Things I'm not sad to be missing

This is my second-worst August bank holiday for about 9 years. This is because I'm not at Greenbelt, my favourite festival in all the world. Normally I steward, and I love it. This year I am not stewarding, due to being 5 months pregnant, which means I need to go to bed at a reasonable time and get tired after walking for about 10 minutes. This is not conducive to being part of a team who spend the hours between 7pm and 3am walking round Cheltenham racecourse.

However, my worst August bank holiday was about 3 years ago, when I went to Greenbelt but didn't steward due to having a broken leg. I spent the weekend feeling miserable at missing out on the stewarding fun. I decided not to risk that this year. Instead I am staying at home, going to a wedding and watching ER. We might go and look at cots tomorrow. I feel like I've made the right choice but I do still feel sad and am missing my friends and stewarding. I'm already trying to work out how to manage to steward next year while having an 8-month-old baby.

I am fortunate to be kept up-to-date with what is going on at Greenbelt by text message and Merlin's blog. Which does remind me of some of the things I'm not missing - sweeping the campsite for intruders in the early hours of the morning being one of them!

A picture of Spoonface

This is my baby at 21 weeks, which was pretty much 2 weeks ago. That's how up-to-date I am.

Apart from the baby refusing to show its face, a crucial part of the scanning process, and then the fire alarm going off while I was walking around to try to make it change position, the scan was pretty uneventful. The baby looks healthy and the sonographer thinks it's a girl. While she won't say for sure, she didn't say it was hard to tell. So I'm guessing when it comes out it will be female.

We're calling her Spoonface for now - Matt made it up and it seems to have stuck. We're hoping to come up with something better by the time she's born but I think we're not going to tell anyone. My sister can't quite believe we're not even going to tell her what we're thinking of calling the baby.

Spoonface is getting bigger and is very kicky. There's just something wrong about being kicked by a small baby from the inside. It's reassuring that she's ok, but it just doesn't feel like it should be happening.

I'm starting to feel very excited about having a baby, and counting down the weeks until I can start maternity leave (13 1/2) - I am enjoying my new job (not so new any more!) but looking forward to not having to get up and try to be coherent five days in a row!

Rod Liddle is an idiot

It's been an interesting week for women in the news.  Harriet Harman has been left in charge while Gordon Brown is on holiday and has shared a few thoughts about the current position of women in society and politics.  This has been presented in the most sensationalist manner.  'Business and politics work better with both men and women in leadership' becomes 'Harriet Harman says men can't be left in charge'.  Tanya Gold writes an interesting piece on how the response to Harriet Harman is misogynistic.

I'm not happy with the idea of quotas for women in leadership, as Harriet Harman has suggested.  But I'm not really happy with all-male leadership either.  I feel pleased to have a senior politician who is actively raising questions about the poor state of gender equality in Britain at the moment.  Things are vastly improved and I'm grateful, but there's a long way to go.  It's nice to hear someone actually talking about it.