Resuming normal programming with news in brief.

• Pregnancy has reached 23 weeks.
• I don't enjoy being pregnant.
• I hate the clothes the most. Why do they make the legs tent-size too. My legs aren't pregnant.
  
• When the baby is born, the average age of our children will decrease from 6.67 to 5.
• The age range of our children will increase from under 5 years to over 9 years.
• The kids are really excited about having a new sibling.
• The sibling in question is a boy.
• I am glad about this for Danny and for the baby.
• My dream family, a long time ago, was two girls followed by two boys.
• The odds of this happening in a four child family are 1 in 16, or 6.25%. It feels a little weird that things have worked out this way.
• I recently had some very minor spotting and while there is nothing at all to worry about, it did start me feeling what it would be like if anything happened to the baby - upset and panicky. My only other experience of pregnancy bleeding was a major bleed with Lauren at 7 months and I was hospitalised for a week and on home rest for another week.
• Peter asked if this reaction meant that I would want to try again if something went wrong. The answer would be no, which I think he finds odd. But there is no comparison between a baby and this baby.

We have been busy.

The girls are rehearsing for a show at the end of the month. Lauren's ballet group and Robyn's modern group are both doing dances in the show, which incorporates the whole dancing studio - kids from age six to 18. So there has been quite a flurry of rehearsals and sorting out costumes.

Robyn recently wrote two entrance exams for schools for next year. We haven't heard the results yet and are very torn over choice of schools for her. She seemed to enjoy the exams though and wasn't remotely stressed by the process.

Robyn is reading the Harry Potter series now and is loving it. She is currently on book four. We haven't let them watch past the third movie and I suppose I will have to revise that decision once she had read book four. It is tricky to manage this sort of thing with kids at different ages.

Lauren recently lost her bottom two teeth. There was much excitement. The tooth fairy service seems to be a little unreliable though. For tooth number two she didn't collect the tooth until the second night. We thought maybe it was because Peter didn't really go to bed but was messing around on the computer for ages, or dozing on the couch, and so the fairy was too shy to come in. He had strict instructions to have an early night the next night - and the fairy was then brave enough to come. She felt bad about being late and left an extra 50c to make up for it.

We had Danny's party about three weeks ago and it went very well. I must put some pictures up. We had a pirate party with a treasure hint culminating in buried treasure that the kids had to dig out of the ground with shovels. The main part of the treasure was a spray can of party streamer for each child. Lots of fun. We also played Pelt-the-Pirate, in which Peter donned a pirate hat and was chased around the garden and pelted with water balloons in exchange for loot (sweets). He would toss a handful of sweets out on a successful hit. The cake was a treasure chest which we have now made for three fourth birthday parties.

The kids and I had a wonderful time visiting our friends in Wilderness in the Eastern cape just before Easter. I missed Peter a lot though. Not sure if I would want to do it again without him. We had a lot of fun swimming, beach combing, building sand castles, browsing around the markets, swimming in the river and hiking.

I recently applied for a new post at work, and got it. It is more of a technical position than I am currently in. There were two other candidates. In my favour were my years of experience; counting against me were my part-time status and the fact that I am going to be disappearing for maternity leave in September. The whole thing was and is complicated and made awkward by the fact the the position is in Peter's team. Anyhow, hopefully things will settle down and maybe I will start to enjoy work more. I've been pretty miserable since I came back from my contract at the beginning of March. In Peter's area there should be more of the work I enjoy and less bureaucratic rubbish.

Speaking of maternity leave, we recently got a dividend payout at work and it is enough to cover what my maternity leave will cost (not to mention bring relief to two credit cards in distress). I get four months on half-pay and then I will as usual take two additional months unpaid. It is nice not to have that financial stress hanging over us.

Speaking of returning to work after my maternity leave, I haven't yet got a solution for looking after the baby in the mornings. I wish I could take 18 months rather than six.

Speaking of work, I am currently, while at work, baby sitting Lauren's digipet. I have just fed it a fish, a hambuger and an apple and it seems to have cheered up.