Yoghurt Faced Girl

It's been awhile since we've uploaded a picture of Isabella, so here's one of our yoghurt faced girl taken last month.

Lucas One Month Old Today

Lucas is one month old today and yes we all need more sleep, much more sleep, but that's just part of having a newborn! Here's a picture of me holding him aged one month.

Lucas is three weeks old

Time has already flown by so fast. He has grown so much in these 3 weeks. He is staring around at the world trying to figure everything out. Grandma thinks he will be an engineer because he seems to be dissecting things with his eyes.
We had a wonderful 3 and a half weeks with Grandma. She left yesterday – we were very sad to see her go. She was a supremely big help and made our lives so much easier in our transition from one baby to two. My sister Andrea has come over to step into the void left by Grandma as Bella’s special playmate - lucky for us.
We celebrated Jason’s birthday last week with cake and a nice dinner. He loves his fish tank and continues to add to the fish community. Isabella is showing the same interest and helps Daddy feed the fish. She also knows all the names of the fish. Very impressive!!

The Fish Tank Arrives

The day after Lucas was delivered our fish tank was delivered. It’s my (early) birthday present that I picked out and had delivered before Marika even had a chance to see what she was buying me, by the time Marika and Lucas came home from the hospital the tank was partly set-up, well it was in cycling stage getting the water and filter ready for the starter fish. I decided to go with a more natural style set-up, Marika was keen for a shipwreck, and sadly we didn’t find suitable wrecks though I did concede and we have a natural style tank with a holey barrel and I’m looking for some fake rock caves. As for the fish that has been a bit of an issue, we started with six Serpae tetras as I was told they were hardy fish for a new tank, I though okay, tetras as fun happy little fish, oops my booboo. Serpae’s are feisty little buggers which can be fun to watch when they are chasing each other around the tank, however they also chase and attack the other fish we have. We also added two Otto Catfish to try and keep the snails under control; the snails were compliments of the plants we added. And the story continues, we now only have one Otto, the other was found partly eaten in the Serpae’s favourite hiding place. And the Serpae’s have also been having a go at our three Bumblebee Gobies which are now missing their tail fins, thankfully the Gobies have big mouths and now will face off against the Serpaes. I’ve come to the decision that the Serpae’s have to go for the good of this community tank. Nearly two days have passed since I typed the previous sentence and the Serpaes are gone back to the shop. I replaced them with ten Cardinal tetras, there funky fish similar to the Neon tetras I had as a kid, I also picked up another two Ottos to keep my single remaining one company. So now there are sixteen little fish in a big tank. I’ve spent some time working out what fish I should get based on their water and community compatibility, the Bumblebees don’t match my plan as they like slightly salty water, however they were with freshwater fish in the shop and they seem to be doing quite well in my freshwater tank, I’ll have to keep an eye on them and find them a new home if they start to look sickly. I want to get more fish as the tank looks quite devoid of fishes, but know that I should wait so I don’t mess-up the water quality. I’ll check the water quality again on Monday and if all is well I go fishing.

Empty Tank

Some Set-up

More Set-up

Finished (for now) with limited Fish

Bath Time - Sleeping Yellow Baby

Saturday was Lucas’s first bath, well first bath at the hands of his parents. Man I had forgotten how to bathe a newborn, had to watch the video of Isabella’s first bath as a refresher. Lucas was very active in the womb, and he still likes to wiggle, bath time was no exception, I had my hands full just trying to keep hold of him. We were just about finished with his bath and I thought to myself, mmmm the sprinkler attachment hasn’t fired. So I told Lucas to let it rip, I need to be christened at some stage, instantaneously he let rip, by the amount of flow he had been holding it in awhile. So I’ve been christened and my shirt was washed straight away. It’s good to see he listens to his father, his sister on the other hands usually chooses not to.

We haven’t been lucky with the sleeping again, he seems to like cluster feeding for the first half of the night, after that we can usually get longer sleeps from him. His yellowness started to get bad yesterday and the fear of heading back into hospital was swelling around our heads, thankfully yesterday was sunny and we were able to bathe regularly in that lovely sunshine resulting in much less yellowness today, let me say woohoo to not going back to hospital.

We are all well and would like to say sorry to the people we haven’t been able to get back to. Hopefully most people understand that much of mummy & bub’s day revolves around sleeping, eating and very little of anything else. Grandma & Isabella are keeping each other occupied and Daddy, aka me has been studying and making time to set up our new fish tank, it’s starting to look good, driftwood, plants, it’s just lacking the fish but thankfully it’s mostly cycled/matured and ready for starter fish.

P.S. I’ve uploaded some video of Mummy & Lucas to our video site.

Lucas With Eyes Open