A bit more info...

It is Andy's 31st birthday today. We will be celebrating with him (and the rest of the "gang") tomorrow night at La Tasca, which is a Spanish restaurant here in Bath.

Marla is still doing OK. She is having trouble sleeping at nights. I think it is due to the general discomfort of having an unusually large tummy and maybe also a few allergy problems, probably associated with the time of year.

We are slowly making a shortlist of names for our future offspring. On the table so far are Morgan, Marshall and Marcus for the boy and Cora and Madeleine (and its many spelling possibilities) for the girl.

I played softball on Tuesday and we lost once again. There is still promise within the team, we just have to find it. You might be interested to know that the team now has a blog at http://friendlyfiresoftball.blogspot.com/. We only just started it so there is not much there at the moment.

They're keeping us on our toes...

This morning we had the first of what was to be a regular bi-weekly ultrasound scan. Everything went well - both babies seem healthy and there was nothing out of the ordinary. One thing they were able to tell us is that we will more-than-likely be having one boy and one girl.

While this is not a huge shock, nor does it require a major upheaval of our plans, it is another surprise in an already surprising period of our lives. In real terms, one thing it means is that they are not identical so there is no chance of twin-to-twin transfusion and therefore we will not be required to have a scan every two weeks, it'll be every four weeks from now on.

In other medical news, Marla's dad underwent bypass surgery last week and is now well on his way to recovery. Apparently everything went very well. We are, of course, very happy about this.

That's all for now.

Twin update...

Marla has been feeling the twins kicking quite a lot in the last few days. Now that she knows there are two of them in there it makes a lot more sense when she can feel movement in two places at once. As much as I might try, it is impossible to imagine what it must feel like to have your future children growing inside you. No wonder mothers have such a strong attachment to their babies. I'm not jealous, but it is definitely something that fathers don't get to experience. Still, I am quite glad I don't have to go through the actually birth bit.

Revenge of the Sith...

We went to see Revenge of the Sith - for the second time - last night. Some random thoughts about it now follow:

• It is a better movie than either Episode 1 or Episode 2. As The Empire Strikes Back stood out amongst Episodes 4, 5 & 6, so Revenge of the Sith does amongst Episodes 1, 2 & 3.
• There were genuine moments of tension. For example, when Padme realises that Anakin has moved to the dark side.
• As everyone has been saying, it links the movies together very well. It fills in most of the gaps and answers a lot of questions. It does, however, leave a few things unanswered. For example, who is Anakin's father? I remember reading a few years ago that there was a rumour going around that it might be Palpatine, which is especially cool because it would mean that at the end of Return of the Jedi, when Vader is looking back and forth between Luke and the Emporer before throwing the Emporer down the shaft, he is actually choosing between his father and his son.
• Another small inconsistency is that in Star Wars (Episode 4) Ben Kenobi does not recognise R2-D2 when they first meet on Tatooine, even saying that he doesn't remember ever owning a droid. While I know that R2 was never actually Kenobi's droid, you'd think he'd remember all the interaction they had during the Clone Wars.
• Speaking of Ben Kenobi, Ewan McGregor virtually carries the film I think. His performance (as well as Natalie Portman's) is very strong, given the limited scope of the dialogue - which unfortunately is a recurring theme of all three of the new movies. And I also think that McGregor and the make-up artists do a good job of easing the potentially troublesome transition to Alec Guiness.

Aftermath...

Now that we are sort of pulling ourselves together after the news of the twins I thought it might be nice to give some other news - of a far less life-changing nature. Last Saturday Paul, Andy and myself went on a mountain bike ride in the hills of Dorset (about an hour from Bath). The route was one recommended by MBR magazine (Mountain Bike Rider) and was designated "Easy". Perfect for us. Anyway, Paul was able to program the route into his GPS device and we also had the map provided by MBR - so getting lost was not a worry. The route was 17 miles in total and it took me a little by surprise how quickly we covered that distance, even over less than ideal tracks. Nevertheless, about 3/4 of the way around, I was almost completely exhausted and when presented with anything like a semi-steep hill I got off and pushed the bike. That said, I think we all had a very good time. The weather was great and the exercise did us all good. I found that having no suspension on my bike (actually, my brother's bike) was a disadvantage and after having tried Paul's bike (that has suspension on the front forks) I think that, if I was to take this up more seriously, suspension would be necessary.

One huge thing I have not mentioned was the Champions League final on the 25th of May and Liverpool's fine win. Has there ever been a more unlikely and thrilling come-back in the history of competition - or even all of football? I was in a sports bar in Schaumburg, Illinois for the match. There was no sound, but I got to see every second of the game. It would have been nice to have joined in with the celebrations back in the UK, I understand that the entire country (apart from Chelsea) was celebrating. I even got a celebratory text message from my brother! Now that the celebrations have passed, Liverpool can start looking toward next season. There is already talk of Gerrard signing a new contract soon, and now that UEFA have announced that Liverpool will be able to defend the title things are looking very promising for the Mighty Reds.

Other news: Andy and Fi are off to Spain for the weekend; Fi is doing well their future son appears to be healthy. We're still playing softball; had a game last night and were comprehensively beaten. I was however happy with the way I played. And that's about all for now. Going to see Revenge of the Sith again tonight... I'll maybe post some thoughts about it later in the week.

Baby scan images...

Here are the images from our momentous scan last Wednesday. Click on the image for a larger picture.



The three images on the left are of one twin. Head is sort of top-left, facing away from us, hence a lack of visible features. The three images on the right are of the other twin. Head is top-right and features are visible .

I'm not sure if we will be getting images from any subsequent scans. We will be having a scan every two weeks from now on so I'm sure there will be some more pictures in the future.

Incidentally, we are slowly getting to grips with the idea of two babies. We will never fully be ready (who ever is fully ready for even one baby?) but we are starting to realise that everything will be OK. We will just have to increase our planning and preparation. I am getting excited about the prospect of twins. There are some great things that twins bring that we would not have experienced if we had one baby... I'm just not sure what they are yet.

Back from the USA. And strangely diverted via Minnesota...

You might think, with us just returned from America, that this post would be full of comments about the trip. Well, before yesterday it would have been. Except that something happened yesterday that takes precedence.

Marla had her first baby scan yesterday morning and... well... we are having twins! Obviously it is a huge surprise to us and will take a while to really sink in but to sum up my initial feelings, I am very happy and absolutely terrified. There is now much more urgency surrounding the preparations for their arrival and considerable financial planning required. While we initially are telling ourselves that things will be fine, we will now have to actually work hard to ensure that is the case. There are also added risks associated with giving birth to twins, so Marla will now be monitored much more closely by the pre-natal people at the hospital in Bath - in fact, we had our first meeting with a "twin specialist" today.

With it being so soon since we found out there is not a great deal more to say on the matter - but I'm sure there soon will be once we get to grips with it all. There are pictures from the scan that I will post within the next few days. And also, apologies if you are finding out via the weblog as opposed to hearing from us in person. I felt that it was the sort of news that most people might like to know as soon as possible and I suspect that if you are one of the people who feels we should have called you to give you the news, we will probably do so in the not so distant future.

Just a few brief words about the trip to the USA. We had a great time both in Chicago and in Michigan for nephew Jared's high school graduation. We spent a lot of time with Marla's parents and siblings (and their children) as well as were able to see some of our closest friends, including Pam & Greg, Susanne & Mark and Chris & Lisa (and their children). The photo below is of me, Marla and Susanne in front of one of the new features in Millennium park in downtown Chicago (a giant vertical fountain - one of a pair, ironically). More photos (a lot more) can be seen in this online album - there are no captions so you will have to muddle your way through all 134 of them. Our return journey was delayed by a day due to bad weather between Chicago and Detroit and our tickets the following day were re-routed via Minnesota... home of the Twins!