Christmas 08

The 13.46 London Midland train from Euston to Crewe was absolutely rammed. Like many people I was too far up the platform for the tiny little train that eventually pulled in and there was no hope of a seat. Travelling on Christmas Eve is surely something that no sane person would do if they had any choice but of course so many of us have to, one way or another.

There is an old Master Card advert in which a father uses his Credit Card to buy the last plane to anywhere, then a train ticket and then a hire car. He makes it back to see his daughter on Christmas Eve and the punch line as ever is that it is priceless.

This year our daughter is six thousand miles away and we're not going to see her. It will all be different next year but for the moment we are treading water, hoping time will pass and at the same time increasingly concerned about how much we have to do and how soon.

Christmas Eve for us this year was spent with Sarah, Rob and Jessica. In the morning we were up and ready for Jess's second Christmas and delighted in her opening her presents. After a grand breakfast once Gill and Chris had arrived it was off to Sue and Graham's for mince pies and the chance to see Anne and Michael. It was lovely to see everyone but the real highlight for us was when Sam, Philip and Rebecca arrived with their new dog - Bobby!

We were so relieved to see just how happy he was with them. There is no doubt that he is loved by every one of them and that he now has the position in a family that he deserves. It's still a shame for Billy to have lost his playmate but Billy couldn't complain much because he did have his sister and two nephews this time. It was then back to S, R & J's for Christmas lunch.

The turkey was perfect and once we had had our fill Rob, Jess and I took the dogs out for a walk before returning for a well deserved pudding. Then it was back to the present opening for Jessica. We finally got round to opening the adults' presents once she had got to bed and settled down to some television.

On Boxing day we were off to the Lomas household for another fanastic feast, this time of lamb. The boxing day walk comprised two west highland white terriers, four chocolate labradors, one golden retriever and some people. What a sight we were to behold - although not too closely if you had any sense.

The 27th was Chris' birthday (21 again) and that too involved copious amounts of fine food, a touch of alcohol and dog walking in the freezing cold.

And then it was over and we were back home. We've had good news that Harriet is doing very well and are trying to enjoy a little bit of calm before the next storm. We will be shipping animals across the country and flying ourselves and our mothers to the other side of the world while desperately trying to sort out the legal situation. It's going to be horrendous but like that train journey there is no alternative and the destination is priceless.

Serenity, or lack thereof

There is a chill, frosty wind moaning through the city . In keeping with the season I am trying to remain phlegmatic but that is far from easy.

I suspect it is a similar story everywhere. Those who have survived have become more nervous and more suspicious of each other. The main liberation for me in the run up to the redundancies last week was that it really did not matter what you did, you could not change anything. But now there is a palpable sense of activity. People want to impart their vision and strategy to anyone who will listen and are fiercely protective of their spheres of influence. Even people whom I consider to be friends have warned me off their turf if I stray too far.

There's such miserable uncertainty everywhere. I have tried to get something out of our UK lawyers, by phone and by email but with no success. Our US lawyer is deeply uninspiring; at one moment promising to reply soon and at the other reacting in a surprised way when we follow up a week later. All we have received from him is a bill charging us 60 dollars for answering the email with no credit for us passing on our knowledge of UK law which his colleague had asked for.

I am working at least 10 hours a day during which time I need to chase these people who treat me with such contempt. If I charged £350 a hour then the second baby would already be started. We have deliberately reduced our Christmas presents to mere tokens this year and everyone understands why. Yet the various Christmas parties and team dinners that the directors subsidise still mean another four hundred pounds or so down the drain. Yes I sound like Scrooge and yes people were grateful and they don't just assume that it will happen but that's how I feel and it is not phlegmatic.

We know so little really about what is going to happen to us. The sword of Damocles that is our immigration problem continues to hover above us and there is still so much to sort out. The things we can control completely we have done. If Harriet arrived today in Field View the nursery has enough stuff to cope, admittedly with a few temporary expedients but it would be feasible. The things we partially control we need to get a move on with (I am having a nightmare finding long term car hire that costs less than what I reckon a brand new GM or Ford would cost in the current environment). Then there are the many and varied things which are beyond our control but not beyond influencing us.

Some of you may been turning your thoughts to the serenity prayer here but thanks to Wikipedia I have found a secular version that pleases me better:

For every ailment under the sun

There is a remedy, or there is none;

If there be one, try to find it;

If there be none, never mind it.

Surviving to fight another day

We knew that the redundancies were to be announced on Thursday, which by unhappy coincidence was the day of the department's Christmas party. The good news is that I was not made redundant but the news still left me feeling slightly flat.

Partly this was because I did know people who had been made redundant but also there was a nagging sense that this is by no means the end of the story. The reality is that the dislocation in the financial markets has been so severe that it is difficult to have confidence about anything and I don't expect that to change any time soon.

And yet office life still has to go on. We are approaching the end of year which brings lots of regulatory and reporting deadlines so we are extremely busy. I am hopeful that there will be no repeat of last year's frantic round of meetings in the last week of the year and because Christmas is a Thursday I should be sure of having at least four days off.

I'm in Scotland at the moment because it's my niece's 21st birthday and also a significant one for my aunt. We will be returning early in the New Year with Scamper and Pippin who will be staying here while we are in the US. So if you are walking the streets of Falkirk in 2009 and see my parents running down the High Street after two little white dogs I would advise that you steer well clear!

Last year at Christmas we were anticipating the beginning of the medical procedures and we expected the baby to be here already. As it happens we are again spending a Christmas waiting around for the life changing event to finally hit home. My mother warned me today as we were looking for some things for me in the shops that next year I too will be in the queue for Santa Claus. Maybe but Santa if you're reading this there are a few things I would like from you this year - a healthy, safe delivery above all and if there's room in the stocking I'd like immigration problems sorted out, someone to invent a TARDIS to keep all the toys and clothes in and finally Scamper to lose her wanderlust. Pretty please?

One day at a time

It's difficult to know what to write at times like these because situations are changing so quickly. Committing thoughts to paper (or to some server in the world wide web) is threatening because a few days hence they might look completely stupid, misguided or irrelevant.

Our situation can currently be reduced to numbers: 45, 66, 650 and 5,300. The easy ones to guess are that there are 45 days till Gill and Jay fly to the US and 66 days until the due date. The less happy numerals are the fact that my employer announced 650 job cuts in the UK on Tuesday and then on Thursday announced that 5,300 were to go world wide following some poor results from the investment bank in the fourth quarter.

Last week I heard from a colleague in the US who had been part of the earlier redundancies in the US branch. He was a person I rated highly and that made it all the worse.

So we just have to carry on doing the things that are within our control. Harriet's room is beginning to take shape since we now have a chest of drawers to keep her already staggering amount of clothes safe. We've got the sterilising kit and a there are a few more bits and pieces that give bright spots of colour to the room. Today, we need to bite the bullet and go Christmas shopping and it all has to be done because I will be going up to Scotland next week.

There's no easy way to end this and tie everything up nicely. Of course we are still so excited and grateful for Harriet, while being still so concerned about her as we enter the final straight. The job situation does not help but I do still have one for the moment and I just need to keep going. Whatever will be, will be.

Which dialect am I speaking today?

The EU drive to standardise bananas is starting to make sense to me. My head is spinning with legal matters and I am now rarely sure what version of English I am supposed to be speaking. There is no area more country specific and more jargon specific than the law and talking to two legal systems is very confusing. The American terms seem to be lawyer and attorney but I am not sure what the hierarchy is. In the UK we have solicitors and barristers and the latter we refer to as silks (if you are in Scotland a barrister is called an advocate).

I have now finally spoken to the immigration lawyer/solicitor/god knows what and he has given us some interesting news. It's not so much a law we are fighting against but a 'regulation'. Apparently there is a new regulation that was introduced in 2006 that means that if a British citizen is named on the Birth Certificate of a child born abroad that child will inherit British citizenship. The caveat, as I mentioned before, is that this applies only if the mother is unmarried.

Our surrogate is going through a divorce at the moment and if that is complete our immigration problems are over because Harriet will be a British citizen. In theory all we do is register her birth at the British consulate in Los Angeles and they will issue us with a British birth certificate. Then she should get her passport although currently the lawyer is fighting with the Home Office to get the consulates to understand that there is no requirement for 'Registration' (whatever that is) and indeed in his view this thing Registration would be illegal anway. This sort of confusion is typical.

If she is still married then we are going to need the Home Office to give guidance on what they would do. The lawyer will write to the senior civil servant to alert him that this case may happen and that they should be prepared to give a view. We have also been in contact with our local MP, who sent as an encouraging letter this week offering to help us.

So it's all going on. That's even before I have mentioned that our surrogate has started Braxton Hicks, which we know from the books is a possibility at seven months, but certainly focuses the mind on how close we are getting. Work is also very active and I had the misfortune this week to learn that one of my colleagues whom I liked has lost his job. He was one of the most able people I know and it brought into sharp focus how savage the market is at the moment. I am expecting further news in the next week. It will not be a happy Christmas for so many people but whatever happens at work and in the courts at least we still have the most important reason in the world to be happy.

Frustrations

It's been a long time since I have written here. Mostly that's due to the confusion and then frustration that we have been feeling over the UK law and deciding what to do about it.

The good news is that we have found someone who understands our case relatively well and who has already obtained a barrister's opinion. The bad new is what that opinion says.

The following is what we understand. The UK law will regard the surrogate as the mother come what may and will not pay any attention to Californian birth certificates etc. UK surrogacy law will allow for something called a parental order which can be used to extinguish the rights of the surrogate but this option is not open to us. The current Human Embryology and Fertility Act only allows married couples to obtain a parental order. There is an Act of Parliament currently in progress that will extend the rights to civil partnerships but this will not apply to us since the surrogacy took place abroad. Even more frustrating is the fact that the UK law will regard the husband of the surrogate if she is married as the father. If she is unmarried at the time of the birth this will be much simpler since it will be possible for Jonathan to be regarded as the father and the child to inherit his UK citizenship. Otherwise we will need to prove genetic parentage. In UK law I would be nothing to her though.

The best we can do is obtain a residency order. Both of us can apply for this and it would grant parental rights to both of us but it would not extinguish the rights of the surrogate under UK law. Yes it would be extremely unlikely that any UK family court would judge it to be in the child's best interests to be taken away from us but it is the mere possibility that is so infuriating. Adoption is not a possibility in the UK because we have been advised that it is a criminal offence to bring a child into the UK from abroad with the intention of adoption. This is supposed to protect children from the developing world being trafficked for adoption - you must only go through international adoption agencies prior to bringing the child back - but it affects us nonetheless.

So there we go - the law wants to stick its nose in, it doesn't care what decision a court of a civilised western ally has reached and it presumes to understand parentage based on the rules of the seventeenth century. We will just need to obtain a residency order and grin and bear it but it doesn't mean we have to like it.

Leaving that to one side we were delighted to hear today that she is doing extremely well and is getting into position. Six thousand miles away we feel so distant but it gave us such a tremendous boost to hear the news and we simply cannot wait till she arrives. J has booked his flights out and will be there in sixty days - it all seems to be getting rather close. There's the small matter of Christmas to deal with but then it is very much all systems go.

The Vocative Case

One of the little differences for us is that we have to decide what to be called. I have every hope that in due course Harriet will have an affinity for numbers but I don't want her to start from the beginning with Daddy 1 and Daddy 2. In time she will decide how she will call us but initially at least we are going to go with Daddy for J and Pops for me.

The nursery is also taking shape. J has rearranged the house into yet another configuration. Amazingly the 'little' bedroom, which has hitherto been little more than a storage room, has become our bedroom. It is small but not oppressively so and in fact reminds me of the kind of double bedroom one would have in London where space is at such a premium.

The result of this is that our former bedroom has now become a very large guest room and the front room, the largest of them all, has become Harriet's nursery. We don't yet have a cot but we do of course have J's Moses basket, which his mother made for Kevan and all the children have slept in. We also have a travel cot, which is up and it now looks like a nursery. There a few hints of pink springing up everywhere to liven it up.

One thing that should not be going pink is the thermometer. It was a surprise to me to learn just how cool a baby's room should be (about 18C). The thermometer glows blue if it's too cold, red if it's too warm and yellow if it's just right. The heating is off and it's cold in the morning but it stays stubbornly yellow.

The upstairs of the house looks as good as it ever has. The downstairs also looks good if you please just avert your eyes from the kitchen. Hopefully some more of the puppies will be going very soon and they really need it because they are all getting a bit boisterous.

This year we even have names for the puppies because to identify them they have coloured cat collars. So now we can address the offending puppy properly ("Purple collar please stop biting my feet", "Black Collar please stop sitting in the food bowl") and we notice their individual characters much more.

If we know the name the new owner has chosen we will use that. The largest boy has the name Hendrix, which is universally agreed to be a great name. Names are such a vital part of our identity and most of us have different names with different groups of people (you can't be friends with Kevan on Facebook but you can be friends with Chester, who seems to have a very good grasp of technology for a Labrador who is a few months old).

I like the idea of being Pops because it is resonant of her American birth and Daddy seems too babyish for me. I hope she enjoys seeing people's surprise when she announces that she was born in Sacramento, California. I wonder what names she will choose for herself and whether she will ever use her middle name or something completely different.

What's in a name, well quite a lot but not as much as I suspect will be in that nursery in its final form. We have been touched by people's generosity already and for that we are truly grateful.

Off to the Lawyers

Our initial trip to the lawyer a few weeks ago was something of a disaster. The young lawyer refused point blank to see us as a couple and so I went into the room first. I told our story as she sat stony faced opposite me. It's not that she was being deliberately unfriendly, I think it is more likely that she was just young and out of her depth, but it still felt bad. At the end she confessed that it was not something she could advise on and that she would pass on the details to the partner in family law.

The partner did get back to us within an hour and reassured us that she would be able to take on the case. We had the trip to go see the scan first but scheduled a meeting with her this week. This initial meeting went well - the focus was on how to formalise my relationship in UK law with the child. She promised that she would research the Californian law and get back to us. We felt good that we were finally making progress.

The next day was less good as she explained to us how the UK law regards surrogate births and what it might mean for us. Apparently the Embryology Act is one of the few that was not updated following the introduction of Civil Partnerships and there is a clear distinction between a marred couple of opposite sex and us. I don't want to dwell too much on the details because it is too early to be confident about anything. She will be consulting with barrister friends and doing more research.

Everything will be fine we know, it's just a shame that it is not as straightforward as we might have hoped initially. We have consoled ourselves with the thought that if the UK authorities harass us too much we can go claim asylum in California where our status as parents is unambiguous. Not a bad plan B after all.

The Long and Short of It

There are two ways to think about the time remaining until our daughter is born. Either the seventeen weeks (we hope) seems to be a very long time to wait and we need to fill it somehow or it seems like nothing and we feel hopelessly unprepared. We have both feelings at different times in the day.

In any case we do need to get a move on with the preparations and yesterday we both went to Mothercare. This was the second time, after the trip to Target in Sacramento, that we had gone looking for baby stuff together. I am perfectly sure that no-one there gave us a second thought because they are wrapped up in their own worlds but I did feel very conspicuous and nothing, certainly not rational thought, can make that go away. Yet it's the beginning of something that we just have to get used to one way or the other because Harriet needs somewhere to sleep, a mode of transport and seemingly millions of other things. Our little hang-ups just don't come into it and very soon these concerns will seem laughable.

This afternoon we have done some on-line research on prams, high chairs etc while waiting for some people to come and see the puppies. They didn't show up - the third time that this has happened. It's absolutely infuriating but poor Billy is the loser because it curtailed his walk. On the positive side some of the people who have come and chosen puppies have been very interested in what we are doing and were really keen to hear the results of the scan. That is encouraging that these complete strangers whom we have met through the unrelated area of selling puppies have been so kind.

Seventeen weeks seems sometimes long, sometimes short. But here's one number that's scary whichever way you look at it - there are only 74 days till Christmas! Good luck everyone.