This Summer at the Duckpond

Questions, questions...

How have I managed to do no blogging whatsoever over the summer?
How am I already over halfway through this (still fairly unbelievable) pregnancy?
And the eternal blogger cliché - how is it already September?

Answers on a postcard please.



So that was summer 2015. I honestly had no idea back in May at the start of the summer that by the autumn I'd be well into the second trimester and expecting a Findus in January. I mean, we'd started the treatment for our frozen embryo transfer at the end of March but it didn't even cross our minds that it might actually work.

We still managed to get up to a lot of stuff though, even if at times I had to take things a bit more slowly.



Findus went to his/her first Glastonbury festival (I was 10 weeks and 5 days); I did two shifts working down there and then went in on the Sunday evening to see Paul Weller and The Who. I did feel a bit tired during Paul Weller's set so I had a doze while he was playing - I'm sure it looked perfectly fine down there at Pilton!

Oh yeah, and did I mention we met Lionel Richie? (rather than being chauffeured back to the helipad (which is along the lane we work on) he decided he wanted to walk and "enjoy the English countryside")


Me, Andrew, my parents and brother spent a lot of the summer Shaun-hunting in Bristol. Following on from the 'Gromit Unleashed' trail back in 2013, this year it was our woolly friend who descended on the place for the 'Shaun in the City' trail. There were 70 Shauns in total and we managed to spot 59 of them - a fairly respectable number methinks considering my condition! (oh yeah, that's being wheeled out as an excuse from now til January...)

Me and Andrew had our usual trip to Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival at the beginning of August. Back at the start of 2015 we decided to go for the whole week which in the end, proved to be a very good decision indeed as we could spread out the number of shows and I wouldn't get so tired. We still (somehow) managed to pack in 28 of them though, including a live recording of Radio 4's 'Just a Minute' at the BBC Potterrow tent and a blogger meet up with some truly lovely ladies - Denise, Gwen, Alex and Elise (who is an absolute darling and had knitted Findus some gorgeous little booties!). We did well for celebrity spotting in the street too - not including the ones we saw in shows, we also walked past Nina Conti; Rory McGrath; Josh Widdicombe, James Acaster, Mickey Flanagan and Ivo Graham (who were all going to see Jon Ronson at the Assembly Rooms - who was fab); Rob Beckett; Matthew Crosby; Janey Godley; and spot of the week - Richard Osman.

And a Findus update...
Well, he/she is still alive. Despite being a fairly positive person for the rest of my life, I can't help but worry about this little one. I clearly have no trust in my own body. We had our 20 week scan last week (at 19 weeks and 1 day) - it was 8am in the morning and this baby is obviously not a morning person as it spent most of the scan curled up in a cosy little ball asleep. The sonographer was lovely and got me to do some kind of belly dancing move to try and wake the baby up - all you got then was it shuffling round for about 10 seconds and then going back to sleep. It did a perfect impression of someone who really didn't want to be woken up that early! Long story short, we have to go back on 18th September for another scan so they can complete all the necessary checks (and hopefully find out whether it's a boy or a girl!).



Hope you've all had good summers!