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.