Baby Andrea is born

On the 28th November at 10:05 in the morning we welcomed baby Andrea Prior Gonzalez into this world. Our beautiful baby girl weighed 3.41kg and measured 51cm in length. The following is a picture of Andrea taken the day after her birth.

Since the 28th time has certainly flown by and we are adapting to no longer be able to sleep, watch TV, or do anything apart from taking care of baby. It is well worth it, as the slightest smile just melts your heart.

Now being a new first time parent it is amazing at how your prespective on things changes. An example of this is the amazing interest that you seem to have over the changing colour of babys execrement, from the exteremely smelly black first poo's to the later greeny type colour to the final yellow type. Sad, but true.....

Apart from having to adapt to baby, we have also noticed that we need to buy a new car. Simply enough our little car is not big enough for us, baby & shopping, so an investment will have to be made.

Mayte (my wife) is doing pretty well, and as my mother predicted she is starting to ping back to her slimline figure. This is supposedly to do with the fact that as Mayte is breast feeding the baby then all excess fats are burned to create milk for the baby. The other bonuses of this are that breast milk is supposedly the best food for baby (as it is natural) and it is fully of Mayte's antibodies which protect Andrea. Saying that, for reason Andrea sometimes requires more milk, so we are having to make up bottles. As you can see, Andrea eats like her father.

One thing about living in Spain is the amount of paper work that needs to be completed. This has been one of my main jobs over the last couple of weeks, as simply enough, Mayte has been recovering from the birth / looking after Andrea. If you live in Madrid and have a baby the following will needs to be done :

1. Registration of the baby at the registro civil. Pretty easy to do, but you will need to take the yellow form given to you by the hospital, and I recommend filling it in before you get to the registro civil. You will need to take the "libro de familiar" (i.e. family book) and identification for both yourself and spouse. I would recommend not going on Mondays as the rather nice lady who helped me complete the forms mentioned that Mondays are horribly busy.
2. You next need to register the baby with the Social Security office (seguridad social). This is pretty easy, but you need to add the baby to either your own or your spouses social security number. Once this is done you will have a little white peice of card with an offical stamp. While you are here, if your wife is taking maternity leave from work pick up the documents for the "baja de maternidad", ekse you need to make another visit to the social security offices (like I did) at a later date.
   
3. Now you need to register that the baby is living at your home address. This is called "empradronar" in Spanish I think it is a bit ridiculous, but with out you can not register baby at your local health centre. Get to your local council (ayuntanmiento) office early as the queues are pretty horrific. When I was at my local office(Cuidad Lineal district) it was even worse as they were having computer problems, but I have to say that the staff were fantastic to me.
   
4. Now go to your local health centre with the social security papers, the empradronimiento papers and family book to register with the centre, request a social security health card and assign a pedriatrician.
   
5. Arrange a doctors appointment for your spouse to be signed off (dar de baja) for maternity leave. You can go yourself, just explain that your wife has given birth and that you need the certificate for the maternity leave.
   
6. With the maternity leave documents that you obtained from the social security office, complete the paper work, send one of the paper to your spouses company. This paper has to be filled in an sent back to you. Then you need to go back to the social security office with the paper work from your wife's company, her ID and the document given to you by the doctor.
   

Well that is the basics, as the maternity leave paper work has only just started and we are half way through number 6 at the moment.

I would also like to say a massive thank you to family, friends & all for their hospitality and gifts. We feel truly honoured.