Isaac and I only stayed in hospital for 1 night, bed was way too uncomfortable and hospitals are so noisy! We came home around lunch on Monday and have been trying to settle into some sort of rhythm before Julian starts working again next week.

Isaac is doing really well, although he got frustrated before my milk came in, as he is a big boy and very hungry. He is much more settled now and we are getting some decent stretches of sleep. Angus is trying hard to be the helpful big brother but is finding it hard to talk in a quieter voice around Isaac.

We'll hopefully get some more photos over the weekend and put them up.

Isaac was born very early this morning. 4.48kg (that's 9lb 14oz in old money) and 54cm long. He had a full head of dark hair and very long finger and toenails when he was born. Mother & baby are both very well, pictures here, more later.

I've just reached 35 weeks down and 5 to go in this pregnancy so it's all downhill from here!

I must say this pregnancy has been more challenging than the first for a variety of reasons: I'm not as fit; dealing with a 3 year old Angus; I'm 4 years older....But we are all starting to get very excited about meeting Isaac (we found out so that Angus could bond better and it has really worked).

My birthday was a couple of weeks ago and I was lucky enough to be given a voucher for a pregnancy massage (from Bella Mama). Sam the masseuse was wonderful and knowledgeable - she is also a Doula, first one I have heard of in NZ. Having used a Doula for Angus' birth in Sydney I find it hard to believe they haven't caught on here in NZ. Although we aren't using one this time (2nd time around and all) I would definitely recommend a Doula for first time mums. My lovely husband also made me home made bacon for my birthday, check out the photos on the right!

I've been reading Nicola's blog since being pregnant with Angus and just read one of the articles she linked through to on some American midwives going to work in a Senegalese clinic. It was really interesting, especially the American's having to learn to be able to be less interventionist, also the Senegalese women learning how to be a little more hands off during the pushing phase. I know that sounds contradictory (the interventionist vs hands off part) but it's more the American's having to learn to get by with less.

For both my pregnancies I have tried hard to remember I'm not sick/ill so therefore don't need much help/attention during the pregnancy and that during the birth itself my body was designed to do this so don't have to have intervention/drugs. I know that's not for everyone but even though I ended up being induced last time I was glad I managed to labour without any drugs for pain relief. This time round I'm hoping to have a water birth (all things going to plan of course). When we did the tour of the hospital and got shown the birth pool a little voice piped up from my side and said "but I didn't bring my togs" (bathing costume to non-kiwis). Very cute.

Am off to visit the midwife, but am starting to feel it's the beginning of the end now!

If memory serves (which of course with lack of sleep and current pregnancy it may not), we were told of this thing called the terrible twos. Angus turned two and all went on as normal, he was a generally polite and obedient child and continued that way.

Until about a month ago - he turns three in about a month, so about 2 months before being a big three year old his behaviour changed (for the worse of course!). These are turning into trying times, hence the trying threes. He seems to understand we have limits and boundaries to what we will put up with, and he seems to need to push those limits when we ask him to do things. He quite obviously hears and understands what we are asking but then waits until he is on the verge (or sometimes past) of being punished for not listening. We have had to change our behaviour and stop counting to three before he gets "timed out", because he was simply waiting until 3 to do anything!

But we are viewing this as a stage he goes through (hopefully a short one) and eventually we will get back some semblance of that polite and obedient child we once knew. As with all kids he has the moments that make it all worth while - like when he told me "Mummy, you are my best friend". Will be interesting to see how he copes when the baby arrives in a few months. He is getting to observe his older cousin and newly arrived baby brother, so hopefully it won't come as too much of a shock to the system...I know that will come back to haunt me!

We've relaunched this website using the Serendipity weblog engine, which is really nice, but one thing that's really been bugging me is the way Serendipity builds permalinks to entries on the site.

Serendipity's default permalinks look something like /archives/123-Title-of-Post.html. Now I don't like the "archives" bit or the numeric ID, and I want the post title to be always in lower case (and preferably be a separate field from the title so I can clean it up a bit in some cases) and I don't want to see ".html" tacked on the end. Permalinks are important, they're intended to be permanent and hopefully survive across relaunches, so it's worth a bit of effort to get them right in the first place.

I realise that sticking the ID in the link helps a bit with efficiency – it's quicker to pull something out of the database given it's ID – but frankly I'm prepared to work those Xeons in VPSLink's server farm just that bit harder in order to get good looking links.

So far I've managed to make the permalinks look more like /2007/07/12/title-of-post which I'm pretty happy with, but I haven't yet looked at how much it would be to add a separate "url-title" field separate from the post title.

Changing the format of link is really easy in Serendipity's configuration, but there didn't seem to be any way to force the permalinks to be lower-case (maybe there's a plugin for this but I couldn't find one). Fortunately Serendipity is pretty well put together and there's a single function for generating permalinks called serendipity_archiveURL in include/functions_permalinks_inc.php. Change the last line of that function to be

        return strtolower($path);

and everything Just Works. If you've already created some entries and you'd like to lowercase the existing permalinks, they can be easily updated in the serendipity_permalinks table in the database. If your site is already live then it'd be a good idea to keep the current capitalized links and add new rows to that table with the text in lower case, so you don't break any existing inward links to your site from other places.

Happy! I went hunting for recipes for Kim-chi fried rice, my current lunchtime crave, and found a really good recipe for it at Lily's Wai Sek Hong, which has a ton of other great looking recipes (including lots of nyonya ones).

I have laid in supplies, and my lunches are sorted from here on in. My first try was pretty tasty, but a bit too meaty and not kim-chi-ish enough.

Another good site I found while on this hunt was TriFood which has a good guide to various Korean dishes and some recipes.

After a very long time away, tiddly-pom.com is finally back on the air again. This time it's thanks to Serendipity and PostgreSQL on our new Slicehost server running Debian.

We'll be changing and tweaking things over the next few weeks until it's good. For now I can't be bothered sorting out effective comment spam protection so for now, all comments require moderation. That will change eventually. Also the template and fonts are a bit broken. That can wait. For now, it's just good to be back!

OK, it's officially late and I have sleep to catch up on.

Update... we moved to a 512 meg slice at Slicehost for hosting after a few glitches with VPSLink and some glowing reports I'd read about Slicehost. So far, so good.