This is half-pie.

I’m an Uncle, as of 11:45pm last night!

My brother Dougal and his wife Sarah have had a baby girl, Eva Elizabeth Stevenson Macdougall (6lb 7oz) at Dunstan hospital. Mother and daughter are both well, and the father is, I think it’s fair to say, fizzing.

So are my parents. That’s three granddaughters – Bella, Rosa, and Eva – for them, which sort of makes up for having us three boys in the first place (particularly from my mother’s point of view I’m guessing).

The arrival was not without a little drama: in the great tradition of birthing events the baby had to arrive in the middle of the worst storm of the winter thus far. The same storm which, somewhat disappointingly, failed to deliver any snow this morning to Wellington, dropped about 10cm yesterday around the house at the farm. Sarah started getting labour pains around the middle of the day, and they drove up to the midwife in Alexandra yesterday afternoon, picking their way through the snow and black ice on State Highway 8. And then they made it all the way back again. It’s lucky that Dougal has lots of experience driving in snow and ice: he needed it. As he got home he turned to Sarah and said: ”I bet you’re going to make me drive that again tonight”.

And yes, so it turned out. At about 8pm Dougal and Sarah had to drive back to the hospital, again taking the farm Land Cruiser over that high part of State Highway 8 between Roxburgh and Alexandra. That road will have been closed by now, but in any case they made it through, taking an extra half an hour on the normally 45 minute journey. It must have been a very interesting drive.

It’s all good news. Rosa is going to have a cousin exactly the same age as her, and Bella will have another younger person to command. They’ll be as thick as thieves. I hope they end up having the same sort of relationship with each other as Dougal and I have with our cousins, and that the distance between our families (Cook Strait and 800km of road) isn’t too much of a barrier.