Poppy Sylvia Holmes

8.41 am on the auspicious date of 7/7/10 Poppy Sylvia Holmes entered the world via a gaping wound made by the surgeons knife. If it sounds glamorous it was which brings us to her birth story
Her official due date was not until 26/7 and we had booked her in for an elected caeser on the 14th July. The damn upstart came a week earlier than that and well and truly caught us with our trousers down. We hadn't packed for hospital, installed the baby seat, or even contemplated that she might come a little early.... Hell I was even in the Grand Canyon a week before that. Note to parents take pregnancy seriously.

So there I was on wednesday morning lying in bed with Ivy at 4.30 am whilst kate was googling contractions and when to go to hospital. Eventually she decided to wake me up and inform she was in Labour we gathered what few things at 4am you consider important to take to a hospital, called the next do0r neighbour Chris for emergency babysitting and sped off in the saab like we were out of some lame early nineties Romantic comedy.
The early morning drive was of course surreal when you have a pregnant wife screaming in the seat beside you and all sorts of bleary eyed people are wandering the streets wondering if Germany will defeat Spain. Eventually we made it to the hospital, interrupted the mid wives engaged in world cup viewing and made the obstetrician cancel his trip to the airport.
Before I knew it we were sitting in surgery surrounded by people dressed in blue and about to have an emergency caeser. ( Kate of course knew all about it because she had been having 4 hours of contractions by now which wasn't part of her script). But She had finally turned a corner. For the first time in 10 months she didn't feel sick. There she was on the operating table with her belly being cut open and she casually remarked how wonderful she felt.

Before we knew it Poppy Sylvia popped her head out (big head actually but the rest of her very small) Coming in at 3.18 kilos and 50 cms long for statistics nerds.

Dad managed to do some complicated negotiating and got his choice of name (Poppy... kate succumbed and Olive will have to be the name of our next pet)
We have managed to produce children with extraordinary numerology. Ivy was 05/06/07 and now Poppy 07/07/10. It was enough for talk of a visit from the Panchen Lama.

In fact all was going swimmingly until poppy realised she was the second child with a diva older sister and decided to stage a dramatic I'm not going to breathe incident. This was followed by another the next day and was enough to send the ward and her parents into a spin....

Doctors running, nurses shouting, alarms buzzing and before we knew it she was in ICU linked up to all number of machines that well and truly go Bing.

After all manner of tests our little Frankenstein baby was finally released three days later with the quote of the week. "In a nutshell... we've spent an awful lot of time and money figuring out that your baby is absolutely normal" remarked the Doctor.

Talk about cutting down the tall poppy!

Now we're all home and I think the happiest person in the world is little Ivy who is still wondering where dad went that wednesday morning where he turned into the next door neighbour.