The last game of 2009 has come and gone. The floor seemed a little slippery tonight, but the games went well otherwise. We’re off for the next two weeks (December 22, 29) and start up again on January 5th. Here’s who came out:

Goalies (2): Dave & Doug

Yes (8+2+2): Brian, DaveH, Dino, Doug, Ian, Jeff, Jimmy, Kolin, Marty, MikeB, MikeG, Scott

This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a very long time. I find that talking about past videogames and the reasoning behind the decisions made during the development of them, both helps me understand them more and at the same time demystified the whole process of game development.

So that’s what I’ll try to achieve with these post-mortems.

In the past year or so I’ve started quite a few projects and finished only two of them (the first one and the last one, conveniently enough). Nevertheless, I’ve learned something new out of every single one of them, so I wouldn’t even dream to label any one of these projects as a waste of time, in fact, quite the contrary: Each one served as an experiment in different ways to make games. Some of them failed, some of them succeeded and all of them were made with Game Maker.

I’ve already started to try out new tools for game making, so I thought appropriate to start a series of postmortems now that I had such a big change in the way I’m making games.

Also, this post is just an introduction to the series of post-mortems since explaining all of this in the first post of the series would have only ammounted to unnnecessary commentary. This way, I get to ramble on and on for a few paragraphs without having to worry about the word count. Plus, I have two very big exams in a few days so I don’t exactly have the time to give this series the polish it deserves.

Spurred by some of the MSU students’ experiences this term, here are some thoughts on how to manage expectations on team projects: be aggressively competent.

The games were ok tonight, though the final 10 minutes (when the score was tied 3-3) were probably the most exciting portion of the night. I don’t have much else to say, so here’s who came out:

Goalies (2): Bob & Doug

Players (8+2+2): Brian, DaveH, David, Dino, Doug, Ian, Jeff, Jimmy, Marty, MikeB, MikeG, Scott

The following Patricia Cornwell books are currently on sale at Books From A Rose:

Yikes, that was an ugly night. Turned ankles, pulled hips, balls and elbows to the head. Here’s what bart had to say after I told him about the games:

Thankfully the injuries were only minor. remember boys, keep your sticks down. Here’s who came out:

Goalies (2): Bob & Doug

Players (8+1+1): Brian, DaveC, DaveH, David, Dino, Doug, Jimmy, Kolin, MikeB, Scott

Thumbs up: They way the students on the project came together and worked as a team, holding IRC meetings, sharing emails and conference calls.

Thumbs down: The project started off slower than expected, in part to the existing infrastructure and rules of interaction with Eclipse projects and with me becoming familiar with supervising such a unique student course experience.

First off, thank you to Greg and all the profs and TAs that made this project course possible.  It was definitely a unique and invaluable experience that I believe all students should consider in their undergraduate years.

What worked:

I’ve been working full-time as a programmer for 3 years now and I wish I had taken this course during my undergrad as this course is extremely applicable to real life work practices.  It teaches you about the importance of communication and coordination with teams across the world with respect to solving a problem.  This is a very common scenario in the workplace, whether it be communication, design,  integrating code, code reviews, etc…and this course helps set you in that mindset and find ways to work with it.  Overcoming obstacles like timezone differences can be difficult but not impossible.  With good planning and communication, teams can work very well together and produce results.  This course definitely puts you in that perspective and forces you to realize the importance of planning and communication.  Having this experience before setting out full-time as a programmer or any profession in fact gives you a great additional skill set!

What needs work:

Having said that, working ‘virtually’ with teammates really posed a challenge with respect to communication.  I know this is something many teams posted about but I’m going to emphasize on the planning aspect of communication.  A good plan could lead to a good design which in turn could lead to good direction.  The code sprint was a great chance for teams to spend the time planning and designing their systems but after that, it was difficult to do any.  As a result, no one actually ‘fully’ understood the entire system.  It’s difficult to design out the whole system at first and many requirements can change along the way.  I think implementing an iterative design and development process could have worked here.  Rather than looking at milestones, look at perhaps shorter two week sprints.  Dedicate a couple of days before each two week sprint to plan out what needs to be done in that period, address design issues for only those tasks and work on those specific items.  After a sprint, address outstanding issues and move on to the next set of tasks needed.  Taking on the system in appropriate chunks not only allows you to focus in on a specific area, but it allows you to understand how one part integrates with the next and realize what works and doesn’t work with the design early on.  It also gives you more direction because you are not overwhelmed with the big picture.  Communication with respect to these smaller iterative periods could be improved as well since everyone understands what is going on and what needs to be done in that two week cycle.  Perhaps this is something that could be considered within teams to help the struggle of meeting deadlines, communication and direction.

Thanks again for the great experience everyone!

Positive: Finally, I can experience working on a real, fully distributed team. Also, I learn a lot of technical stuff from this course. From programming in python to machine learning algorithms. I am also grateful to learn from my colleagues as this is more practical than learning from textbooks.

Negative: I couldn’t contribute to the team as much as I want to. There are various reasons for this but most notably is due to the complexity and difficulty of the project. As time goes by, I discover more stuff that can’t be done than stuff that can be done. There is certainly a way to fix it but given the fact that we are expected to work ~10 hours per week, we would end up fixing stuff rather than achieving our goals. Thus, sometimes hacking is the most appropriate (but not the best) way to do it. If I would do it again in the future, it would be very nice to have someone that is knowledgeable to tell us what could possibly be done by 50 hours of work per week over four months. Unfortunately, it is very hard to find such person in any project.

It has started to snow here in Reykjavik. Since arriving it has snowed far outside of the city, up into the mountains. but this week the snow has come to 101.

The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found? -J. B. (John Boynton) Priestley

On my walk into town this afternoon, just as the light turned i managed to snap a few lo-fi images using my (not so precise camera phone). i will endeavour to correct this, and alas turn to digital. i have avoided digital, debating that you lose the patience and creativity with digital, i much prefer the ’shoot from the hip’ approach-that way its like a lucky guess when you get developed what the pictures were.

The developing and scanning for 120 film is considerably cheaper than in london, but if i plan to improve my camera skills i think investing in a good digital slr would be the best start. I hope to find a Nikon Coolpix P90 in the Sales, but at £250-300 its not a massive payout if i dont.

These are Images i found in a Historical Icelandic book in the Photography Museam, which luckerly they had in the City libeary so i photocopied in refernce to my Cake Coffin Project.

I have yet to track down the ‘Corpus Camera’ Film about ICelandic Funerals and Post Mortem Photography-im hoping that the Film council will get back to me on that. I am going also to search out a few texts in the University Libeary tomorow, which will hopefuly tell me more about how Icelanders deal with Death.

The Good:

It was nice to learn how people are using tools like FriendFeed to interact directly with their end-users. I know there are a lot of solutions to that specific problem, but my experience with large scale work in the past had only ever been internal projects.

The Bad:

Lack of direction. I understand that this wasn’t really a problem for a lot of the projects, but I feel that ours suffered it in spades. We didn’t have a shareholder who was really hands-on and invested in what we were doing.

Whups, it appears I missed the original email on doing this writing assignment–apologies for it being a bit late!

I’ll start with my thoughts on the positives for this course first.  I really feel I’ve learned a great deal about working with a distance group on a software project–something normal CS coursework doesn’t really prepare one for (and even precious little time is spent in the courses I’ve taken on working with more or less random groups as well).  There are definite difficulties in the process, but it’s been a great experience learning these things firsthand.

And for the negative.  Looking at some of the other posts, I think I would be redundant if I simply mentioned the lack of structure in the course, so I would like to point out at least one thing specifically–I’m going to pick on the grading schemes here (I was already thinking about writing this up before I saw Eric’s post just below mine–I guess this is ending up being a long extension on one of the subjects to touched on).  It’s an interesting idea to have the students decide how their own projects will be graded, but I don’t think it worked out very well this time around.

I really feel there needs to be a more definite overall grading scheme.  I went through all my emails from UCOSP going back to the beginning of the term, and didn’t see anything with any sort of set grading scheme.  Through the semester we’ve been asked to do various things (several writing assignments, project presentation video, etc), but these pop up more or less at random, and other than being told basically that “it will affect my grade”, I have no idea how they will affect my grade.

If at the beginning of the term we could see something like:

“Initial writing assignment: X% of final grade
Project status updates: Y% of final grade
Final project video: Z% of final grade
…”

*Along with item due dates*, I feel that would be immensely helpful.  The specifics of the items don’t have to be filled out at that point, but would make sure students knew ahead of time when something was going to be due, and around when to check back for more information.  For example, I somehow missed Greg’s first email about this writing assignment–but thought nothing of it, because I guess I didn’t remember seeing the initial email, and I didn’t know to expect one–so the current terrible signal-to-noise ratio of my inbox took over.

Then for some set percent of the overall final grade, students could do what we did this term and pick how their final deliverable would be graded at the end of the term.  However, that would not be their *entire* grading scheme, but section of a more structured grading chart.  This would allow not only for the projects to be graded more simply, but would allow students to get a better feel as to how they are progressing throughout the course, and have a better idea on how to schedule their time through the term.

So I do think that more structured grading would be a great thing for this course, what students could get out of it, and positively impact the final products as a result.  I like the ideas here http://ucosp.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/some-ideas-for-next-term/ as a start, but to implement those ideas, we’re also going to need structured grading.

It’s been a great experience overall though!  I know this post is a little long, so I hope it all made sense–feel free to comment if anyone wants me to make any part of my long rambling here more clear / want me to explain anything better

Thanks for reading, and it’s been great working with everyone!

Eugene Ionescót a Román Akadémia tagjává nevezték ki post mortem

The good cent:
I would definitely say that the best part of my UCOSP experience has been my project “mentor”, Blake Winton.  I’m not sure how he put up with my incessant IRC messages at all times of the day Sunday through Saturday.  I learned a lot about Mercurial and distributed version control from him, and he was always so chill that I couldn’t help but want to work on the ISPDB.  It’s too bad he’s not grading me for the course, otherwise this might be a nice little push towards a good grade

The bad cent:
In short, the structure.  I didn’t bother reading all of the other post mortems so I hope that I’m not repeating anyone here…

The long version:
The structure of the course made it hard to give it priority equal to my other courses.  I know that I still put in a good amount of work, but I would have liked to put in more.  I liked the idea that “Greg” had (I know your dirty secret on this one Greg, and it’s safe with me ),  but I think it still needs more structure.  If the 3rd suggestion had a percentage of the total grade (like 30%) where you either got your weekly milestone done (or a good blog post about what you came up against that kept you from completion) or you lost a percentage of your total grade.  As it stands now, it’s hard to see the real repercussions of missing milestones since they don’t have a direct, quantifiable effect on your grade.  I could go on about this one, but unless someone comments with questions I’m going to lay this to rest…

peace.

Thumbs up: first of all, know a lot of new friends:) this is most valuable. Second, learn how to cooperation with each other, even we are far away from each other. We use IRC to hold and log team meeting, wiki page to schedule and record our process, bugzilla to keep track of everything. Those tools contribute a lot to the final success of the project. For the technical aspect, I learn the new language flex and use it to create the UI and animation for the front end.  It’s an amazing tools for data representations and I am so glad that I can apply it to the real work.

Thumbs down: The only problem that I can see is that the open source projects are lack of documentation. We start with thinking and end with coding. But if we do have documents, for one things, we can realize what we are gonna do much faster. For another, if we create documents while developing, it will be much easier for the fellows to improve our work or continue the unfinished parts. Otherwise, they may have to spend some time to understand our code.

Overall, I will rank very high for this projects. We can do something which is meaning for lots of people, instead of coding just for assignments. Lots of useful tools are involved and I can improve my working skills through the whole semester. BTW, I really miss the trip for the Toronto and saw the beautiful city.

Sorry for posting this so late; I’ll keep it short. Thanks for parking in the lots. Although we’re not the cause of the problems (sound like it was the Thursday night crew) it was good to see that everyone did as asked.

Here’s who came out:

Goalies (2): Bob & Doug

Players (8+2+2): Brian, DaveH, Dino, Doug, Ian, Jeff, Jimmy, Kolin, Marty, MikeB, MikeG, Scott

The Good: I learned a lot about web frameworks (specifically, Django) and jQuery applications from Basie. Without having any web development background, the course allowed me to move at my own pace while still absorbing lots of information that I will likely retain for future employment opportunities. Not only that, but the reference gained by doing such a project is certainly one of the best ways to get your foot in the door (here’s looking at you, Greg ).  Basie was my first taste of the real world.

The Bad: Code reviews were daunting since team members were focused on very particular aspects of the project.

Judging by factors that extend beyond the mere comparative lengths of the two preceding paragraphs, the good most certainly outweighs the bad. Having a web development course under my belt, I’ve decided to continue experimenting with CSC49X and am now on board for a project with a much different flavour: image recognition. I’m very excited how far-reaching and open-ended these projects can be and hope that more students, as I did, will have the opportunity to apply their knowledge to something meaningful in the coming terms.

thumbs up: Getting the opportunity to work with so many interacting technologies was a challenge. It forced me to take care with the documentation I have been preparing, and given me some inspiration as to ways that documentation could be organized better.

thumbs down: Meetings were often canceled and it was hard to set attainable personal goals.

All in all, I feel the course has been helpful. It was extremely frustrating at times because I felt like I was spending so much time dealing with installation problems and not always knowing what work was necessary to get to the next step. That frustration, I think, was key to learning how to work with multiple open source communities where everyone is setting their own deadlines and is dealing with other time constraints as well.

Up: One of the best parts for me was learning what a great thing constructive criticism is. I practically look forward to a denied patch because of the amount of feedback and the opportunity for improvement. This was refreshing after just getting a discouragingly low mark.

Down: The delay of email sometimes causes all progress to halt because I just didn’t know how to proceed. This would cause breaks and dry spells, something I found tough to deal with.

Thumbs Up: Getting to work on an exploratory project, and seeing what it ended up becoming. WikiDev didn’t have as defined a goal at the start as most projects, but instead a framework to build on and ideas for where we could take things. After that, it was up to everyone to discuss every week and see where we wanted to go next. This was very enlightening and I enjoyed seeing how the project evolved as pieces were completed and we could see what our ideas were shaping up to look like. I am used to working on projects where the plan is fairly complete and spec’d out before any code is written, so this made for an interesting change of pace.

Thumb Down: Working on an exploratory project, especially for motivation and getting invested. The flip side of the coin is that with a less defined idea and direction, it was sometimes hard to see where each piece would fit into the whole. I always knew what I was working on at any given time, without knowing what was coming next or why it was important, I often had a nagging feeling that what I was working on would end up ignored and unused.

Overall, this was a great experience. The code sprint in Toronto was awesome, it was good to build real things in school for a change, and by the efforts of everyone involved it felt like much more than a simple course. I’d heartily recommend it for anyone else who gets the opportunity.

Apart from the fact that it’s great to work on a real project. I believe it was invaluable to meet the programmer behind the name at the start of semester. It gave us the chance to not only meet, but perform a little team building as well rather than just a name somewhere in cyberspace. I think that working in a distributed team like this gave us all an experience that we might not get from some IT companies. I’m really glad that I had the chance to be apart of this course. If we’ve learned nothing, the very least we can take away from this project is how to deal with a distributed team in the future. But from the sounds of previous posts, we all have something or another that we can take away.

In Basie, we made it a standard to review code before its submitted. This is not a bad idea, but I decided to split my work into many reviews that took weeks finish. This wasn’t because the reviews were long, but because as the semester progressed, student reviewers became busy. It became a little difficult to keep things separate when each progressive feature built on top of the previous.

The Good: I, for one, really loved the grad school talk, I think that it was very insightful and I’m really glad that we got the opportunity to attend it.

The Bad: Can’t do pair programming when team members are 500km away This might be a personal preference but I’m a huge fan of pair programming, I find development a lot smoother and it’s also easy to stay motivated and on track. I’m sure this won’t be the last time I work in a team setting like this, so I guess all in all it’s a good experience to go through.

The Ugly:

Thumbs up: Mozilla’s strict coding standards and having to submit patches and get our code reviewed was very beneficial. It forces you to pay attention to details and you learn a lot more compared to projects that you hack together last minute and hand in whatever works

Thumbs down: The tasks our team worked on were pretty individual and so there wasn’t much collaboration between us.

[disclaimer: my own opinion, others might not think the same]

The good: the course itself, was a great experience. I think the most valuable thing is that it made me see the challenges software teams face in the real world and why those challenges can’t be resolved easily sometimes. In addition, I got a chance to work on a great project, and this is the reason I took this course in the first place.

The bad: I am not happy with the progress of our team. We knew that the problems existed within the team (mostly related to communication), yet somehow, we had some of those problems until the end and could not find an effective solution, which definitely affected the overall performance. To put that on the scale of the course, I believe that we have to learn from this experience and look more into enforcing stricter team /communication policies/ and /ethics/. I don’t know about you, but personally, I am not a fan of unanswered emails, ignored code comments, or other similar things – it’s not natural for a good team to have some members to be more interested in the project than others.

Greg and everyone else who made this course happen – thanks for this great opportunity

Well November is nearly past and it is time for another reflection on what was going on a year ago.  I think this will be the last of these “a year ago reflections.”  After this there were not too many events of note.  Just the long and slow grieving process which is still continuing of course…

…In the months following Abigail’s death we were pretty much in a daze to be honest.  A week after the funeral and I was back to work in a very public way heading the annual conference for the charity I work for.  The work was easy enough.  But having frequent head tilt “how are you” conversations with people was challenging.  Some people really wanted to know and could cope with the truth but others just wanted to go through the motions and hear that you were getting there (wherever there is) and that you could quote some vague religious platitude.

It wasn’t long before I found myself referred for more infertility tests picking up from where we had pulled out when we found out we were pregnant with Abigail.  Both my wife and I wanted to get as much of this behind us before we cared again.  We had had two and a half years of disappointment leading up to Abigail being conceived and we were not looking forward to the monthly rollercoaster of trying to conceive again.  So yes in the months that followed I had numerous opportunities to have intimate relations with a cup, go for physical examinations, blood tests, an ultrasound (on me this time!) and the rest.  I remember the first time I went to see the urologist consultant, I had to walk through the maternity unit and see lots of pregnant women waiting for their ultrasounds.  It was so unfair that here I was going to see if anything could be done to see if we could get pregnant when here were all these women who were already there.  If only we could reset and reboot – go back to when we were pregnant and play it again and see if we got a different outcome.

In the weeks following the funeral we knew that the first week of December was going to be especially jarring.  We had Abigail’s post-mortem results on 1 December and her due date was 6 December.  I booked the week off work and before long, these dates were upon us.

My wife and I discussed the PM results before the day and we both felt that anything less than a 1 in 4 chance of recurrence would not be enough to stop us trying for another baby.  1 in 4 might be enough.  We had a strong suspicion that Abigail had died from a genetic condition.  Some of her fingers and toes had been fused together and that seemed a strong indicator of a chromosomal cause.  Even as I write this now, I hate the idea that some readers might think “ah well in that case she was left than perfect/not normal so perhaps her dying was probably for the best.”  Someone said basically that in a card to us once!  Let me be as clear as I can.  Abigail may not have been perfect – nor are any of us! – but we loved her as if she was.  If she had lived we would have loved her with all our hearts no matter what challenges she would have faced.

The day of the post-mortem results came and we dropped our son off with friends and walked in to the hospital.  We had done this so many times for scans and now we repeated that well-known routine.  We parked the car and had five minutes to spare so we walked along the street outside.  We then went into the waiting area and this was the one time I felt the hospital let us down.  We were in a maternity waiting area surrounded by posters of babies, mothers with babies, mother’s breastfeeding their babies to “give them the best start in life”.  This was also the room where we had had anti-natal classes when we were pregnant with our son.

There was one mother-to-be and grandmother-to-be waiting.  They were very chirpy and talking excitedly about their pregnancy.  We were not chirpy but very sober.  At one point the grandmother-to-be even made a comment about how we seemed very serious.  I nearly told them we were there for our daughter’s PM results but restrained myself.  Altogether we waited about 25 minutes past our appointment time and that was hard in that room.

Finally we were taken into the consultant’s office.  Our doctor, Paul had been great during the pregnancy but by now we were quite on edge.  He had a student doctor with him.  A girl who seemed about 17 (probably 23).  I doubt she had done one of these before.  Paul came straight to the point and said that he was sorry for the delay but the formal PM report had not come back to him so he had been getting the results over the phone.  Abigail had had triploidy.  This was a condition that resulted in a lot of miscarriages but not many babies made it as far as birth.  All in all it accounted for about 1 in 50,000 live births.  It occurred when a baby had 69 instead of 46 chromosomes.  It was always fatal and no baby had lived beyond 10 months with triploidy.

The good news (!) was that it was a fairly random event and was not likely to recur for us.  Say 1 in 100.  There was no reason we couldn’t try for another baby – other than ongoing infertility problems that is.  Ironically the majority of triploidy cases occurred when 2 sperm fertilised one egg.  Madness – none of my sperm were good enough to get to the egg but when one finally did a second one did too!  Stupid sperm.  Grrrrrr.

Here is a final email I sent to all our friends and family who had been receiving updates during Abigail’s short life.

There are two ways to tell you about the PM, the first is medical – what we know and think.  We now know that Abigail had a genetic condition called triploidy.  This results in quite a lot of early miscarriages but it is very rare to last as long as we did.  It only affects about 1 in 50,000 births.  It is lethal with most triploidy babies being still born or with an average life expectancy of 10 hours after birth.  It is not hereditary – as the doctor puts it we were struck by lightning.  This is a relief as otherwise there would have been a chance that [our son] could have faced similar problems in his future.  That said we do face an increased risk of this or similar happening to us again of about 1 in 100.  This is a lot lot lot better than 1 in 4, but not as good as nothing!  Stating the obvious there.  So overall not as bad as we feared but not as good as we could have hoped.

The second way to talk about these results is not what we think or know, but how we feel.  Abigail was conceived into a fallen broken world as we all were.  But, we do not love her one tiny bit less for this.  We do not think of her as imperfect in any way more than everyone else alive today including you and me.  We certainly don’t want people telling us it was a mercy she died when she did, or that we have been saved from more heartache.  If we had had 10 hours with her we would have treasured those 10 hours.  We do treasure the limited time and limited contact we had with Abigail – we always will, it has tremendous value to us as her parents.  Even though we know now that she was never going to survive we still grieve the life and the potential that she had in our hearts and dreams.  We will remember the milestones that never occur even if they could never have been.  I share this side of it with you because as our friends and family we want you to understand and be comfortable with the simple fact that at this simple level Abigail remains part of our lives and part of our family.  We hope you can be part of this too and feel comfortable talking about this side of things with us.  We do not expect or want this to be a morbid thing but a way of valuing the person Abigail was and is.

One final thing, this verse has been helpful to us from Lamentations 3 v32-33

Though he brings grief, he will show compassion,

so great is his unfailing love.

^For he does not willingly bring affliction

or grief to the children of men.

We do not expect to understand why this happened to us, but we will accept it.  And we know that God is good and faithful.

We had ended up arranging to visit friends for the weekend of Abigail’s due date.  This was probably a mistake.  We were struggling to function and it was all fairly chaotic at our friend’s house.  They had other people staying and four children so the house was quite crowded and we didn’t really have an opportunity to talk meaningfully.  In the middle of bedtime routines the Dad of the home said something to the effect that it felt like he had 18 children to put to bed.  I came close to saying “lucky you” but again restrained myself.  These people were (and are) good friends but we were not in a good place.

At one level Abigail’s due date didn’t have the meaning it might have had.  If Abigail had lived she would have been delivered by C-section much earlier than this date.  But looking back further to finding out we were pregnant, this was the date we had been told was her due date.  Over the entire length of Abigail’s pregnancy this was the date we had expected to be filled with joy.  Instead we were just getting stuck into the grieving process and wondering whether we would ever get pregnant again.  Not a very acceptable exchange really!

In the run up to Christmas we felt increasingly lonely in our grief.  The support that had been so tangible in the first few weeks now faded into normality for others and raging grief for us.  People moved on but we did not.  There was nothing new for people to say to show their support and we increasingly found it unsatisfying being around people.

We had a few days away with some friends in a holiday park and I remember getting into an argument about gender specific appropriate activities.  It got quite heated until I eventually explained that I was arguing from the point of view that Abigail had been a girl and therefore I wanted to imagine her in pink and doing ballet dancing not football lessons.  Stupid really.

We then stayed for a weekend with some friends who had driven an 800 mile roundtrip for the Abigail’s funeral and given a massive donation to Abigail’s fund.  We had hoped to catch up with them and share where we were at with Abigail.  But basically they couldn’t hack any conversation about Abigail at all.  Whenever she was mentioned they would immediately change the subject.  We hated that weekend more than anything.

But that was compensated by the fact that we then spent an evening with some friends who had suffered three miscarriages and ongoing infertility problems.  They were so understanding and happy to talk about Abigail.  This has been a valuable lesson to people – how comfortable people are with suffering seems directly related to how much they have themselves sufferred.

For Christmas we have always had a tradition of buying a new decoration for the tree each year.  This year we bought a bauble with Abigail’s name on it.  This was on the tree this first year and will continue to be part of our Christmas tree for years to come.  It was good to be able to recognise her in our family Christmas.