This weekend we got to meet and spend some quality time with our new niece Lucy Kate Owens. Clive and Tracey and very relaxed and obviously very proud parents.

Lucy was born on the 9th January at 7.40pm weighing in at a respectable 8 lbs 7 ounces.

Its was just magical having the three girls in the same house for the night. It was comical in many ways as we have not long gotten past the night feeding and to see Clive and Tracey do it, it seemed a distant memory for us.

I’m sure the three girls will be spending many a weekend together so they best get on… We are back over next weekend as Clive, Jonathan and I are running a 10k in Portlaoise on the Sunday, more on that later.

Congratulations guys, she’s beautiful!

How time has changed. It’s Saturday morning at Clive’s house and where previously it would have been hangover central, it’s now more like a cresh with feeding and dirty nappies a reoccurring theme.

I needed an excuse to try out a new mobile app for blogging. I’m finding it really difficult to get time to sit at my desktop and write some posts so I’m hoping to update our blog while on the go via my mobile (on trial at least).

I was chatting to my brother Paul last night and he said that text wasn’t as important as the photos so maybe on the odd occasion I’ll just upload photos. I’m conscious that the girls are getting bigger and, although we are in the think of it, members of our family are missing out.

I’ve be putting off uploading some Christmas posts because I’ve 800 photos to sort through. I promise I’ll have something up by the end of the weekend.

A big big big thank you from the bottom of our hearts to all who sent Sam, I and the girls well wish messages, cards and gifts.  We were overwhelmed by your generosity.  A number of the garments were hand knitted and we know the effort that has been put into them – thank you so much!

All the outfits are beautiful and over time you will see them appear on our blog as they grow into them. The girls are already building up an enviable show collection.

Thank you again.

We are visiting Sam’s family in the UK for Christmas so we need to get the girls their passports and thus needed to take some passport photos.  Ordinarily this wouldn’t be much of a problem but it turned out to be a far bigger task than we had anticipated – it took a few attempts.  The rules governing a child’s passport photo are the same as for an adult: eyes open, no smiling, certain size, centered etc. etc.

We were surprised that our local photo shop and pharmacy do not take infant passport photos.  They said it was too time consuming to take a photo within the guidelines.  They suggested we take the photos ourselves and they print them.

We never laughed as much trying to take the photos.  You will see from the selection below the number we had to take. The harder part was getting them to keep their eyes open.  In the end it took three attempts on two separate days.

We are now waiting on their PPS numbers to come through so we can submit their applications.  We are hoping that the express service will have them here in time for our flights on the 22nd December.