Thank You

Our fireplace with a lovely cross stitch from my sister-in-law and a rose picked today from our garden.

Last week I found out that I'd won a blog award from Notcutts Garden Centres. I don't know who nominated me for the Wildlife blog award, but I wanted to say thank you!

This is the first award I've been nominated for or won, so it's a really nice feeling. Especially the £50 voucher I received for winning the Wildlife category - which led to a flutter of bookmarking!

As some of you will know, it's been a busy time for me lately, with my wife's severe pregnancy sickness and other things, so I've felt quite guilty that I haven't had the energy to keep up with the blog as much as I wanted to (stupid M.E). But, I have lots of ideas and hopefully normal service will resume presently!

So, I also wanted to thank everyone who's followed my blog for the past few years, especially those of you that provide the comments that motivate me to continue sharing my thoughts and studies. You're all wonderful and make the blogosphere a great place to be a part of.

For more information on the Notcutts awards, click here.

Expecting

Nearly 2 months ago my wife and I found out that she was pregnant!

We code named the baby "Meeple" after our love of boardgames, so that we could talk about the baby without anyone knowing! However, that didn't last too long as my wife came down with severe pregnancy sickness. This has meant that she's been bed bound for around 6 weeks and has lost nearly 2 stone in weight.

The pregnancy sickness seems to be calming down now and we had the 12 week scan last night and were happy to find that everything is progressing as it should! Our little meeple was very active and this meant that we got to see him/her for at least 10 minutes while the nurse tried to get the required measurements. In between these periods of activity, meeple would turn over and go to sleep - which turned out to be very unhelpful!

The benefit of the pregnancy sickness was that we got to see our little meeple at around 7 weeks as the GP needed to check that everything was ok and to find out if it was a multiple pregnancy that was causing the severity of the sickness. By last night the 7 week scan seemed like such a long time ago! It was wonderful to see meeple's heart beating away and to see such active movement.

Now is the wait until the 20 week scan and then finally the birth! We've been given a due date of 26 April.

Here's a copy of last night's scan showing meeple curling his legs up!

Reflowering Phalaenopsis Orchid

I've posted a few times now about my Phalaenopsis orchid, here and here. I just wanted to write a quite post because, with this being my first orchid, I was really pleased that it grew a brand new flower stalk and put on an impressive flower display.