In the beginning....

In the beginning there was just me, and then in October 2000 I met Jonathan, an old uni mate of a guy who had once dated a friend of mine for a bit.
We married in November 2004 and the whirlwind began. Within weeks it became clear that my mother-in-law was ill, that the "cold" she'd picked up during our wedding weekend, was, in fact, something more sinister.
By February 2005 she'd been diagnosed with lung cancer, she was just 60.
I found out soon after this that I was pregnant with our first child, the news buoyed her up for a while, she was excited about the prospect of a grandchild, the first family baby for 30 years,  and when she had the energy during a fairly experimental course of treatment she read baby magazines and insisted on buying a cot and pram and car seat.
She died in the June, the night before the scan that would have told her she was having a grandson.
He was born in November and was the joy of all, we named him Samuel, and call him Sam.

Sam was just short of ten months when we realised he wasn't going to be an only child. Josiah joined the family in June 07, weeks after his cousin, was born.  We'd planned to nickname him Jed, but his brother had other ideas and he's been 'Siah ever since.

We'd always wanted a bigger than average family and Reuben came next, 18 months after Josiah and 3 years and three weeks after Sam. Again our plans for him to be known as Roo were scotched by siblings and "Ben" was amongst us.

I broke my wrist when he was 4 months old - right in the middle of classic growth spurt time! - and had to have 2 operations in the next 6 months to get it right.

And then we moved house when he was 16 months, and two days after we moved in, still surrounded by boxes and packing cases, I was in the kitchen when J phoned to say he'd been offered another job, one that meant moving house, and country.

Five months later, with our possessions in a couple of removals vans, we disembarked from the ferry in St Peter Port, Guernsey and started another stage of our lives.
Sam started school and loved it.
We settled in to the new place and the new routine and we discussed the possibility of another baby: was four children madness? I was almost 40, was it too late? What if there were problems? Wasn't it nice now that the children were gaining some independence? Sam at school and 'Siah about to start? Would it be crazy to go back to even more broken sleep? Especially as neither of the younger two boys had ever managed more than a couple of nights of "sleeping through" - that's a couple of nights ever by the way, not a couple consecutively...
Undecided we settled into the "well let's just see shall we?" frame of thinking.

So in August, when I was sicker and more tired than I have ever been in my life, J asked if I thought a pregnancy test might be a good idea. And it turned out to be a very good idea. I was 6 weeks pregnant.

So, we were after all going to be the crazy people with four children aged 6 and under. Until we got to the 12 week scan....