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Welcome to the world, Lilly!

This is a bit of a diversion from what i'd usually put on my site, but I think it's worth sharing experiences of being a parent with others. Especially as in future I may share how i'm coping working as a contract dev while doing my fair share of parenting.

Ever since I was young I'd envisioned having a family at some point. In recent years my wife and I had discussed when the ideal time to start a family would be, we each took it in turns to be more ready than the other!

In the end we decided to wait for my wife to qualify as a nurse and in turn our move to a larger house to draw our 'young adulthood' to a close and begin family life.

What we didn't bank on was the uncertainty of conceiving. The next two years saw many negative tests and increasing concern as to whether it'd ever happen for us. The fact everything else in our life seemed so perfect also increased the bittersweet feeling that we were at action-stations, everything was in place to become parents, and yet everything we'd put in place may not have ever come to fruition. Low and behold, just as we began to consider reaching out to a clinic, we had a surprise positive test. Going to an early scan and seeing a small lentil shape flickering on the ultrasound screen was a surreal feeling and one of pure joy.

At every stage of pregnancy we told ourselves things surely couldn't work out this smoothly - there'd be a bump in the road, a complication etc. Low and behold, fast forward 10 months and I am now the proud dad of our baby girl, Lilly!

It wasn't completely without hiccups, 4cm dilation to emergency intervention delivery took 19 hours, but we're relieved to say she's here now and a very happy, healthy girl. My wife's recovery has also been rapid and we'll forever be grateful to the NHS staff that helped us on the labour wards.

Next steps

The last 7 weeks have flown by. I decided to draw my last contract, with Interactive Investor, to a close prior to Lilly's arrival in order to be as present as I could for the intial weeks. All things considered Lilly has been great. We suspect she has a minor infant allergy to lactose so my vegetarian wife is currently on quite a limited diet to not affect her breast milk, but Lilly is starting to sleep just a little bit more and is growing nicely. With the dust settling I am now starting to get back in to coding. While I seek my next contract I'm going to revise any gaps I feel I have in my knowledge, do some leetcode challenges, finally develop some small fun apps just for myself for once, and perhaps even begrugingly learn some LLM and AI stuff. Should any Typescript, React or React Native work become available, I'd love to hear about it.

Useful info / links we used during pregnancy