Announcing the birth of… Abigail Ione Moorhouse on Sunday 8th October 2006 at 21:01 Update… She weighed 5 lb 12 oz and was born at home in the birthing pool, just as we’d hoped. This was a particular answer to prayer, as earlier the midwives had told us that there was a possibility we would have to go into the birthing centre, as the labour ward was short staffed. However God provided us with 2 excellent midwives who were keen to ensure we had the home birth that we wanted, and they battled for us for it with the hospital.

Contractions are now 2 minutes apart and lasting between 60 and 90 seconds. The midwifes are here just assessing here…more later

Yesterday things were quite variable after the initial burst of activity. While we were waiting for the midwife we had a surprise visit from Michael at the door, which threw us completely as he didn’t look much like a midwife! By the time the midwife arrived the contractions had died down quite a bit, but she checked the usual stuff and Laura’s temperature and all seemed fine. Last night though, Laura had a very disturbed night and is now very tired, but the contractions are coming stronger.

Laura has gone into labour - I think it all started about 1 o’clock in the morning. She woke me up at about 5 o’clock and told me that they were getting more regular. I was completely out of it and didn’t understand what she was telling me until I’d got up and come downstairs! I thought we were supposed to be going somewhere! Well she’s now all wired up to her TENS machine and contractions seem to be about every 4 minutes.

After seeing that one of the contestents on Masterchef this week had cooked butternut squash risotto, it made us fancy it ourselves. I had a look for a recipe in some of the usual places, and then decided to make one myself (with a little help from the example risotto on the back of the rice packet). 1 Onion (finely chopped) Handful of mushrooms (chopped) 1 litre of light vegetable stock

After talking about different bible software with some people at life group on Sunday, I thought I’d do a bit more investigation into some of the free bible software available. The main software I’ve looked at so far is: In the beginning was the Word, The SWORD Project (for Windows). I also tried MyBible - but didn’t get past the installation, as it failed to download the texts. Here’s my initial findings, I intend to investigate some others and post some more details as I use them a bit more later on…

This weekend Laura and I celebrated our fourth wedding anniversary by having a nice relaxing weekend away over at my parents caravan on Hayling Island (more on that to follow). It’s amazing how time has flown by in these four years, but it’s been wonderful and lots of different things in each one of them! 2002 - 2003 - My Graduation, preparing for Uruguay 2003 - 2004 - Mostly in Uruguay

…awaiting new content… Matthew 18:5

Last weekend I finally got my laptop to talk to my wireless network in Ubuntu, I’d tried following some instructions before when I had Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy) on the laptop, but never got anywhere with it. I know I could have changed my network to use WEP instead, but I didn’t want to have to change too much just to get my laptop to work occasionaly when I booted into Linux.

Time is flying by - Laura is now 32 weeks pregnent so we’ve got less than 2 months left before our little daughter is due to arrive. It’s exciting and at the same time scary! I’m really looking forward to being a dad, but it’s quite daunting at the same time The other morning before I went to work, Laura was very tired and had drifted back off to sleep, I put my hand on her bump, and our little baby recognised my hand there and started kicking (or poking) my hand - It was lovely!