a lot better at settling baby than you (and will probably just get wound up watching you try!). Certainly if Ben is getting into a tizzy than I want either Anna or I to have him!!

This was a bit of a revelation for me, as in my limited experiences of babies before Ben came along, I always felt very guilty handing it back as soon as it started crying! However, I have noticed several people who have several children will hand back babies to their mother or father when it starts crying, and perhaps this is the reason why.

I guess it might change as they get older, or if you have other children..

Abstract thought for the day – it’s actually really hard to do exactly 70 on the motorway. I think there are three main reasons for this:

1. Physically it seems hard to maintain exactly the right pressure on the throttle. I’m not sure why this should be, when I don’t have a problem nailing 30 without looking, perhaps it’s just the gear ratios of the car!
2. Practically, motorways often go up hill and down dale, and it’s easy to slip up or down 5mph before you’ve really realised. Then of course when you come across a slower vehicle, you often have to back off until you can pull out.
3. Psychologically, if you’re overtaking, especially with a car 6 inches from your boot, or rapidly bearing down, it’s oh so easy just to put on a little spurt to get past the other car more quickly.

But I did notice some interesting effects:
Firstly, you get overtaken. A lot. And often pretty convincingly. You think the speed limit was nearer 80 if you didn’t know better.
Secondly, you hardly ever overtake anyone else, and even they are normally lorries or coaches doing 65 or so. Oh yes, there’s the occasional driver who feel most comfortable down in the 50s, but they are a dying breed, I think.
Finally, I often found myself in an empty patch of road – because I was never really catching anyone, and everyone passing me did so pretty quickly, there were several occasions where the nearest cars where a good 100m in front or behind me. This was often a large group of cars all moving together, but not a single one immediately around me.

For obvious reasons I am not going to talk about the speed I often travel on the motorways, but nailing the speedo at exactly 70 was quite an interesting experience.

Ben’s getting really good at sleeping now – he has only needed feeding in the middle of the night once in the last couple of weeks!
He does tend to wake up and give a couple of squawks in the night, but then he gets himself back off to sleep, and we don’t even have to get out of bed. Hopefully as he gets older he’ll stop waking up at all overnight!

Must give a quick mention to The street bible by Rob Lacey. It’s a complete reworking/summary of the Holy Bible in modern (street) language for those who “have never read the Bible, or have read it too much“.
I have personally found it quite inspiring, particularly how he works the four gospels into a single narrative (although the disciples being called “Drew”, “Jim”, “Jonno”, etc was a litle disconcerting at first!!)

Is it still called writer’s block when it’s not something you have to do? I mean, there was all the to-do over J K Rowling’s alleged writer’s block with Harry Potter V, and I certainly stared blankly at a screen for hours when trying to dream up phrases for my thesis. Actually, that’s not entirely true – the main problem with writing my thesis was never quite getting around to it (too many websites to visit, y’see), rather than not knowing what to write when I actually did (although this was still occasionally a problem).

But if you’re doing something entirely voluntarily, and which nobody is going to read anyway, is it still writer’s block, or can you simply think of nothing to say?

In any case, I’ve decided that blogs are really just modern day diaries/journals, which also happen to be publically accessible anywhere in the world. I, of course, operate a self-censorship policy as people I know might well read this, which could mean
a) I’d get in trouble (or at least embarrased), or
b) they might.
Neither of which are particularly favourible outcomes, I think you’d agree. That said, some blogs I’ve read (and not necessarily anonymous ones) seemingly don’t operate this very simple policy.

Nothing particularly to say (although this is nothing new), but a silly amount of time to kill while A feeds the little ‘un. Food this evening is curry, but one which we’d cooked up in a batch and frozen, so ‘cooking’ it actually just means dumping it in a saucepan and heating it ’till it bubbles lots. Most easy.

Did actually have fun yesterday – it was the centinary celebration of the University of Leeds, and loads of the alumni can back to pay their respects (and get free alcohol), including Nicholas Witchell (although I didn’t see him – but why couldn’t Cat Deeley be a Leeds graduate, eh?). Young Ben came in with us, and met my work colleagues and friends for this first time, which I think he enjoyed (hard to tell with a 15 week old, although he wasn’t crying which means he didn’t mind too much).

Otherwise life goes on. Was a little disappointed that Jenson Button didn’t really get a look in this afternoon after securing pole. I thought he was in with with a chance for the first 8 or 9 laps, but then it was all over (well, ok, so he came second – but 30 seconds behind Schumacher?). Was nice to see Louise on the box again though.

Really catching up on my (long) back catalg of films I’ve been meaning to see but never quite got around to. Have now chalked up both High Fidelity (which was fine – nothing special, but nothing bad either) and This is Spinal Tap, which was absolutely fantastic, and about ten times better than I was expecting!

Any, as usual no time to write properly, baby to feed, courseworks to mark, that kind of thing..