The first chapter

For the next couple of weeks, there's no little bubba crawling around and doing funny things I'd like to write about. So this seems like a good opportunity to explain a few things about how our funny little family came to be. The events that brought Isobel into my life have sometimes been difficult and don't easily fade into the past. Matt and I were 'friends with benefits' for a long time, during which I hoped to stumble upon a more reliable man and he played around with other women. My career was flying so I didn't have the time for a full-time boyfriend and was still pretty sore about the last one that had ended in tears. It was a good set up, giving us all the good bits of a relationship without the complications. And he'd left the northern city in which we lived temporarily to suit his career. I was fiercely independent and enjoyed being single. I had no desire to have to rely on anyone else. I didn't really believe in love, marriage or happily ever after (or a man's ability to hold to their part in any of the above). If it were ever to happen for me though, I had a vision of the man who'd eventually win my heart being much different to Matt. But annoyingly for someone so sure they break the mould, the predictable happened. Matt travelled to mine every weekend. We went out in public with our other friends and, instead of just having sex, we started to cuddle and kiss. The perfect arrangement couldn't last forever. Though now I suppose I'm glad it didn't. It started to unravel on a Saturday night in April, when I planned a night out with a girlfriend. She lived near him and I arranged to stay at his the rest of the weekend. Returning on Sunday, my bag was hidden in the wardrobe and there were two used wine glasses on the counter. "Fast work. I was only gone one night." Stupid girl, you're not supposed to care. The next weekend was Easter and my parents were having a relative over. I was summoned to their house in the village where I grew up for the weekend. Matt didn't ask me my plans and I didn't tell him, for a number of reasons. I feared I was being presumptuous that he'd come in the first place. What if he said he wasn't planning to anyway? I wanted to ruin his weekend plans last minute, not give him the chance to make more. And I wanted to teach him to have the respect to ask me first, rather than presume I'm always there waiting for him. Even if I usually was. What wasn't part of the plan however was that he was already on his way. On arrival at an empty flat, he was never going to drive all the way back home. I understood immediately what I'd done, although not yet the extent of the repercussions. My mum suggested on the Sunday of the bank holiday weekend that I go home early. I was being a mardy bitch. Back in the city I went out, got sh*t-faced with a friend and pulled a really sweet guy before falling down the staircase in the nightclub. Nick picked me up, took me home, put me to bed like a gentleman and called me the next day to meet for coffee. He was funny, cheeky but not too sure of himself. We spent a lot of time together in the warm early summer, having barbecues and drinking while he played my favourite Counting Crows songs on guitar (Mr Jones is actually quite complicated). I wasn't to know it then, but he was not the new love that was working it's way into my life.