Up until last night, I've pretty much owned the title of biggest clot in this family. Although Amelie runs me close sometimes. But that was before Lisa dropped a ball of blood the size of a King Edward potato during last night's episode of Big Brother.

Prior to that, it had been an uneventful day. Too uneventful, in fact. Having fed with no problem since he was half an hour old, Toby suddenly decided to kick back, relax, and stop eating yesterday morning. He was quite alert...

... but the way he reacted when offered any milk, you'd think he'd gone vegan.

Lisa put in a request for a breastfeeding chair yesterday morning, as sitting up in bed all night was giving her backache, so having dropped off Amelie at nursery at 1pm, I headed for the shopping metropolis of Woodingdean, and the Martlets Hospice furniture store, where I picked up a wicker chair for fifteen quid.

Back home, however, Toby was having none of it. No matter how Lisa tried to tempt him, he didn't want to breastfeed. Amelie gave it a go when she got home from nursery...

... but not even she could persuade him to eat. By early evening, he was crying constantly through hunger, and Lisa had the kind of milk sacks that made watermelons look like kumquats. We phoned the midwife for advice, but there was clearly some kind of birthing emergency going on, as they wouldn't answer the phone. We finally got through just after 10pm, and they advised us to try and tempt him with some expressed milk in a sterilised syringe. Which I just happened to have in the bedroom.

Before we could try it, however, Lisa dropped a bombshell, in the form of a major blood clot, which fell out of her like a cow from the sky. Only more unexpected. We'd already been concerned that Toby was likely to pass out from malnutrition, so the fact that Lisa was clearly now about to peg it through blood loss wasn't the best news we'd had all day.

So we phoned the midwife again, and told her about the blood clot. She said "Is it as big as a 50p piece?". Lisa said "No, it's the size of my fist". The midwife said she'd call us straight back.

The upshot of the group discussion on the labour ward was that they'd send a midwife straight round in the morning. Assuming Lisa made it through the night. If it happened again, or if she started feeling unwell, she was to get straight down to A&E. But fortunately, at the time of writing, Lisa's still alive. She's currently asleep, but I know she's still breathing from the sound of snoring.

We were up until 1am, pumping breast milk into Toby, and checking Lisa for blood, but by the time the midwives arrived (in a pair for safety) at 9:30am, Toby was beginning to feed again. Lisa was fully examined in the bedroom, and they seem to think she's ok.

So things appear to be getting back to normal. We've had no sleep, Amelie's playing up, and Lisa's exhausted, but that's pretty much par for the course. The good news is that we successfully shocked two experienced midwives. Not with the blood clot and the starving baby, but with the news that Amelie won't be four till October. Having met her on Wednesday, and then again today, they'd guessed she was six years old.