A couple of days after I read my friend Joel’s blog about his cold I end up with exactly the same symptoms, lasting the same length of time, resulting in the same thing (going to the doctor). But he's in Nashville. There's no way I could have caught it from him. How does that work?

I wonder if we use the same hot toddy to drive the wolf from the door?

Yours wishing I could have made it to the writing retreat but who would want to be writing with Mr Sneezy anyway,

S.

We’ve all got some revolting cold. The whole family. Most of us have had it for over a week now. Even Barty’s got it, so when he cries he sounds a little like my espresso maker. Poor little chap. We need a holiday to look forward to.

So yesterday I booked our flights… the whole family are coming to Nashville for August. A friend is letting us use their house while they are in Canada for the month.

The family trip to Nashville is well overdue. Can’t wait to introduce everyone to all my friends, to show Sandra where it all happens, Fellowship Bible Church, Cold Stone, Wild Oats, Smoky Mountains, do some proper sight seeing and just hang out somewhere new for a month.

Would love Poppy and Monty to get involved in some kids activities if that worked. I’m sure they’ll come back speaking ‘American’.

Although we'll be just 10 minutes from BBMP the aim is holiday. But I can’t think I’ll come away without writing some.

Yours wondering how easy it will be going back again without them,

S.

PS Grateful for any ideas for family days out

Tonight was the first opportunity Sa and I had to sit out on our balcony and watch the sun go down after having put three little ones to bed. It was a beautifully calm sea – so calm that we could see and hear the fish jumping out of the water.

There were times over the last couple of weeks when I wondered if we’d ever do this kind of thing again. I know it’s silly to go through life expecting the worst but seeing Sa plugged into pipes and machines it somehow seemed silly to expect the best. Especially when nature is involved. And things did go wrong. Like the dishwasher breaking down on the first day Sa was home. Like Moo redecorating his bedroom with his nappy. Like the whole house gong down with a heavy cold on Barty's arrival. But in the big scheme they were silly.

So it was difficult to watch the sun go down on our full house without feeling incredibly blessed. I never take this stuff for granted. Never.

Yours trying to catch up on a week’s sleep,

S.

OK, here we go – after much agonising, soul-searching, wringing of hands, writing and re-writing, spreadsheet after spreadsheet we decided on the following:

Bartholomew (Barty) John Rocket Henderson Hawkins

So there we have it. We were determined to have the name of my publishers in there somewhere but because he's a boy we chose the name of her husband (John). I wasn't brave enough to have my boy named Sue! He might still come after me for calling him Rocket!

Yours glad to have got that done,

S.

As we hoped, Sa came home on Friday and it’s been wonderful to have her and our new little man home. It’s going to take some time to shake off this current state of chaos, although the plus side of it is that we are all so exhausted that we are getting some early nights - each night since they came home the entire household (including me) has been ready for bed by 7.30. Having both sets of grandparents nearby and on amber alert is working out great.

It won’t be long now until we decide on the final line up of names. The girlie names (which I kinda hope we will never use now) were ‘Coco Sparkle Sweetpea Henderson Hawkins’. With the original boyzy names not far off those you can see why we had to have a rethink.

Poppy has decided her own name for her new baby brother and has told her entire school that he’s called ‘Jeff’. I fear that Jeff is a name she might have picked up listening to the news headlines before CBBCs (children’s bedtime TV) a couple of weeks ago. Somehow it doesn’t work for me to call him after Lord Browne’s former gay lover who caused him to lose his job as head of Britain's largest company costing him over £15m.

Monty on the other hand has picked out a name that resonates more personally with him – ‘The Wheels On The Bus’. Nice.

The funny thing is that despite our agonising I can totally hear new baby being called some ‘Bus’ derivative for many years to come, just like Montgomery was quickly shortened to Moo and my brother (Andrew) is now called Freddie.

Yours writing this way past my bed time,

S.

Sa and baby should be coming home today. Can’t wait. It will be great to have them around and I think it will be a lot more restful for them than being in hospital. I’ll pick them up after I do the school run. Baby has one of the best rooms in the house… I suspect it will become our bedroom for a while.

We also have reinforcements arriving today – Naoko, our Japanese cleaner, will zap the house into Zen-like spotlessness and Caroline, our hired-in help, will come for the first time to target high value jobs. In reality, despite Moo’s pre-dawn raid on nappyland yesterday, we’re in pretty good shape. I had a bunch of suggestions for his bedroom – thanks for those. I think Lisa probably got it right, but I might wait to see if there’s a return to the theatre of activity before a rebuild.

I took supper into hospital last night and the three of us just hung out for a while. We made a lot of progress on names. Some ideas are best left to when they’re ready to come out. I just couldn’t run with our first draft… I tried but they were too edgy... sounded like they were morphine induced! Still a few nouns on the list but I’ve eliminated most notes of the piano. He will thank me on his first day of school. I’ve always said there are only a few decisions in life you have to get right and although this isn’t a major one it’s more than a minor one.

Yours looking forward to us being five for the weekend,

S.

Thanks for all the messages we’ve had over the last few days – email is just incredible – we’ve had messages from friends across the world from Borneo to Bath, The City to St Louis, Singapore to Spring Hill, Colorado to the Caman Islands, Nashville to Nebraska, and places in between. I’m printing them off to put in baby Hawkins’ album.

Sandra’s been moved to her own room now and is comfortable, esp. when they give her enough pain relief. Baby continues to feed well and is already a little treasure.

Still grappling with names. Still grappling with the routine – I’m on my second day of single parenting and I’m already in awe of how Sa balances everything she does to make our home work. As I type I realise I should be somewhere else - swimming with Moo. So I’ll have to dash…

Before I go though - if anyone knows how to get pooh off a light carpet perhaps you could email me. Moo excavated his nappy before we all got up this morning. While I cleaned it up he managed to remember the entire lyric of Take That’s ‘Patience’,

Yours thinking I might just put him in the shower a little longer before we go into the pool,

S.

I am delighted to announce that at 4.07pm yesterday Sandra gave birth to a little boy weighing 8lbs 10oz! Names t.b.a.

Both mother and baby are doing well. We’re hoping that they will be home on Saturday, if not before.

Thank you so much for all your thoughts and prayers.

Simon.

Baby Hawkins is due to arrive on Tuesday. We’re totally ready now. Well, as ready as we’ll ever be: nursery finished, a long list of 'nesting jobs' done, names picked out, schedule planned, more lists written out, hired help introduced to the children, cot scrubbed down, new mattresses bought, clothes washed, new camera charged, case packed, car filled with petrol (gas). Sandra’s now in ‘go very slow’ mode and I’m trying to take the children out as much as possible so she can rest.

When we got back from buying the new baby presents from Poppy and Moo this morning we all raced upstairs to show Mummy what they had chosen. When the excitement had died down I heard this -

Poppy: Mummy
Sa: Yes, Darling
Poppy: Thank you
Sa: Thank you for what?
Poppy: Thank you for making me another friend
Sa: Oh Poppy... (cuddles)

Yours praying that the next couple of weeks turn out just a little like we have planned,

S.

I gave Poppy an extra hug this morning as she left for school. The UK media is filled with the story of the hunt for 3 year old Madeleine McCann, who was taken from her room while asleep at a holiday resort in Portugal last week. She was taken while her parents had supper less than 50 yards away and with her twin brother and sister sleeping next to her. She remains missing and no one knows what happened to her. There are signs that someone broke into the apartment. There are reports of her maybe being taken across the border into Spain.

It’s shocking that it looks like it was a planned abduction from an ordinary family on holiday in a child friendly resort. It's also shocking that it seems such little progress has been made in finding out what happened to her. Every twisted hypothesis is being examined. Now they’re talking about scaling down the hunt.

A couple of years ago we went on holiday to a sister resort in Portugal run by the same company. Poppy was three then. If anything had happened to her…

That’s why I gave Poppy an extra hug today. And probably another one tonight when she gets home.

Please pray for little Madeleine,

S.

My Myspace page has been notching up some hits just recently... today it reached #5 in Christian, UK. Yeah, I know, I’m a total saddo for even looking. But as a songwriter it feels good to at least get some exposure. To break into the top-4 I’d have to do a world tour or something… we’ve got Matt Redman, Charlotte Church (?!), Kathryn Scott and YFriday in there with six figure hit rates… and with baby Hawkins arriving next Tuesday I've got other plans!

But if you want to get a feel for what Christian music is like in the UK, doing a search on ‘Top Artists’ and punching in the criteria is not a bad idea. You’ll soon notice that the top 100 isn’t filled with mega bands doing their 300 gigs a year on mega busses and private jets… it’s pretty much the exact opposite. Apart from a few well established names like Matt, Delirious?, Paul Oakley, Phatfish and Lou Fellingham there’s a lot of experimental stuff. I even found some Acapella Christian Grime! Guess that's why I never thought twice about signing in Nashville.

One treat to look out for – Chris Eaton’s just put up his page (http://www.myspace.com/chriseatononline) and it has a medley of tracks from his new album… it’s just awesome. Hearing the clip of him singing 'Breath of Heaven' and 'Lay It Down' I couldn’t help thinking of the discussion we're having on ‘Writer-CDs’ on the WAJ discussion board… how hearing the writer really adds something special. He’s also got a great voice which kinda helps. We’ve just fixed up to finish up the song we started in Nashville at his place over here in sometime in June… I know I’ll come back inspired. I wonder if he’ll have a spare copy of his album? Wonder if he'd ever come to WAJ?

Yours thinking I should really be in bed at 1.23am with less that a week to go before chaos strikes,

S.

Just had lunch at the Lobster Pot. On the way home Poppy asked if, when she grows up, she could do a different thing each day:

Monday – be a painter
Tuesday – be a teacher
Wednesday – be a disco dancer
Thursday – write songs like Daddy
Friday – go swimming

What a cool idea. I've always thought that one life is not enough to do everything out there.

Yours wishing the summer weather would come back,

S.

I read this in someone’s blog the other day…

"There's something called 'divine restlessness', where God puts a call on someone and pulls them out of their present comfortable situation to find something greater.

• He did it with Abraham when He called him to pick up and leave his family lands in Ur
• He did it with Moses and the Israelites when He led them into the wilderness, and
• He did it with Jesus when the Spirit moved him into the wilderness for 40 days.

I think He does this with us at various times too and He's doing it with me now. That doesn't necessarily mean that I have a great, world-changing destiny ahead of me, but it means that I have to prepare to do more than I am doing now."

I so love that idea.

S.

It was Sandra’s birthday yesterday – a big number – but instead of our planned night away we stayed at home… it’s less than two weeks before little Hawkins #3 arrives. So we had a lovely day at home with various things programmed to happen as the day unfolded…

•    Cards in bed and a special breakfast
•    Clarins treatment
•    Benefit make up
•    Coffee at Starbucks
•    Lunch at a cool new restaurant
•    Sleep!
•    Balloons arrived
•    Flowers arrived
•    Tea party with special cake
•    Loads of presents
•    Light supper
•    Early night

The weather was beautiful and I think she had a wonderful day.

Please pray for a safe (and quick) last couple of weeks. This part seems the most difficult.

Yours thinking it must have my long legs,

S.

We’ve had record April temperatures this year… no horizontal rain, not even a week of light spring showers. It’s been glorious sunshine for most of the month. We’ve had people swimming in the sea, the children in the paddling pool, long evenings outside BBQing on the terrace (albeit with a fire towards the end of the evening). It’s feels like summer is well and truly here. But we're in April.

As I was racing around Chichester today, putting the finishing touches to Sandra’s birthday arrangements, I remembered that I normally do this in a coat and boots. Today I was in a T-shirt and boat shoes. Oh, and shorts. And from 11.30-2.00 office workers were taking time out of their normally busy days to enjoy lunch in the sunshine over a glass of wine or two. That’s not supposed to happen for another two or three months yet (unless the World Cup is on).

The trouble is, us Brits connect glorious weather with summer. And we connect summer with taking holidays in France or Greece or somewhere else with guaranteed sunshine. Maybe this year the best sunshine will be right where we are?

Yours thinking I’m far to out of shape to have a suntan,

S.