Christmas 2013, and I was about six months pregnant with our baby, and we knew we were having a boy. My extended family met in a country pub, nestled in the Surrey Hills, for a rare gathering at what had been my grandmother's local pub. As we spent the time chatting and catching up with my cousins and grandmother, we soon started talking about how my pregnancy was going and whether we were prepared for our new arrival. My cousin asked if we had decided on a name, to which Granny responded that he would be called Thomas! We had historically mentioned that we had liked that name, but we hadn't made any decisions at that point.
On 1 March 2014, we had finally decided on Thomas Samuel and had agreed that we would announce this more widely, by sharing another photo of him on social media and perhaps alongside an update as to how we were getting on at home. Prior to that, we would let our immediate family know, and I sent them an email with the news and our hope that we would be able to go and register his birth on the Monday. I soon received a response from Dad saying " What a LOT of children you'll have!" It was the first time it dawned on me that our choice of children's names created this acronym.
Of course, what subsequently happened later that day, with Thomas' admission to hospital, meant that we didn't get a chance to announce this immediately. Throughout the time at the birthing centre, in the postnatal ward, in the NICU and in the PICU, we were asked by the doctors, nurses, paramedics and care staff for the patient's name. We had a sense of unease telling them so definitely, when we hadn't made it official to everyone who knew us. It felt wrong. How dare they have that privilege to know before the people we loved and who would love Thomas. Of course, we told them, but hearing strangers calling Thomas by his name, and introducing him to others wasn't what we had planned.
We were still keen to tell people and realised that we may be in hospital for quite some time, so perhaps we would need to let people know that things weren't quite as we had hoped. We also didn't want to worry people unnecessarily, and, at the time we were not in a position to know what the immediate future for Thomas would be. Instead, we settled on this post to social media 10 years ago today:
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