Last week, I alluded to a promise of more information as to what I planned to do about about the enourmous belly I grew in sympathy for Karen whilst she was pregnant with William.

There it is - the gut-o-meter. A public display of the girth of my gut. Now you can all watch my progress as I attempt to get the circumference of my belly to below 1 metre. Of course posting the graphic on my blog is not going to just make it happen by magic - I have a plan. A plan so crazy that it just might work.

Having "lost weight" a few times in my life now, I figure all I need to do is

Walk 2 hours per week
Cycle 2 hours per week
Gym 2 hours per week
Eat less than 2200 calories per day.

Its a diet of 2's. If it works, watch for my bestselling book in the future....

One of the things that people ask me a lot of late is "when are you going to have you're baby?" which is a jibe for the piles of weight I put on whilst Karen was pregnant. Fine I know I am pretty round at the moment, and this week I am doing something about it - but more on that later.

What I wanted to mention now was the weekend just passed, which was dubbed the Retox weekend. Steve and Myself, aided and abetted by various others, just did nothing but consume stuff that was bad for us for two solid days.

The whole thing is hardly noteworthy really, but it probably should go on record that on Saturday night, with my visiting brother Andrew and handful of others, managed to get through 11 bottles of wine, and a couple of kilos of cheese and salami.

Not wanting a hangover, we had some bottles of wine at 10:15 the next morning with our super brunch of Fried Pancetta, sausages, more salami, brie and gorgonzola cheese on toast. The best brunches are the ones that start at 10:15, go to 4:30 in the afternoon, and have a shift change of friends in the middle, I got to tell you.

That's all really. Oh yeah, William's still cute. Want proof? Here's him with his buddy Zac.

I got spewed on for the first time today.

This is living baby!

Sheesh, what a week. Well a weekish anyway. I know it has been a long while since the last very spartan update with the big news, but it turns out that having a new baby keeps you quite busy. To be honest as well, given the choice between blogging and hanging out with my new son over the past few days, it has been an easy decision for the latter.

Babies are amazing time wasters, you can sit there and just watch them for hours. Our Wil has a vast array of cute facial expressions.

But a time comes when there are some stories to be told, so here we go. No need to skip paragraphs here guys, there is no gory details or descriptions below to worry about.

Our adventure started on Thursday night the 4th, when we nipped down to the local hospital so Karen could be induced. Wil was seven days overdue by this time, and enough was enough and it was time he came out.

Karen was admitted, shown to a bed in the labour ward and given the gels to soften her cervix overnight, so they could bring about labour in the morning. I hung around for a while, but we both agreed it was probably a good idea to get some sleep, so I came back home let Karen rest. Friday was to be a big big day.

I got back to the hospital just before 7 am, and Dr Karen arrived soon after to break the waters, administer the IV hormones and "get the show on the road" so to speak.

After this, Karen quickly started having contractions, and went through 10 hours of labour, the first 7 without the aid of any pain killers. The first few hours were somewhat, I don't want to say relaxing, but strangely sort of calm. Karen went into 15 odd seconds of pain every couple of minutes, but in the mean time, we just chatted, listened to music and played scrabble. About mid afternoon though Karen started to be in some pretty serious pain, and decided to have an epidural as the exhaustion of 2 minute contractions for 7 hours set in.

Amazingly, once they pumped the magic cocktail into her spine, calm was restored, Karen had a bit of a doze, and I tapped away at my laptop on a top secret project (which I will reveal soon I promise).

Dr Karen returned at 6pm for another "exam", and the result was that dilation was still less than 2cm. Which means, in laymans terms, after 20 odd hours we were still nowhere near having a baby. There was a chance that little Wil was stuck in there. At this point we had to make a decision, have a ceasarian section, or try another 12 hours of labour and see if the little bugger wanted to come out, and if he didn't, have a section anyway.

A section seemed the wise decision, and so, exhausted, this was what we decided to do. (It turned out that Wil's shoulders were actually stuck, and it would have been a section no matter how long Karen laboured).

So, they put Karen on a guerney, I got into the scrubs and signed the "we promise not to sue you" form.

I felt like I was on one of those medical dramas as I helped wheel Karen into theater. We broke a wheel on the guerny on the way, which I had to fix, and that was the first time all day I felt I was of any use, and not just in the way. It was kind of lucky I was there, because neither the midwife and the young orderly had the foggiest about what to do in a mechanical engineering emergency.

Anyway in the interest of maintaining my no gore promise, I am going to skip the rest. Just know I was a long way out of my comfort zone in a real life operating theatre. A bloody long way. If my comfort zone was the coastline of Australia, then sitting behind the screen under that big light was somewhere around the south pole.

Long story short though, soon enough the friendly paediatrician Dr Power, handed me my son, all wrapped up in a neat bundle, and I could do nothing but grin like a cheeshire cat.



While Karen recovered, Wil and myself followed our midwife Sylvia to another room so we could weigh, measure and bath young William. As I mentioned in the last post, Wil is a big boy as babys go, 4170g (9 lb 3 oz in the old money) and 53 cm long at birth.



This took about 30 minutes , and by the time we got back to the room that would be Karen and Wil's home for the next week, the drugs had worn off of Karen and she was as stoked as I was to have entered parenthood.



And since that time, the last week has just been a blur of changing, feeding, cuddling, late night TV and seeing friends and family. It has been a bit of fun, I mean how can you not laugh as when a little guy urinates on you?

I just want to say a big thankyou to everyone who has sent their love and gifts, we really appreciate it. We are fortunate to have such a great "network" and to quote Jeff Fenech, we love you all.

Here are a couple of photos taken yesterday. First is William at one week, quite handsome I if I do say so myself.



And secondly, the Czornohalan family as it currently stands.

So I was wrong OK?

Even though I have so much I want to share right now, I am absolutely shagged, but here are the juicy's to tide you over

Baby William Alexander, born 7:50pm, Friday 5 August, measuring 53 cm and weighing in at a healthy 4170gms ( 9 lb 3, in the old money). Wanna photo? oh alright....

5 days past the due date, still no baby to report! Talk about all dressed up with no place to go I tell you what. Anyway, this afternoon we are off to see Dr Karen to discuss options for coaxing wigglebum out, but in the meantime I would like to share with you a list of all of the suggestions we have had from people about how to bring on labour.

1. Sex and Curry (Suggested by Dr Karen - Best medical prescription ever!)
2. Go for a motorbike ride
3. Go 4wding over some sand dunes
4. Drive on some bumpy roads
5. Sex again (It's a popular suggestion, remarkably mostly from women!)
   
6. Go for a walk
7. Have a hot bath
8. Breast Stimulation
9. Evening primrose oil
10. Put headphones on Karen's belly, and play the Rolling Stones
11. If that doesn't work, try something more offensive, like Billy Ray Cyrus
12. Rub Karen's stomach with goose fat, and then tap her on the head at 22 past the hour, every hour, with the branch of a peach tree.