Gabe and Eggy Palmer

We drove across the border into Cornwall yesterday to visit my eldest daughter Frances and her two week old baby Gabe. Frances and her partner Wazza were completely exhausted already as Gabe has settled in to his nocturnal pattern of sleep all day and scream all night. Now, I've had a few babies in my time and I can just about remember those torturous nights, but I couldn't really come up with any easy solutions.

The midwife has told Frances that it is very important to wind the baby during the day because it is that wind that gets into the intestine and keeps Gabe awake at night. I got to thinking about that though - it doesn't make sense does it. Why doesn't the wind in the night get to his intestine the next day. Anyway I spent a lovely couple of hours carrying Gabe around. He really likes to just be next to someone, feeling their warmth and the movement of their body. I started to think about where he had just come from, nice and warm and soft, with no rough materials rubbing his skin, and how now, he's come out into this world and he has to get used to different temperatures and different textures, and being separate and on his own. There can't be any hurry for all that to happen can there. My daughter laughed at me when I told her to keep him in a nice warm little nest so he felt nice and snug. Give him a few months and he'll start to get used to how it feels to be in a little human body.

Hey, but what a palaver!

And then my mare Splodge goes and has her foal Eggy Palmer, and I find him in the field about two hours old, just standing by his Mum with not a care in the world. Three metres away there was an absolutely huge and perfect afterbirth - I lifted it into a bucket and put it in the hedge for the foxes to eat. Two days later Eggy is cantering around his Mum and looking pretty special.