Surveyor has been and gone. We have discovered that the bottom of the chain is ready to exchange. Next thing is to see if our buyer is happy with the survey…

Very tired today. Jon woke up around 1:30 this morning and came in to us wanting a cuddle. We also had a man round to quote for a new roof for our prospective buyer today and so we had to be up bright and early too.

We are still don’t know if our sale will be going through or not yet. It’s not in our hands anymore. It’s looking like we can exchange on next Tuesday or Wednesday and then complete on the 9th July. However people up the chain have said that they will pull out if they can’t complete by the 30th July. Our buyer seems adamant that she can’t complete before the 9th and so we have to hope that either we can persuade her to complete earlier or persuade the ones somewhere up the the chain to hold on.

At the moment it’s looking like the chain above us will collapse, all because of 9 days :(

“‘Tax rich more’ says minister”

You can tell that this government is getting comfortable in power as we start to see more and more traditional Labour policies come along. What I can’t believe is that I voted for this lot :(

BBC News reports that a British couple have just had a son that was selected so that he stands a chance of being able to save his older brother’s life.

I’m currently in two minds over this. I know that during IVF embryos are discarded and so implcitly a choice is made, so I don’t really see a problem with choosing the embryo that will save a life. The argument against it seems to be that it “devalues” the child who’s been “selected”. I don’t agree personally as I think that most parents would only go through this sort of thing if they wanted another child anyway. The fact that they can save the life of their current child is a bonus that means that they will go through the pain of IVF for that chance, not that they are only having the baby for the first child.

What I find worrying is the obvious developments. In this case, the embryos were studied and the one with a tissue match was chosen. The next step will be to modify the embyro so that it’s tissue does match and then we’ll be getting to the point where we are choosing the embryo that’s got the genes that match the parents’ vision of thier child. This is where it gets problematic in my view. I wouldn’t want a child to be modified just so that it has blue eyes, but paradoxically, I wouldn’t have a problem modifying a child so that it won’t get a brain disorder.

I don’t have an answer, but I do know that pretending that it will go away is going to cause us more problems later.

Was awake for most of the night, and fell asleep sometime after 5am this morning. As a result I slept straight through the alarm and have just got to work.

Not a good start to the day.

It looks like our sale has completely fallen through now :(

Update:

It’s all on a tightrope at the moment. It seems that threatening to re-market our house has forced movement towards getting this sorted. We won’t know if it’s all going to work though until next week…

Have spent all morning investigating options that’ll mean that the entire chain doesn’t collapse. I think that I should be paid for all this work!

We ate out today to celebrate Father’s Day. Went to a very nice restaurant where they welcomed children with open arms. It’s much less stressful to go to a restaurant where there’s more than one high chair, kids cutlery and food that isn’t just fishfingers and chips.

Although we booked for midday, we had such a good time (and Jon didn’t get bored!) that we didn’t get back here until 2pm. Jon’s nap was a little late as a result but he slept very well until about 4ish! Of course, he probably won’t sleep tonight now :)

I’m not quite so stressed today over the house move. Georgina and I had a nice long talk last night which was good and made everything much more bearable.

We can’t do anything about the move for a week or so, so I’m sure that my stress level will rise again then :)