The postman woke me up at 6:40am today! The postman is not my favourite person in the world. However, since the box turned out to be a huge package from Hôtel Chocolat courtesy of
ewx and lnr, J declared the latter to be her favourite person in the world.I got to the hospital pretty much at 10am today (bearing the box and several cards which had also arrived), and J was waiting outside the registry office. 15-20 minutes later and we were in. I had a slight problem because they asked me where I was born and they wanted the same answer that is written on my birth certificate. Now I do know both the name and the physical location of the hospital that I was born in, but although it's named after one (large) town it is usually said to be located in a neighbouring (small) town, which can get confusing. So I ended up ringing my house and hoping that my parents would answer - which they did, and I then got my dad to fish out my birth certificate and see what it says (as he didn't know the answer without looking either). Anyway, after that minor hiccup it was all pretty straightforward, and we ended up with both a short birth certificate and a full birth certificate (which, confusingly, are actually the same size, though the former is free and the latter costs £3.50).
After we got back to the ward, a doctor came and told us that yesterday's blood results had come back negative, same as the day before's, and that baby T could therefore come off the antibiotics. So a midwife came and took the needle off his arm, leaving it free apart from a piece of cotton wool taped to his hand to stop it from bleeding. (The process of taking all the tape off was a bit traumatic for the poor dear, but we managed to get him settled afterwards.)
I had a bit of a funny turn, but I'm going to skip over that. It does mean that I didn't leave until just after 12:30.
When I got home I had a reply from the administrator about my leave. It started out badly (`Agreement to work at home cannot be given by anyone other than the Staff Committee of the University' - so the stuff about the head of department which C relayed earlier wasn't true then?) but ended OK. He added up the days when I was absent (and he hasn't counted in this the days when I turned up for a few hours and then worked at home), subtracted the leave days I have available, and allowed the rest to be `exceptional compassionate leave' provided I promise to follow the rules in future. The bottom line is that I don't have to go back until the 11th (as it's covered by my two weeks of paternity leave) and I don't have to go unpaid at all, though I have no more leave left until October. And he demands at least one week's notice in future every time I want time off.
Oh, and apparently I should have applied for paternal leave 15 weeks ago. I don't know quite what this means since he was well aware of my intention to claim paternal leave back in March, but anyway it's a bit late now so he will reluctantly process it through retrospectively provided I give him a copy of the birth certificate. (Presumably he didn't need the birth certificate 15 weeks ago too?)
Well. I skipped out on the afternoon visiting hours and went to the lab for half a day instead. My parents had gone out and about this morning and left me a note, so on leaving I left them a note in return. While visiting J they were joined by J's brother and sister-in-law (a matched pair this time). Meanwhile, I had a nice chat with niceboss C and eventually (when he had come out of a meeting) gave baby T's birth certificate to administrator M. And I did a bit of work too.
C said he thought M was hot-and-cold (`We're very flexible, so long as you stick rigidly to the rules') and a bit mixed up (C thinks the bit about staff committees is supposed to be for people who expect to spend most of their time routinely working at home, not for staff who expect to spend most of their time working on location but for exceptional reasons sometimes want to work at home) but he's glad everything got sorted out anyway. Then I told him what the /proc filesystem in Linux is for, as he's trying to find out what is taking up the most space on his home machine and wondered what all those numbered directories were. And we looked at the weather in Scotland, as he's going there on holiday today for a couple of weeks. M seemed to be in a reasonable mood when I saw him, and he took a copy of the certificate and wished me well (and AWR happened to be in the office and passed on his congratulations, as well as mentioning that another lab member had apparently had a baby boy within the last couple of months and given it the same name). When I went back to my office, my colleague said M was clearly on a power trip (just like the time when he wouldn't allow the professors to have ground coffee, and so on). Anyway, that's enough of that.
By the time I had got back from the lab, my parents had come back from visiting J and the baby, and had started making tea. After tea we all went back again, and met J's parents again. We took the baby into the day room and all admired him some more. I sat with him for quite some time. He was sleeping, although he would give a little startled jump each time a particular door slammed shut - and also sometimes when the people with particularly noisy cameras took pictures of him.
And that was the end of another day. Baby T is three days old now!