A/N I have nothing interesting to report about me. The baby, however, well she can now climb onto the coffee table and insists on wearing a nightie meant for a doll on her head as a hat. I'm starting to wonder if she needs to get out more.

Disclaimer: Not mine.

SPOV

It was kind of exciting when I picked up my new car, or people-mover as it was really. It was so new and shiny. I briefly considered banning kids from it completely, but, as Eric said, that kind of defeated the purpose of buying it in the first place.

Of course it had been pretty obvious that Eric had been to that car-yard and picked the thing out long before I got there. But by this stage I'd learnt that if Eric was actually talking about it, it was probably a done deal. Mostly that was OK; I just hoped he didn't have any other big surprises up his sleeve or anything.

Clearing out my car in preparation for trading it in was a complete revelation. I hadn't quite realised how much stuff I had in the boot. There was the pushchair, of course, which kind of languished in there now Felicia had gone off sitting in it, but I also had the picnic rug, some buckets and spades, which were still a bit sandy from the last trip to the beach, my reusable shopping bags, including the chiller bag, a spare rain jacket, the big umbrella, Amelia's pink umbrella, a ball, an emergency change kit for Felicia with a pull-up and some wipes, the sun shade and the rain cover for the pushchair, and, kind of bizarrely, one lone lemon that had obviously rolled out of my shopping at some point and was now a bit mouldy on one side.

We pulled it all out and set it in the garage. Eric surveyed the pile. "Yeah, you fucking need a big car" he muttered to himself.

"What?" I asked. I'd seen worse, I was sure I had. Of course we hadn't cleared out the backseat yet, but that was all the kid's junk.

Eric didn't reply he just nodded at the pile. "Well" I said, trying to think of a defence. "Mainly, it's for the kids."

"Uh-huh."

"They need a lot of crap."

"Yep."

"Maybe I won't put sandy spades in my new car though."

"I wouldn't."

"Because it's all nice and shiny."

"Yeah."

"Thank-you" I said, reaching over and taking Eric's hand. He looked over and smiled at me. "You're welcome, Sookie" he said. He seemed pleased that I liked the people-mover, and really, what was not to like? It was all clean and shiny and new and it was going to be really easy to get the kids in and out. Even Bob liked it, when Eric brought it home on the Tuesday evening he promptly went to sleep on the roof, and I could hear Eric out there shooing him off it.

At least Bob hadn't made it inside the thing yet. I'd left my old car open once and found him asleep on the parcel shelf in the sun several hours later. The cat fur was still in place when I traded it in because I'd never got around to vacuuming out the car.

The kids liked it though, although Amelia couldn't figure out why I was driving an ambulance now, and Felicia didn't understand that she couldn't run around inside and still had to sit in a seat like normal.

And Eric, well, Eric looked pretty pleased with himself all round, that is, when he wasn't telling Bob that his claws would scratch the paintwork. I tried to tell him he was wasting his breath. I was pretty sure Bob didn't care.

EPOV

Despite the fact that Sookie had figured out that there may have been some planning on my part prior to the purchase of her new car, she didn't seem that pissed about it. Mostly she still seemed happy to be getting it. And when I saw the amount of shit she had in the trunk of her existing car I could see why. I wasn't quite sure why she needed all that stuff, but apparently it was a necessary part of motherhood or something.

So I'd solved one problem, but I still had the house to figure out. I'd seen some more places with Maudette but they were shit. She really didn't have much of a clue despite the fact I'd tried to make it as clear as possible what it was I was actually interested in. I was starting to wonder if we were ever going to be able to move.

Calvin came over to fix the hole I'd made in the garage wall. He didn't ask much about how it had happened, or why, but I took the opportunity to discuss with him again the idea of adding onto our current house. Yeah, it still didn't make any fucking sense to do that. I mentioned the villa I'd seen on my first trip out with Maudette, the one that had already been renovated.

"Yah, there are a lot of places like that around here" Calvin had said. "But they're fucking expensive once they start tinkering with them and adding in bifold doors and big decks and designer kitchens."

"Yeah, that's what this was like. And it had a really fucking great bathroom."

"I bet that wasn't original. Half the villas didn't even have bathrooms, although you get a few with claw baths that are worth a fortune now. Or copper door-handles. They strip all the door-handles out and sell them off."

"Uh-huh."

"Maybe" Calvin continued, stepping back to look at his handiwork, "what you need is something that hasn't been renovated? A real project?"

That sounded less than appealing. "I don't want to live in a pile of shit, Calvin. And neither does Sookie." Well, I figured she wouldn't, but who knew? Bits of this house looked pretty awful before we got Calvin back to finish them off, and there were still a lot of loose floorboards and a door that stuck. Sookie insisted that you got stuff like that with any old house, but I felt sure we could improve it.

"Just don't move until it's finished" Calvin said, shrugging, as he started to pack away his tools.

I thought about that for a moment. "That'd mean bridging finance, if we haven't sold this place yet." I wasn't sure I wanted to be that far into debt.

"Well, you're the one who works with all those bankers. Surely they can help you out?" Calvin asked.

"I guess." I wasn't really convinced though, it would be a huge commitment in time and money and I couldn't really see Sookie on-board for it.

"OK, well I'm done here anyway" Calvin continued. "So just let that putty dry out overnight then give it a bit of a sand-down before you paint it, OK?"

"Yeah, OK." Fuck, I really wasn't up for any renovation projects despite Calvin's enthusiasm. I guess he thought he was going to get the work. Maybe that would make it cheaper, although, fuck. I might still end up being his assistant and that wouldn't fucking work at all.

But for the sake of satisfying my curiosity I started to investigate these renovation projects that Calvin was talking about. He was right there were a few of them around, but most of them were fucking horrible.

And the money they would suck would be horrific. It wasn't as though we were exactly struggling, but at the same time, we weren't made of money. While the house we lived in now was fully paid-off, thanks to Bill's early demise and the fact that Sookie had once sold him life insurance when she worked in a bank branch, funding renovations without releasing the capital by selling the current place was going to be a big ask. I didn't think we could quite do it, yet. In fact I didn't know what we could fucking do about the house. I'd felt good about getting Sookie the car, but as the weeks passed I felt, well, I felt despairing about the house.

Sookie seemed OK though. She was more than OK really, she was blooming now, or as she would say when she looked at herself in the mirror "My arse is getting wider by the day." I didn't like to point out that no one was looking at her ass. They were looking at her bump, or, more likely, her boobs.

Every time I thought that she couldn't possibly get any bigger, she did. And so did Sam. We went back to see Russell and he did some more measurements with the ultrasound again, and then he got out a little graph and started drawing points on it. "So this is where you are" he said, showing the chart to Sookie. I put Felicia, who'd been sitting in my lap, on the floor and leaned over to have a better look.

"Well, that's good" I said, "he's way above the 90th percentile." Sookie shot me a look that showed she was really annoyed by that statement but I couldn't figure out why; surely it was good news that he was doing so well.

"We'll just keep an eye on what happens from here" Russell said. "What were your other two?" He turned around and looked at the screen, scrolling through Sookie's notes. "Mmm, just over 8 pounds…well; I think you can do a 9 pound baby, but maybe not a 10 pound one. We'll have to keep an eye on that."

Oh. It dawned on me why Sookie was a bit less than impressed with Sam's size; she had to push him out. Yeah. Ouch. I felt fucking sorry for her. And I was pretty sure it was my fault he was going to be that big.

After the appointment was over Sookie didn't seem to want to talk about it. "Its fine" she said, "And you can't trust Russell's measuring skills on that ultrasound. He announced I had a 9 pound 2 baby in there the day before I had Amelia. He was a pound out. I wouldn't worry."

But she did sound worried. Still, I decided to change the subject. Kind of, anyway. "Why pounds?" I asked. "Everything else is kilos." I didn't mind, I could understand pounds, I was just curious.

"Tradition, I guess" Sookie said, shrugging. "I mean, the official weight is in kilos, but everyone talks about babies in pounds. It means I can compare babies, but I have no idea how the weight compares to the real world."

"Well, I can tell you. If you want."

Sookie looked at me and smiled. "Yeah, I guess you can. I knew I had you around for a reason!" I walked her and Felicia back to their car and waved goodbye. I might have been great at understanding pounds as a measurement, but I really wanted to be fantastic at finding a new house too.

I wasn't sure what to do about that, so I walked back to my office wondering if I needed to try Maudette again, or maybe try some more realtors. There were a couple of other offices in Mt Eden. There had to be something out there for us.

But what I found when I sat back at my desk and switched my laptop back on was something completely different. I had an email. From Indira

SPOV

Eric was worried about something, I could tell. Me, I was worried about how big this baby was going to be but I was trying to put that off for now. There wasn't much I could do about it, save maybe take up smoking, and I wasn't quite that desperate. If the baby was big, well then, I guess that's why I had a specialist. Despite Russell once cheerfully telling Bill during an appointment that you could get any baby out with forceps, I trusted him not to be quite that brutal and if it came down it, well there was always surgery. He'd done Tara's caesareans and she seemed to have recovered OK, so I was sure I would too.

But Eric was hiding something again. We'd bought the car, so I couldn't figure out what it was, but it was big, I could tell that much. There was a lot of staring at stuff on his phone and occasionally getting his laptop out and trying to work at night. I wanted to ask, but I figured he'd tell me in his own time.

In the meantime, life went on. Felicia reached the magic age of nearly 2 ½ and got promoted to the pre-school at daycare. The main difference, apart from the activities, was that I now had to provide her morning tea in a lunchbox, to get her used to having one. So on her first day she trotted off with her new Toy Story lunchbox and happily joined the other kids without a backward glance. She'd been over this side of the building enough with Amelia, I guessed, but it brought home how much she was growing up too.

It was just lucky I had another baby on order, because otherwise I might have had to go home for a good cry after that.

She was still excited when she got home "I's a Kiwi now!" she told Amelia, after we collected Amelia from school.

"So? I go to school. We don't have groups like at pre-school. I'm in a house. Green house."

"I's got a lunchbox!"

"Yes, and I've had one for ages. Em has the same lunchbox as me. It's got princesses on it." It was clear that Felicia was never going to win this comparison, but she didn't seem to mind. I guessed that was how it was always going to be, Amelia was going to get there first and Felicia would just have to carve out her own little niche in the world.

Certainly she was enjoying coming to parent-help with me. Once she'd stopped spending the time wandering around investigating what they had to do in Amelia's classroom, she started paying attention to what the kids at the table were doing. Usually, it wasn't much. It took a lot of coaxing to get them to write anything, and it really depended on the topic as to how enthusiastic they all were. The day they had to write something about their dads had been a disaster as Chloe had promptly burst into tears because she had two mummies and no daddy.

Amelia of course immediately tried to tell her that couldn't possibly be right because there had to be a penis if you wanted to make a baby, and I had to step in and shush her before she made it all worse. "Just, um. Just write about one of your mummies then" I tried.

Chloe stopped crying and started chewing her pencil, so that was progress. "How do you spell dick?" Emily asked me.

"Pardon?" I tried, turning away from Chloe.

"Dick. As in 'my dad is a dick.' Mum says he is. All the time." She looked at me expectantly. I wondered about Tanya's parenting strategies. "Maybe you should write something like 'my daddy is fun' instead", I tried.

Emily looked thoughtful. "I guess…" she said slowly. "Great!" I told her enthusiastically.

"I'm going to write that my daddy has red hair" Maisie piped up. "Good for you" I told her.

"I'm going to write that my daddy is dead!" Amelia said, trying to top that. "Um, really?" I asked her. "Why don't you put something about Eric?"

Amelia shrugged, "Alright. How do you spell comes-from-America then?"

Emily looked up. "Mum said that Eric's her friend now. But I don't know if that's a nap-taking friend. She takes naps with a few friends." She thought for a moment. "She says she's going to the museum if Eric goes. Is Eric going?"

"Don't know" I said. Probably not now, I thought.

"Mum said that Uncle Chris might be my daddy. I heard her talking about it with Jocelyn" Chloe said, still chewing her pencil. "Do you want to write about Uncle Chris then?" I asked her.

"Um. Maybe. I could say he has no hair and a picture on his arm?"

"Yeah that'll work" I told her. When the girls had finally settled down I walked around to see how Sebastian was doing. "Do you need any help?" I asked him. Well, any help that wasn't Felicia. She was standing at his elbow watching what he was doing. He was drawing a picture again. This time it was a tiger. At least Felicia wasn't scribbling all over his picture, I thought.

Sebastian looked at me and shrugged. "Want to write something about your dad?" I asked him. He nodded. "What do you want to say?" I asked. He thought about it. "Lawyer" he said in the end after much thought.

"Your dad's a lawyer?" I asked him.

"He specialises in tax law, primarily GST for large companies" Sebastian said. He tripped over a few of the words but I think that was the longest sentence I'd ever heard him speak. Wow, so I guess some things were rubbing off on him then.

It was only after Felicia and I left the classroom at the end of our shift that I noticed what Felicia had in her hand. It was Sebastian's drawing. "Felicia!" I said to her. "Did you take Sebastian's picture?"

"He gived it to me!" she countered, holding it against her chest.

I sighed. I was pretty sure he hadn't. "You shouldn't take things from other people, sweetheart" I tried. "They won't like it and you could get in trouble."

"Mine" Felicia retorted.

I was torn about whether to go back to the classroom and hand it back, or just leave with it. In the end I decided it was just a picture and we'd let it go for now. "Just don't do that again" I said to Felicia. "Or we won't be allowed to come to school with Amelia anymore."

Felicia just glared at me and held the picture close to her. It wasn't until we got home and she put it down to eat lunch that I saw what it was a picture of. It was a tiger and next to it was a tiny girl with blue eyes and curly pigtails. Felicia had been right; Sebastian had obviously drawn it for her. Maybe Amelia had been telling the truth and he did really like her?

EPOV

I was going to have to tell Sookie sometime I figured. Unfortunately I picked a night when she'd been helping at the school and after dinner mostly what she wanted to do was tell me how that had gone. "The kids are still hard work" she said, as we sat watching TV and I absentmindedly ran my hand over her bump, while Sookie leaned against me. I couldn't even fit my hand over it now. It was pretty big. Probably due to the big baby in there. Fuck, poor Sookie. I realised I hadn't really been listening to her. Mainly because I heard her say "You're not listening, are you?"

"Oh, I was, really."

"So what I was saying?"

"The kids are…hard work." That sounded right, anyway.

"I said more than that. The important point is you need to be careful if you do go to the museum, Tanya thinks you're her friend."

"That's because I got Connor under control for her."

"No, that's Debbie. Tanya's Emily's mother."

"Who? I don't know any Emily."

"Em."

"Oh. Well that's OK, isn't it? If she wants to be friends. The kids are."

"Remember she naps with her friends. If you want to call it that."

I pulled back to look at Sookie. "Really Sookie? You think I would."

"I think she would" Sookie snorted. Then she muttered something that sounded like "She should be so lucky."

"I don't think you need to worry. It's not even like you get to be alone on these trips. There's kids fucking everywhere and they all want something. And when I had to supervise all the boys that was a fucking nightmare. Seriously, half the class and only me to deal with them. Not good planning."

"What did you do?"

"I told them that if I saw anymore pushing and shoving we were all going back to fill in another worksheet."

"And that worked?"

"None of them wanted to fill in the one they had, so they really didn't want to start another."

"Yeah, I guess. It'd be like getting them to write stories. Sebastian actually wrote something today. And he drew Felicia a picture."

"Did he?"

"Yep. Of her standing beside a tiger. He's a weird little kid, but I think he means well."

"That's…odd, though. Isn't it?" It seemed odd. I mean, I liked Felicia, but I couldn't see her appeal to a five year old boy.

Sookie gave a half-shrug. "I think he's lonely and she wanted to be friends, so he's trying. He just doesn't know what to do with the boys his age."

"They're fucking animals most of the time."

"Exactly."

We sat in silence for a while and then I figured I'd better broach the subject. "So" I said, "I wanted to say something."

"Uh-huh" Sookie said, with a hint of trepidation in her voice. I guessed she'd figured something was up.

"So, um, I had an email. From Indira."

"Oh" Sookie seemed surprised at that. "How is she?"

"Good. She's left De Castro too, now. I think Victor was getting a bit reckless with trying to expand when they didn't have the resources, plus of course seeing Chow every day was getting her down a bit. He's getting remarried soon." To the stripper he'd met when they took me out, poor fucker.

"That would be hard" Sookie agreed. "I don't know what it would be like to have someone you'd loved that much in front of you all the time…" she trailed off, obviously thinking of Bill. I decided I'd better start talking again before we sailed off onto one of Sookie's tangents.

"So, anyway" I continued. "She says she might have a bit of work for me. She's landed this big contract and at the moment it's just her and Clancy in her firm, although why she took that fucker is beyond me. Upshot is she can offer me a cut if I help them out."

"Oh, well that sounds good. The New Zealand dollar keeps slipping so if you can earn some US dollars that would be a nice bonus."

"Yep, it would."

"So, what? They'll send you the stuff to do."

And this is where it all got fucking difficult. "They want me to meet the client first. I'd have to go to Shreveport."

Sookie sat up and turned around to face me. "But…I'm pregnant!" she said. "I'm nearly six months' pregnant you can't not be here."

I sighed. "I don't really want to go" I said, stroking her face. "But…it's a good opportunity. And you said yourself, the money would be nice."

"We don't need the money though! If we need the money we shouldn't have bought the car!" she was almost crying now. Fuck. I really didn't want to make her cry, and I really didn't want to go, but I'd been emailing back and forth with Indira, and fuck, it was a good opportunity. And maybe, just maybe if I earned something from this I could fucking find a house we could afford to renovate.

"We needed the car though" I told her, as gently as I could. "We needed the car because we're going to have three kids. And kids are expensive, you're always saying that yourself."

"They do keep asking for money at the school. You think it's just uniforms and books, but you have to pay for trips, and donations for this that and the other. It's hopeless" Sookie sniffed.

"Exactly. So wouldn't it be good to have this as kind of…buffer. Just in case?"

"I guess. But I hate that you have to go. You'll miss the pregnancy!"

"It's only for two weeks. After that I can work from here. And I won't miss much. We had that other scan the other week, and Sam was fine." I'd taken Sookie for her anatomy scan at 20 weeks and we'd gone back to the same radiology clinic where they'd picked up the initial risk of Down's. Both of us had been quiet going in, but Sam was fine. He waved again. "I have the pictures on my phone. And you can send me others, so I don't miss how big the bump's getting."

Sookie bit her lip. "I know" she said quietly. "I do, but…I want you here."

"I want to be here too."

"But you're going anyway?"

"Not if you absolutely hate the idea. But I think…well I think it's a good plan." I looked at her, trying to read her face. She looked down, and she took a deep breath. "OK" she said finally. "OK, as long as you go soon, because I don't want to you to miss the birth. Book the tickets."

"I guess this gets me out of the museum trip."

"I guess it does."

I kissed her forehead. "It's just a short trip, Sookie. It'll be fine" I said. I wasn't sure any longer which one of us I was trying to reassure.

"I know. But I'll miss you."

"I'll miss you too. And Amelia. And Felicia. And even Sam."

Sookie pulled back. "There's one thing we should do before you go though" she said. "And that's get that list of names sorted."

"Yeah, we can do that" I kissed her again, properly and deeply. I felt so bad about this, that she could have her fucking list of names if that would make her happy. I'd do anything to make her happy.

We broke apart. "So I was thinking that maybe we could name the baby Tristram, see if it doesn't have an 'n' at the end, like Tristan, it doesn't sound so bad with Northman. What do think, shall we put that on the list?"

Except that. Maybe I wasn't doing that.

A/N GST is Goods and Services Tax, it's added on at point of sale for most things we pay for, so lots of companies are therefore collecting it on behalf of the government.

Our primary schools are rated by decile, the decile is determined by the socio-economic environment the school is in. Decile 1 are the poor areas, decile 10 the wealthiest. Decile 1 schools get the most government funding, decile 10 the least. Amelia would be going to a decile 10 school, therefore her school would be constantly fundraising to make up the shortfall it would need to keep itself running. But she does get to go to a nice school. So it's a trade-off.

Thanks for reading!