Saturday night was a rather interesting night - as it almost seemed as though I was about to be a father somewhat unexpectedly and out of the blue. I could go into a blow-by-blow account of what happened, but probably a better idea is to take what Nats has written about the night (and the couple of days after) to give you all a better indication of what happened.

I am still pregnant which wouldnt be so bad if my baby hadn't decided that it wanted to come Saturday night and after getting mummy all excited, causing me excruciating chest pains and being at the birthing center all ready to go that it wanted to stay for goodness knows how much longer. I am an emotional mess right now. I was happy still being pregnant, wasnt worried when everyone else that was due around the same time as me (and even many that were due afterwards) were having there babies, I wasnt in a hurry just taking my time... and then came Saturday/Sunday and now I am a wreck.
My baby is still quite high up so everytime I got a contraction my uterus and the baby were pressing rather hard on my diaphram, ribs and lungs causing imense pain, of course this isnt a common pre-labour symptom (that I have been told about anyway) so I was not prepared for it at all, so after about 6 hours of this I have started to panic, my blood pressure has dropped, I am shaking, crying and to top it all off vomiting alot. I couldnt stand up, I couldnt sit down nothing I did was working to ease the pain in my chest. I had already had about 3 showers but decided to go to my grandmas as she has a bath and I thought that would help. I stayed in there for as long as I could until it got really uncomfortable and then went and lay on the floor in the lounge while my grandma napped in her bed and Josh on the lazyboy. I was sick once more and was having sharp pains with the contractions at the top of my uterus, by now I was absolutely exhausted (after 5 1/2 hours of walking around who wouldnt be) and asked Josh to call Collette (midwife) and ask her what we should do as I was feeling less and less in control of things, she said to come into Birthcare, so that she could give me something for the vommiting and hopefully see some progress.
We called my mum and told her to meet us there made sure we were organised and then made the exhsusting trip (it is only 20mins away from my grandmas but I was in lots and lots of pain so every little bump hurt like hell) We sorted out what stuff we wanted to bring up with us and went inside. I got undressed and checked my urine (which showed traces of protein) the checked my temperature and blood pressure as well as the babies heartbeat and position. Explained that no my waters hadnt broken and I hadnt had a show, but I had been having regular painful contractions since 5pm (it was now nearly 1am) Collette arrived and I chatted to her about what had been happening, was reassured (if you cna call it that) that the chest pains I was feeling was because of how high the baby is, she explained that I am only 3/5 engaged and it would be favourble if I was 4/5 or more but that was ok, that the contractions were working to move baby down. My mum arrived after getting lost and me panicking that she wasnt comming at all (long story) I was still having contractions but not as bad as earlier, I was walking around and swaying from side to side for ages and things just did not seem to be progrssing at all. So we decided that going home was a good idea... If I wanted some Pethidine I needed to be checked for dilation neither of which I wanted so Collette went and told the other staff that we were going home... Discussed that I was in labour but being in a non homely environment was hindering my progress and that she fully expected that I would be able to see my feet by tmrw :)
We got home at about 4am on sunday morning and set the spare bed up at my grandmas so we could try and get some sleep fully expecting to be going back to birthcare to deliver my Bug later on in the day. I was still having contractions and my chest was still very very sore, and moving was extremely painful. I woke up again at 5.20am to go to the toilet and hoping that I would be sick to stop the acid in my throat to no avail. I went back to bed, lay down and the minute I did I had to scramble to get to the bucket to be sick, causing extreme pain as you use your chest muscles to get up. Everything that came up was dark, so I panicked and screamed at Josh to get up and turn off the light because I thought it was blood. After establishing that we didnt think it was, we settled back down to sleep.
I had a little sleep and felt a little better as my headache had also gone by now. I had some toast and a cup of tea as well as oodles of milk to combat the damn heartburn, had another sleep and then came home so that I could clean the house up (all I could think of was the fact that the house was really messy, there were dishes to do and the toilet was filthy lol the things you think of) we watched a little bit of tv and then went back down to my grandmas where we were going to stay. By now the contractions were very sporadic and nothing special so I decided to come home to my own bed. We watched some TV and called my mum and spoke to her about things that were going on in my head and her head etc. I went to bed and had about 6 hours straight sleep before I had to get up and pee and then got up to take my car to get its warrant by 10am... So I have no car, Josh is at Uni and I am all alone with nothing to do... Things have calmed down a lot now and I no longer feel like I am in labour although I feel like I have been run over by a bus, my contractions are no longer regular and I just feel emotionally and physically drained. I just hope that next time something gets started it stays that way and doesn't stop cold turkey, I still feel confident in myself that I can do this and I was never scared that I was in labour, I am just disappointed and exhausted...

I guess on the plus side (why is it always me who looks on the plus side of things?) Saturday night was probably a sign that the baby isn't too far away. It also gave a us a bit of practice in putting that "what happens if Nats goes into labour" plan into practice. I think we did that pretty effectively, although in some ways we were slightly unprepared and had to madly rush around the house collecting things we felt we might just need. But when it really decides to happen next time we will be pretty well prepared, as the bags are in Natalie's grandmother's car - who is going to be driving us to the birthing centre. I guess in some ways having a dummy run can be useful, but it was a let-down as Nats has already alluded to, going from the big excitement back to reality of everyday life.

My literature review is coming along, after being rather put on the backburner after the drama of the weekend. I've written just over half the amount of words which are required, and am slowly getting through the enormous amount of stuff that I need to write about. It's quite challenging making sure that I keep reminding myself that it is a literature review rather than a basic essay and that I need to sporadically detail where the literature surrounding the subject had reached by a certain point of time. It's an interesting topic, with a lot of potential for research as much of the writing throughout the past five years has reached the conclusions that neither urban sprawl nor compact cities can adequately respond to the complex requirements of the sustainable city - although clearly the compact city has much more promise than urban sprawl does.

My rather large 4000 word literature review, which is due next Thursday has reached a really annoying point in my research. The point where I almost feel as though I should have stopped with all the reading and note-taking and started with the writing, but I just know that there are certain parts of my review which I need to research a lot more. But then when I go looking for more articles or books I just find the same old arguments getting repeated over and over and over again, which is not only wasting my time by reading them all, but getting me more and more frustrated. I guess that I should be mastering the art of skim-reading a bit more, but I seem so terrified that I might miss something important that I go through meticulously and take notes from everything, probably writing the same thing down again and again. What I probably need to do now, is make up some sort of a plan for how I'm going to write up this monster, and then hopefully I'll be able to address exactly where the holes in my research are so that I'll be able to focus my research better and not feel like I'm wasting my time so much. But then I feel guilty for not putting as much time into my assignment, that instead of being on the internet I should be studying more and more. Ugh.

We had a pretty quiet day today, spending much of the day back at Natalie's grandmother's which was nice. Nats has definitely picked up my cold, and I feel pretty bad for giving it to her, although I guess that was pretty inevitable given that we live together. Hopefully it passes her by as quickly as it did to me, although I still seem to have some remnants with a pretty nasty cough that's just sprung up this evening. But anyway, the baby should theoretically be popping out on Sunday as that's its due date, but when did a baby ever do what it should so it seems like we might be waiting a while yet.

In my fourth year of studying human geography I think that I've got it pretty much sussed. Things go in about four or five steps: firstly we're presented with a problem, it might be that cities are polluting too much, or that we're having unequal access to health etc., second step some person things they've come up with a brilliant solution to the problem - they've done a piece of research and prove beyond doubt that this is the way to fix it, but then someone else does the same research in a different place and gets the complete opposite result. Then all the human geographers get together in a huddle, realise that there are just too many variables in the world and, in effect, just decide that everything is just too complex and too hard. That seems to be the case in my research project at the moment, which is based around trying to find out what sustainable urban forms are, as well as how and if policies that will lead to these particular forms can be implemented. Most people agree that urban sprawl is pretty unsustainable, because so much car travel is required and that it just eats up all the countryside. Problem is that all the alternatives such as more compact cities turn out to be just as big of a mess, plus the fact that it seems as though everyone would rather live in spread out urban environments, just the exact opposite to what would be needed to achieve urban sustainability. Aaaarrrgghhh!!!! I guess that eventually it has to be decided that you can never please everyone, and that you're better off just trying to please as many people with the policies that you can.

Anyway, enough of my academic spiel. Nats is now over 39 weeks pregnant, as her due date is this Sunday coming up. It's pretty scary to think that for so long March 28th 2004 seemed like an age away, there was always that inevitability that we would get there, but Nats' due date always seemed like quite a way off. Yet now it's only a matter of days, and the rather odd pains that Nats has been experiencing in the last few days may suggest that the baby may only be a few days off now. Now there's a scary thought as my life seems to be fairly full at the moment - but I guess that there are always 24 hours in each day and I'll have to make the most of each and every one of them. Hey, I'm sure writing up assignments at three in the morning, or doing the dishes between crying fits will become normal after a while..... maybe? I guess on the bright side, that even though everyone goes on and on and on about how much hard work it's all going to be, they always say that it's totally worth it. I guess that the whole emotional side of things will kick in at some stage, probably when I least expect it and I'll actually realise that I am a father, that this really is happening, and it won't seem quite so surreal anymore.

I have really been lacking in motivation to write on this page over the last week or two for some reason. Maybe it's the myriad of other things I need to get done that by the time I get onto the internet I really can't be bothered putting in the effort of writing a half-decent entry; maybe it's that I don't really feel like anything's going on in my life that's worth writing about (although I highly doubt that as there have been far more boring stages in my life in the past than at the moment.) I'm not quite sure exactly, but I hope that this phase passes, I've been writing here for over three years now and it would be sad to stop just when I'm about to have lots of interesting things to write about, and about to go through one of the biggest changes in my life.

In some ways I do hope the baby just holds on a little bit longer as I've been feeling like crap over the past couple of days and seem to have managed to catch a cold, even though it's still sort of summer. As a result the last couple of days have been full of blocked noses, sore eyes, sore throat, high temperatures and the like. It's all rather frustrating, as being sick always is, but on the positive side I did feel a bit better today so hopefully the worst of it has passed by and I'll start to feel normal over the next couple of days.

It's been nearly a week since I last updated, which is pretty shocking but every time I've got down and started to write I've sat there for a while not really knowing where to start. Not that much has groundbreakingly happened: no baby, university same old same old.... Nats is getting a bit fed up with the fact that the baby has decided to make us wait longer and longer until it blesses us with its presence. She hasn't really felt any contractions and the baby still seems quite high up, so maybe we'll have to wait a little while yet. But as her due date is only a week away today I can't imagine that we'll have to wait too much longer.

University is definitely beginning to 'heat up', as I finished my first little assignment on Friday and now have to worry about a huge literature review which is due on the first of April. I guess the positive side is that I have full reign over my choice of topic, which I've made to be the discussion of different types of urban forms and whether city planners should be focused on creating compact or dispersed types of cities. This assignment is meant to form as the basis of my thesis topic for next year, where I think I would apply the theory to the Auckland situation and maybe even a specific part of Auckland to focus on what the type of development is happening and whether that's the best option available. It will be interesting, although a hell of a lot of work as there has been a lot written on the subject and I need to get my head around where the literature is at the moment on the subject so that I know what I'm talking about.

I had a fairly uneventful weekend: work on Saturday was quite busy because it was St. Patrick's day and they had a parade down Queen St, then lots of people came in at the same time so things were rather chaotic for a while. Work is rather strange at the moment, not being there all the time for the first time in ages is odd - when I'm there it's like I'm in a really familiar environment (really really familiar!), and it really seems like I'm still working there fulltime. I guess that eventually, once it has settled in that I'm not there five days a week (or more) I'll eventually click that things have changed. But for now it's actually quite a nice feeling, having the comfort of such a familiar environment, and still keeping in touch with everyone there without having to go through the graft of being there for 40 hours a week.

Still no real sign that the baby is coming, although Nats is feeling quite a few less movements than she is used to which is probably a sign that the baby is getting rather squished up where it is - and therefore might feel like stretching it's legs in the not-so-distant future. Actually trying to convince yourself that there's a living baby inside of her is very difficult, no matter how hard I try to see it and imagine a newborn baby it still seems incredibly unreal. Strangely more unreal than it all did a few weeks ago.

My assignment which is due this Friday has turned out to probably be quite a lot less work than I originally thought it was going to be, which is always a bonus. The only issues are that it still needs to be done, and that even though I don't need to do particularly much writing when it comes to actually putting something on paper there is a lot of background reading to be done as the whole point of the exercise is to get us started on the reading. It seems to be that's what postgraduate study is all about: reading, reading and more reading. I guess it's good in a way that I'm becoming a bit of an expert on the strict preservationism vs. comanagement debate which is rather heated in some journals. Hopefully, once I have finished with this small assignment, I will be able to easily continue on to doing the rest of the coursework for this particular paper (which is a big long essay) reasonably easily because most of my actual hardwork would have been done. Then I'll just have to worry about my 10 million other assignments, although on the bright side I do feel like I've still got things under control as far as my assessed work is concerned although there's always that fear that it's going to come down to the last minute no matter how hard I try to avoid that (it seems somewhat inevitable throughout my university career that I'll end up rushing to finish my essay by the 5pm handing in time).

Whoosh..... and there go the first two weeks of university! Typically it's just disappeared faster than I could possibly imagine, which is actually quite normal and how I normally feel after the first few weeks of uni. For some reason time just seems to fly by, which really isn't a good thing as it means that all my assignments just come closer and closer. I spent most of today reading about whether indigenous people should be allowed to remain living in National Parks or not, a rather interesting debate when you find yourself somewhat coming to the conclusion that yes they should be, for the park's sake as much as theirs. By next Friday I need to have completed some sort of a literature review about whether "strict preservationism is the best way to ensure biodiversity maintenance". At the moment I'm sort of leaning towards the "no" side of the argument, although I have read a lot proposing the other side of the argument and it's quite fun going through them all and trying to pick holes in their logic. I also have another rather larger assignment due on the first of April, which is meant to be the first step towards deciding upon the topic for my masters thesis which I am going to write next year. Talk about throwing you in the deep end, I thought the whole point of your first year at postgraduate level was to get some idea about what you are going to research and here I am in the second week making the most important decision of my academic career! But anyway, the highlights of university so far have probably been: meeting up with people who I hadn't seen for over a year who've also come back to do geography after a year's break, being thankful about how quickly all my geographic knowledge came flooding back to me as it's nice to see that a year at McDonald's didn't completely rot my brain, and finally realising that I'm able to access all the library resources from home (which wasn't possible when I was undergraduate) so I will hopefully be able to do most of my study at home. Lowlights have been my mission to get enrolled, and get my student allowance sorted - which has luckily been sorted out finally, as well as realising the huge amount of work I'm going to be doing this year.

Obviously there's still no baby (that will surely take precedent as my first post once it happens!) and all the indicators that seemed to point towards something happening early this week have kind of disappeared and it seems like we're in for another week or two before Nats' bump decides that it wants to come out and meet the world. We managed to have a good talk about baby-names today which was good as we still haven't settled upon anything. Funnily enough after a mad scramble to think up of names when we first discovered that Nats was pregnant we've kind of forgotten about that rather important job over the past few months. It was kind of fun going through the names of all these sports players while Nats said "no... no.....NO....NO BLOODY WAY AM I CALLING OUR CHILD SHANE!!!....no.... etc." But it was a constructive process as we have 'sort-of' settled on a name if it happens to be a boy, which had been the most problematic of the two (there seem to be millions of girls names out there, but hardly any decent boys names). But don't think I'm going to tell you what they are, everyone will just have to wait and see....

I can just see my posts for the next while: it's going to be "day one.... no baby..." etc. until some time in the next few weeks there will appear a "hey..... I'm a father!" It's rather strange getting on with everyday life as normally as possible knowing that one of the most significant moment of my life is just around the corner. Most important things you have some idea when they're going to happen, graduations days, christmas, birthdays etc. but in this case we really don't have a clue. It could be tomorrow, it could be three or four weeks away. I guess that all I can really do at the moment is ensure that I can get to Nats reasonably quickly wherever I am, and that we put off going anywhere outside Auckland until after the baby is born.

With Nats now being over 37 weeks pregnant it has really only just sunk in that it could be any day now. I guess that I had become fairly comfortable with the idea that "it wasn't too long to go now", and through talking with Nats, our midwife, and going to the ante-natal classes I had become fairly confident in my knowledge of what was going to unfold and feeling pretty confident about the whole "adapting to be a father" thing. But then the other morning I woke up and the fact that it all seemed so soon, that we've managed to create a pretty cool new household over the past month, made me a bit afraid of all the change which is going to happen. I guess this is the transition between 'we're going to have a baby soon' to 'it could be any day now'. As a result I began to wonder whether I really am prepated mentally for it all, although at a point you just have to say "I've done the most I can to prepare, now we just have to wait and see, and react to it all".

University's well into its second week, and I am pretty proud to say that I've made a start on at least one of my big assignments - which is more than I've usually been able to say at this stage of the year in the past. I guess with all the upcoming events in my life I feel as though there's a big need for me to get started and to get ahead of my schedule of assignments. Everything looks pretty interesting, although it's a bit of a pity that my most interesting paper probably has the most boring lecturer taking it so it might not turn out to be as good as it potentially could be. But I guess the advantage of postgraduate study is that a paper is really what you make of it and as so much of it is personal research and study the lecturer shouldn't really have that much of an influence upon it. My fieldtrip to Kerikeri has been put back to the end of April which is really good as it was meant to be at the end of March, exactly when our baby is due which is a bonus as fieldtrips are always really useful in geography courses, as I learned in stage three with my fieldtrip to Hastings where I probably learned more than 10 lectures could have taught me.

I've decided that even though they took forever to organise my enrolment (and still haven't finished it all) I do actually quite like the University of Auckland. First of all they managed to sort themselves when it comes to accessing online journals and journal search engines, which means now with the simple entry of my university ID and password I can access something like 10,000 online journals from my computer at home. This effectively means that if I need to, I could probably complete most of my studies from home with all my resources at the touch of a button. Then secondly I received a couple of letters from the university today, the first being an (incomplete) fees invoice for a few thousand dollars which I was expecting, while the other letter turned out to be one congratulating me on the fact that I had been awarded a $2025 postgraduate study grant which means that my fees are now a whole heap less than they were before. Nice how these pleasant surprises arise, in total now the university has given me nearly $6000 in scholarship money - almost half the fees that I've paid them over the three and a bit years studying there. Just goes to show that working hard and getting good grades really does pay off in the end.

I went back to work today after almost a week's break. It was a little bit odd, after working there most days for the last year and a half, everyone was like "hey Josh... haven't seen you for a while". Saturdays are a pretty good day to work at my store, and probably the day that I've worked least often in my two years at the place. The store is reasonably busy, but it's not rush/dead/rush/dead like the weekdays, rather a more consistent type busy which is much easier to handle as a manager. We had a little bit of drama as a bunch of people decided that they would noisily protest outside our store against McDonald's and our use of battery hen eggs, some of the other managers got a bit freaked out and called all the big McDonald's bosses who pretty much told us that we couldn't do anything but ignore them unless they decided to come into the store when would be able to escort them out again. Nothing came of the protest and eventually they moved on. I felt a little bit odd as I do support what they are protesting against, but on the other hand I did feel like they were protesting against ME as I was running the shift at the time and therefore in charge of the store.

My first week back at university is over, and it has been a fairly interesting week. My papers look rather full on, which is to be expected at this level, but also look to be rather interesting as I have pretty much free rein to research and write about topics that I'm interested in. It's kind of scary the amount of reading and research that I'm expected to undertake, but I guess the way to look at it all is in a positive light that I have the opportunity to learn a lot more about some pretty interesting subjects.

Nats hasn't had anymore contractions since the weekend, which means that it was probably just related to the stress and the windy weather of the weekend. Nats is pretty confident that March 7th is the date, although now that we're only three days away from that it seems as though things might take a little longer. But I guess it could all happen quite quickly so we'll just have to wait and see, as the baby will come when it wants to. But it's all pretty exciting, we're basically sorted now with only a few things to organise in our house, which means that we can really think about how things are going to be with a baby in the household.

Trust Auckland's weather to completely screw me over again. After reorganising about 10 different shifts at work so that I could have Saturday off to go to the cricket a massive cyclone decided to hit Auckland on that day. So the game gets postponed to Sunday, which I could have covered my shift on much much easier if I hadn't been trying so hard to get Saturday off - and there ends up being a really exciting game played on the Sunday. Grrrrrrrrrr.... But I am not surprised, February 2004 has been the wettest and windiest February on record for most of New Zealand, to the extent that I've just about forgotten that it's meant to be summer. Does this mean that we'll have a really dry March/April to make up for it, or will the insane weather continue I wonder?

But anyway, it was my first day back at university today for almost a year and a half which was rather exciting. First off we had a meeting for all new 4th year geography students which was pretty cool as I was able to meet up with a couple of people for the first time since stage three geography. It's pretty cool being a special "graduate student", having special computer labs, a pidgeon hole, being able to go into the geography common room etc. Furthermore, there are only about 20 odd students doing postgrad geography so the classes are pretty small and hopefully I'll get to know most people in the not-so-distant future. I learned from doing my bachelors how important it really is to get to know people in your classes, so that you have someone to discuss things with before or after lectures and someone who can probably take notes for you if you're going to miss a class for any reason. I met up with Ella, who had her first day as an undergraduate today, which was pretty cool as it's the first time since 1999 that we've been at the same school/uni. Her timetable seems rather frantic compared to my four 2 hour lectures each week, although I know that I'm definitely going to be busy with all the readings that will be heaped upon us every week. My first lecture, Environmental Management, was probably a sign of things to come as the lecturer gave us all a 20 page reading for next week's lecture. I guess it'll give me something interesting to do during boring bus rides.

The funnest part of the day was just being back at uni, just walking around the place and feeling a part of it all again. Reading Craccum in the HSB Cafe, listening to overly-loud music in the Quad, catching up with people I haven't seen in a long time and so on... The only problem turned out to be my fieldtrip for my first paper is scheduled at the end of March, about a day after Nats' is due to have our baby. So right now here's hoping the baby does decide to come a bit early...