Circles

It's been a while since my last blog entry, a lot has happened!

I became a dad at 1102 on Sunday 1st March 2009, our beautiful daughter Nieve was born 5 weeks early, but in pretty good shape considering. It's one of those moments in life when everything anyone has ever said about it suddenly rings true. We were so lucky to live so close to the hospital. At that particular moment I was supposed to be in Coalville in the Midlands running a Clicker Squad training session, as fate would have it Toyah thought something wasn't quite right on the Friday night so we went up to the hospital on the Saturday morning half expecting to be sent home with a pack of antibiotics. I wasn't completely surprised when the midwife informed us that Toyah was having contractions and hadn't realised, at that moment I was glad that we'd brought the hospital bag!

What followed was a mammoth twenty-five hour labour that Toyah handled incredibly. All fathers will relate to my feelings of helplessness and the sense of being pretty useless, although giving support is crucial it doesn't make you feel any more useful! I won't go into the details but it was a reasonably normal birth. Nieve was whisked away by a paediatrician to Special Care where she spent four nights to get a little help with her breathing for the first day and general observation, and it wasn't until the following Saturday night that we finally 'escaped' after a little bout of jaundice and photo-therapy.

All the normal stuff has followed, long sleepless nights (especially for Toyah), lots of fun times with nappies and all the goey smelly stuff that babies do.

It truly is the best gift in life that any person can have!

Karate has continued to challenge and interest throughout. The club has taken on a couple of new juniors, the seniors has also levelled out nicely for the time being. In addition we were very privileged to have a couple of visits from Senpais Pearson senior and junior from Tunbridge Wells. To put this into context, Senpai Ray snr. may hold the rank of Nidan but he has, at one time or another, graded every single member of my immediate family, as well as having taught every single one of my own instructors (including Norman King, Dave Allen, Barry Henniker, Ray Bond, Paul Gibby) at one time or another. At 72 years of age he continues to train regularly at Crawley under Shihan David Pickthall as well as teaching at Tunbridge Wells so it was a great honour to have him and his son Ray jnr. (and his grandson!) come along and train at the dojo and one that I hope will be repeated in the future.