Naomi Elizabeth Macey is now eight months old. For the technically-minded, this site has been moved to a new server, which is why it was unavailable for the past few days. Katherine and I are looking for a new apartment, which is keeping Katherine busy.

Form way back... we are expecting a baby at the end of October! We're both very excited and happy, even though it may mean slightly less paddling time!

Jump back to about February 7. This is the approximate date of conception of our growing baby! It's due on Halloween. It's been a very exciting time for us - going to check-ups, seeing ultrasounds of the fetus. Seeing and hearing the heartbeat. We're going to have a surprise (gender-wise). It already seems to be pretty active judging by the ultrasound taken at 11 1/2 weeks. At first I was wondering how I was going to cope with a super active baby, but then I realised that an active baby was probably a good thing so that it could keep up with me and Paul! We've just started looking into childcare options as everyone has waiting lists. We've only just started to think about names - because everyone keeps asking! The 20 week ultrasound scans show different measurements and a guess that the baby is 366g or 13 oz. There are some pretty amazing pictures of a little being growing (even if I do say so myself!) See the link below for the pictures and video.

The kayaking season started slowly as we had a lot of late rain (in Los Angeles = snow in the mountains) leading to the best run-off since 1998 that has really only just started in the last couple of weeks. Paul's been enjoying it immensely. I've still been enjoying shorter, easier runs, although it is getting harder to fit into my gear!

We had a great trip to Sequoia in January

We did a snow-shoeing trip to Sequoia in January with our Hungarian-Californian kayaking friends Krisztina and Miklos which was lots of fun. We did a short hike up to a peak and were coming back off trail. Paul was in the lead and was following the footsteps of someone else on the way down. As the slope leveled off somewhat, he noticed that they must have had quite short snow shoes on as their prints were quite small. Then as we sidled round one area, he wondered if, in fact, they had crampons on. A few steps later, one of the prints showed a beautiful bear print! We promptly made our retreat back the way we'd come and went down a different way!

We had a wonderful family time in Paris, Wales and England over Christmas/New Year.

In Wales, we visited my brother, Matthew, and his wife, Suzette, for a day and a bit. We went walking in the mud and drizzle along farmland which was quite a nice change from Los Angeles' dry, warm and concrete. We caught the second Lord of the Rings with them which was fantastic (no NZ bias of course!) and had a nice time doing last minute Christmas shopping.

In Paris, we had joined up with Paul's brother, Jeremy, and his wife Anna (who was about 20 weeks pregnant at the time), Paul's parents, uncle, aunt and cousins. So we had a wonderful, family time. Around all the eating, we managed to go sightseeing and visited many of Paul's childhood haunts.

After Christmas, we went back to England and down to Devon to spend some time with my Grandmother, parents, aunt, uncle, cousin and Matthew for New Year. We had visits from some of Mum's cousins and her kids whom I don't remember ever meeting before and caught up with one of Dad's cousins who he hadn't seen for over a decade and who I hadn't seen since I was a teenager. It was great to meet and see again my family who live so far away.

Paul has had a lot of publicity about his paper on obstructive sleep apnea patients having less gray matter than controls in various areas of the brain, including areas that are related to speech; interestingly, more of the OSA patients (~40%) were stutterers as a child or had word formation difficulties than the controls (~7%). That got in newspapers and radio bulletins around the world, and on national and local TV.

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