My sister had a baby last week! I'm dead excited - 8lb 12 oz, a little girl called Caitlin. Really hard to explain the range of emotions that I have felt though. Of course, I am really chuffed for her and am excited about having a new little neice. At the same time I have been quite down about it. With any birth, there is the omnipresent  reminder that things do not always go smoothly and that whilst being a time of joy, a birth is also a time when things can go horribly wrong. In her memoir, Nia Wyn writes, “It’s the strangest time - a birth - for life to start falling apart. Just like that! The very next moment. It’s rare - but it can happen. And it happens to us..” Our experience was not as dramatic some, although Michael was premature, but this week has reminded me of how difficult things have been for the last six and a half years. Having a child is the most blessed experience that we can ever go through but I have never cried so much or been so worried since that beautiful day in March.

It is a really difficult thing to explain to any one else who has not been through a similar experience, as all it sounds like is that I have got sour grapes. It is not that I am jealous of my sister as I love her to bits and |I would not wish anything more for her. But everything just seems so easy for everyone else and so hard for us. Having a perfect baby is just expected and taken for granted for so many people but is just such a big deal. Really difficult to put into words, but everyone who has been there will know where I am coming from.