Website relaunch

Those of you who know where my work website is will find that it has finally been relaunched, entirely powered by WordPress. I’m pretty pleased with it.

Jab

Polio – check

Diphtheria – check

Whooping cough – check

Hib – check

Tetanus – check

Meningitis C – check

One sore and irritable infant – check

On nappies

Two things:

  • I’m never going to look at a jar of Loyd Grossman curry sauce the same way ever again.
  • Why don’t we have this service available here? Apparently, this company is now offering this service in Australia, the Netherlands and California. Let’s just hope that it is a matter of time, as I’d certainly feel much happier knowing that Tom’s pooped pants were being recycled.

Four minute nuisance

I have Akismet installed on this blog. Today, it caught its 50,000th spam comment since installation. That’s 50,000 spams in just 139 days or 360 spam comments per day – one every four minutes. Which begs two questions – if everyone used Akismet, would spam commenting stop? And how does anyone survive *without* Akismet?

Mmmmmm pi

I was listening to the radio this morning and was heartened to learn that today is International Pie Day. I had visions of celebrating with some pastry-surrounded-meat concoction.

Unfortunately, it turns out that today is International Pi Day, which is far less exciting.

Redesign and upgrades

I’m currently redesigning my work website, moving the whole thing across to WordPress and using the Pages feature to generate the non-blog content. So far, it’s been a mostly enjoyable experience, with only the discovery that forms break TinyMCE to spoil the party. I’ll let you know when I launch it.

Meanwhile, I notice that there is a WordPress security update. How tiresome. Guess I’d best get it.

In other news, we had a builder pop round this morning. He actually turned up when he said he would. Amazing.

Favour

I’m having an email crisis. Can someone send me a gmail invite please? Thanks.

UPDATE: thanks to Paul R, Pete, Vaughan and Meg – all very quick off the mark. A combination of changing to the Gmail SMTP server and increasing the timeout time on the server, the problem is resolved. Phew.

Small successes

Avid comment readers will know that we have introduced formula feeding for Tom as a supplement to boob-milk. It allows us a little more flexibility, in that I’m the one responsible for preparation and application of the bottle, giving H a well-earned rest. The plan is also that it allows us a bit more sleep, as a bottle tends to leave baby feeling more full and less inclined to snack.

Well, based on just two nights’ experience, it seems to have worked. Sunday night was reasonably good but last night was the best yet – bottle at 10pm, then a feed at 3-ish and another around 7am. H and I are both feeling much better for getting something approaching a decent night’s sleep – we’re probably better able to cope with the demands of the day. Spectacular smelly orange poo is the downside, but we can cope with that with the aid of a gas mask and full chemical protection suit.

We plan to keep using the free mum-milk for at least another month and then make the transition to 100% formula feeding, although that depends on how things go over the next few weeks. At the moment, we’re using just one bottle a day. But we think that now is the best time to do this – six weeks of 100% boob-milk has been good for Tom and good for mother-baby bonding. And boob-milk is free, whereas formula is about £7 per tin, plus sterilizing costs.

 

In other non-baby news, it looks like we might make some progress on finally getting the repairs done to the leaky lead flashing around our chimney. I’m slaving over a hot laptop, trying to keep/catch up with work, including installing a blog on my work website to replace the news page (obvious really – should have done it ages ago). And I’ve been doing some work on the garden, clearing dead trees, trimming the hedge and psyching myself up for attacking the major project that is the front garden. Maybe this weekend?