Claire and I became parents for the second time on Tuesday 18th May at approximately 11:40AM, when we welcomed a beautiful baby girl into the world named Evie Charlotte Lattimore.
Evie weighed in at 3.6Kg or 7 lb 15oz in the old scale and was 49cm long. According to the Queensland Health growth charts, she is right on the average for length and between 50th and 75th percentile for weight.
Claire and Evie are both doing really well and we’re overjoyed to have a little girl in the family.
I remember being horrified when Belinda told me one day that she has been known to stick her finger into Ben’s nappy to check if he’d done a poo. Last night, I utilised the finger test myself for the first time & it worked as described. I was horrified I even considered using my finger, but I can assure you there were extenuating circumstances.
Last week our family took the next logical step in preparing for the arrival of our second child toward the end of May – we bought a family car.
Claire bought her 2003 Mazda 323 SP20 in 2004 with less than 10,000km on the clock when the original owner decided that she wanted a Mazda 6 instead. In that time, Claire and I have clocked up about 120,000km on the Mazda and it hasn’t missed a beat.
The downside of the Mazda 323 hatchback from a family standpoint is that the mount point for the child restraints are at the rear of the boot, just in front of the latch for the hatch boot lid. The engineers who designed that component clearly don’t have kids, as for the life of me I have no idea why a car manufacturer would put a child restraint point in that position as the straps severely interfere with the storage space in the boot. It’d have made much more sense to me to have them on the back of the rear seats, that way the boot space in the hatchback is maintained.
Claire and I toyed with the idea of keeping the Mazda for a little while longer but after more discussion amongst ourselves and with family, it seemed as though it was really going to be a major pain – especially once we added in a second set of restraints.
With that in mind, we went on the hunt for a replacement vehicle in the fourth quarter of 2009 but were unable to find something we were interested in at the time. Fortunately we weren’t in any particular rush at the time, so were happy to bide our time to wait for something to pop up and as they say, patience is a virtue.
Claire stumbled onto a 2004 Ford Falcon XR6 on Car Sales and thought it looked fantastic, even with the little rear spoiler! We submitted an inquiry to the Car Sales web site to get in contact with the dealership and when I drove down to Hinterland Toyota at Burleigh to have a look at the car and was completely impressed. The exterior of the car was absolutely pristine, hadn’t been in an accident, no dints, no marks and only a few light grazes on one of the mag wheels. The interior of the car was the same, no wear anywhere in the car or pulled threads in the fabric – it was if the car hadn’t really been used in the last six years. On top of that, with about 95,000km on the odometre – it really hasn’t seen a lot of driving for a car of that age either.
Dealing with Hinterland Toyota was a very easy experience as well, the sales staff were happy, polite, efficient and weren’t pressuring me into a decision. It took about two hours to have Claire’s car valued, which they were happy to do without any real notice when I arrived and were transparent with costs as well which I think is great too. An added bonus of Hinterland Toyota which I didn’t expect was that they offer 175,000km warranty on their vehicles, fixed price servicing in either their Nerang or Burleigh locations and their service centres are open until 11:30PM!
After everything was sorted, handover of the vehicles took less than 30 minutes and I was on my way in our new family car. I provided our personal particulars the day before we took delivery, which meant all of the paper work was ready for me when I arrived – simple but great time saver. I was really surprised it was such a short change over process, I recall spending literally hours at Eagers Mazda in Brisbane when we bought Claire’s car initially – so this was a welcome change.
Claire and I are really happy with our new family car. Claire couldn’t believe it had a slight burble, I think I mentioned it was a happy coincidence. Of course, Claire being the motor head that she is, proudly exclaimed to the world that she now feels like the typical Australian bogan mother – awesome!
I have to thank our parents for their continued advice, help and support over the years. I think if Claire and I can provide as much guidance to our children when they grow up as ours have to us – we’ll be very very proud as it has meant a tremendous amount to the both of us.
It is that time of the year again, I’m now officially 29 years of age!
I woke up this morning slightly bleary eyed to Claire and Hugo wishing me a happy birthday which is fantastic. Being some what of a present fanatic, Claire thought I should open a present immediately and I obliged and received the following completely kick arse gifts:
We set about our morning routine with Hugo and we had pancakes with maple syrup for breakfast. Once that was done, I had to open the Nintendo Wii box, to make sure everything was in order of course. I was impressed with the neat boxing of the components and now easy it was to setup. More importantly, it worked but that took a couple of hours to verify!
As is the tradition, we went to Hogs Breath for lunch which is located on the Gold Coast spit beside Marina Mirage. When I booked, the lady at Hogs Breath mentioned that there was a lot of traffic around today – fantastic to know. I flicked off an SMS to everyone and we were soon on our way. To our surprise, as soon as we got to the M1 overpass at Upper Coomera we could see that all south bound lanes on the M1 were nose to tail and moving very slowly. We later heard on the radio that a car had burst into flames on the motorway and emergency services were on the scene – sure fire way to stop a major arterial if there ever was one.
To get around the huge backlog of traffic, we slipped along the service road and onto Hope Island Road. Fortunately the road was clear but a much slower driving speed as it isn’t a highway. After suffering through a moderate amount of heavy traffic coming through Southport, we managed to make it to Hogs Breath about 20 minutes late.
Andrew and Belinda travelled from Ipswich for lunch, braving the horrific traffic which was great and as a present said they’d help pay for a replacement graphics card since mine finally broke recently. Brendan rode in on his new Kawasaki Ninja, he of course didn’t have to suffer the traffic but he did play on my love of coffee and gave me a couple bags of chocolate coated coffee beans! Kylie, Brett, Hollie, Blake and Summer also joined me for lunch, Blake napped most of the time but Summer was full of beans – she is gorgeous.
Arriving home, Lucy was here waiting for us – which was a little senendipitous as we hadn’t arranged it at all but she arrived only minutes before we got home. Following on from the Nintendo Wii theme, Lucy and Michael gave me WWE Smackdown Vs Raw – which is an American wrestling game for those who don’t follow it. I had a quick game of it but got completely hammered, wasn’t as easy to pick up as tennis or boxing!
I’ve had a great 29th birthday and I’d just like to thank everyone who travelled to the Gold Coast, phoned, SMS’d, instant messaged, emailed and offered well wishes for my birthday. I can say that I have been absolutely spoiled rotten – thank you to everyone for the great presents.
Next year I’ll be knocking on the door of the big three zero!
Toward the end of last week, Claire mentioned that she had a toothache but didn’t take too much notice of it. By the time Friday clicked round, the toothache that she wasn’t paying all that much attention to was well and truly making her pay attention.
Being generally uneasy about dentists, Claire called one of her older sisters for a dentist recommendation. While Anita could offer a suggestion, it was more than likely that the soonest Claire could see anyone was going to be early the following week. At this point, the toothache was severe enough that Claire could barely wait for 9AM to come around to get to the chemist to get some serious pain relief for it. After taking the first two Panadeine Ultra tablets, it provided relief for about two hours – instead of the normal four and then the ice packs came out.
At this point, it seemed quite clear to me that there was no way that Claire was going to be able to make it through to next week (if she was lucky) – so I started calling around some local Gold Coast dentists just before lunch time on Saturday morning in a vein hope that one would be open and be able to see Claire.
The local Pacific Pines Dentist was open, however unable to get Claire in until Monday but referred us to Smile + or Smileplus in Southport. Giving them a quick call, the receptionist was helpful and I got to talk to the dentist within about a minute of calling. They were just about to close up but stayed open for us, which was absolutely fantastic. We left straight away to get into Southport Central and they were both very reassuring for Claire and really set her mind at ease about the whole dental experience.
About an hour and a half later, Claire had her initial consultation, x-rays and a the problematic tooth extracted. To Claire’s surprise, she was feeling considerably better before we’d even left the dental surgery, as the pressure being placed on the nerve was gone.
I think I thanked the dentist & his nurse about half a dozen times while we were there. It was such a refreshing experience to be able to call, when you’re really in need of a specialist service and to be able to get in touch with the specialists. Claire was so impressed with their service, that she voluntarily scheduled another appointment for this Saturday for a general check up, which I think speaks volumes about their service.