Month: October 2007

Dear All,

Announcement: Family Pajon-Silva Upgrade 3.0, Release of Louisa 1.0

The best, cutest, prettiest, cleanest and optimised “code” we ever had done. Louisa 1.0 was released on Tuesday 30th October 2007, at 5.11 and 45 seconds, at home.

Weighing 3.16 kg of top high-end hardware based upon almost 4 billions of genetic code using a selective Darwinism approach in a exactly 50/50 percent parents’ genetic code contribution, the most advanced package designed by Nature Inc.

Her CPU is composed of tens of billions of cores, following a neural programmation setting the base for automatic and continuous self-learning and self-updating. She works at normal room temperature and has a very sophisticate cooling system. She has the last word in antivirus protection. She runs by now solely on breast-milk and she’s completely wireless.

Although no localisations are pre-defined, she’s capable of learning any languages, however she eventually will be available in French, English and Portuguese, at least. For the moment she can only report problems by loud screams.

Unfortunately she comes with no manuals and no warranty at all, but she can potentially last for a century or more. Released under Human Rights license. Nevertheless, she’s an only one entity and no backups are possible; even being cloneable in a near future, she’ll still remain unique.

Louisa, Anne & Alan.

Our little girl Louisa was born at home yesterday at 5.11am on Tuesday 30th October. She was 3.16kg. After my water broken the day before at 5am, I started to have mild contractions around noon. I called the midwife around 9am, she came at 11am to check how things were going. Around 8pm the midwife on call for that night, Lorraine, gave us a ring to check how things were progressing. But at 10pm, I rang her up because I needed help! And Lorraine arrived around 11pm. And all went well at home with the help of the water pool. Unfortunately the 3rd stage of labour was in the hospital because my placenta didn’t come out. I ended up having a spinal anesthesia and a manual removal of my placenta. Mum and baby are now at home.

Anna Youngs, my yoga teacher, is absolutely right, breathing is essential for labour. Without proper breathing techniques I would not have delivered Louisa at home. The only pain relief I had was the TENS machine at the beginning and the birth pool at the end and all the way through was what I learn at the yoga course, at the preparation workshop with Anna and at the NCT classes. But it was not enough to have been to the yoga courses, my husband and the midwife Lorraine helped me so much that they made me believe I would be able to go through it. It is really the combination of what I’ve learned with Anna during all these weeks and being with great people during the labour that I could make this fabulous journey to give birth to my little one. The 3rd stage of labour for the delivery of the placenta is just bad luck… there is always something that you cannot predict!

The first pictures of our little one Louisa are available here: http://picasaweb.google.com/alanwilter/LouisaPajonSilva &
http://picasaweb.google.com/pajanne/200710_LouisaPajonSilva

After night month… exactly 39 weeks + 6 days, only one day before the official due date! We are waiting our little one very happily and peacefully 🙂

Even if we don’t use the pool for the birth, we have a really nice “jacuzzi” and a nice pool for our little one. It took 45min to fill it up and almost 2 hours the next day to empty it. But I found it really relaxing and I am really looking forward to use it for the birth.

We met our new midwife Sue who is going to replace Michele. She did the usual check up and all was fine: baby heart beat, mum-to-be blood pressure and urine test. Our baby is still not in the best position… we are working on it to make her/him turns. We also talked about home birth and water birth. All went very well, she is really nice too!

We have decided to get more space for our future little bedmate! We have reorganized our bedroom. Mum-to-be and Dad-to-be seem ready for his/her arrival at 39 weeks 🙂

Earlier we had a meeting with my NCT mum-to-be classmates at home. Petra, Sally & Ginny came along to have tea. I’ve made a chocolate cake and a pear tart.

We first went to pick up some baby clothes from Marta, a little lovely girl who is almost one year old and who’s mother is Krystina, a colleague of Alan. We came back with a lot of clothes!!! Thanks to them 🙂
Then we went for a dinner at Catherine and Nicolas’ place with Bego & Miguel. We spent a lovely evening!

Sarah and Andrew came for their second visit and we had a great time together. The topic of the visit was about my feelings during pregnancy and I also talked a lot about work relationship and family.

Because we have decided to go for a home birth, we were entitle to have a presentation scan. That was really great to see our baby once again 😉 Even if now our baby is too big to have good pictures (so sorry, no picture this time…).
The scan confirms that the head of our little one is down, but the back is against my back, so called cephalic dorso-posterior. It is not the best position. The best one is cephalic occiput anterior when the baby is head down facing your back, with is back on one side of the front of your tummy. So I am going to work hard to try to make our baby turns by walking more, going to swim and crawling around on hands and knees for 30min every day.
Otherwise everything else is fine even if our baby doesn’t turn. The estimated weight during that scan of our baby is 3.035g.

It was our last NCT antenatal class but we still now keep in touch with our classmates. We’re gonna have a coffee all together at our place next Monday. We also going to have a reunion day in about 4 weeks after the last due date with Alex our teacher.
As during these 6 classes, we learned a lot of useful things. This last class was about breastfeeding and how to cope with sleep deprivation. Each of us got a different schedule for a different kind of baby, ours was only sleeping 9 hours per day and never more than one our in a row… it’s going to be tough if our little one is like that 😉