The umbilical cord does not start from the inside of your belly button to the baby’s belly button.
Well of course I knew this wasn’t true but there was still a small part of me that thought of the cord as a kind of tin can and string telephone system. So if Mr. C talked to my belly button then the message would get transmitted down the line to Baby C.
Pull the finger is not a documented method of winding a baby.
Worth a try though. It is of course a well known method of winding any male over the age of ten. Having said that when the French-in-laws were visiting Mr. C’s dad did pull the finger on Baby C and made her poo. Mind you she pooed every evening when the came over.
Everyone has an opinion as to what the baby will be when it grows up
Baby C has big feet and long legs so lots of people have already said she will be a scuba diver. My mother has her down as a dancer already, those legs again.
As for me I always say she will be whatever she wants to be, but in truth I think she is already displaying the sense of timing of a comic genius as demonstrated by careful poo deployment. For a start there was the pull the finger / poo episode (see above), then as Mr. C and I were discussing people we didn’t like she passed comment in the only way she knew how.
She also pood during the opening credits of the Sex and the City dvd - every one´s a critic!
Her current turn is to poo just after I have changed her nappy, this combined with an innocent “who me” face leads me to believe it is deliberate timing. So, comic genius or ironic commentator on the modern world, you chose.
Sniffing the nappy does no-one any good
This isn’t me, I knew that poo, nappy and nose were not meant to go together, however Mr. C does have a habit of sniffing new and interesting things. Good at dinner time bad at nappy time.
So you see, every day is a school day with a baby on board.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Post partum landmarks
If you read the pregnancy and birth books then the post partum landmarks go something like this:
Week one:
Now about the wardrobe reorganising;
During my pregnancy I put on two stone, equal to 28 pounds or 14 kilos, which is nearly a third of my pre-pregnancy body weight. One baby, several humongous wee’s and a couple of weeks of breastfeeding later and I am back to only three and a half kilos (seven pounds / half a stone) over my pre-pregnancy weight. Yay!
I have an extra couple of inches on my hips and several thousand on my bust so there should be something in my pre-pregnancy wardrobe that should fit.
Lots of my trousers and skirts now fit because I either brought or made them as the smallest size available and they hung on my hips. Now I know what it feels like to have fitted clothes. Everything else is just plain too small still.
For tops I always took fitted styles so anything very fitted now just looks like a dolls hanky when held up to my new Partonesque frontage. Fortunately I have lots of t-shirts which means I am not walking round in just my skirts and maternity bra. This makes going to the shops so much less embarrassing.
Dresses – well let’s just forget those as they were all fitted to my bust.
So now my post pregnancy wardrobe is lots of bottoms and t-shirts, a perfect excuse to shop for clothes or the makings to make clothes.
- First few days breasts produce colostrums
- 3-5 days after birth full milk comes in
- blah blah blah
- six week check after birth
- blah blah blah
- two years later you might feel like having sex again
Week one:
- Get home and realise that the hospital may have given you the right baby but they have sent you home with someone else’s body.
- Realise you can cut your own toenails and shave your legs by yourself, without several mirrors and contortions worthy of the Chinese state circus.
- Squeeze into jeans – admittedly your husbands.
- Breasts swell to size resembling Dolly Parton
- First attempt at lying on your stomach in over six months despite being hampered by pneumatic breasts.
- Squeeze into a pair of pre-pregnancy denims, well okay they are a pair of shorts with a high lycra content but still pre-pregnancy denim.
- Squeeze into non-maternity trousers that do not have a drawstring waist.
- Realise that you might be physically able to cut your toenails or shave your legs but you don´t actually have time to.
- Squeeze into your own pair of pre-pregnancy jeans, they don’t close but with the cunning use of a hair elastic threaded through the button and button hole and a long top no-one will know. And yes okay, they always were a little too big.
- Brave the skinny jeans – let’s just say it is a little too soon for those.
- Re-organise wardrobe, out with the maternity wear and in with pre-pregnancy clothes, well the ones that fit.
Now about the wardrobe reorganising;
During my pregnancy I put on two stone, equal to 28 pounds or 14 kilos, which is nearly a third of my pre-pregnancy body weight. One baby, several humongous wee’s and a couple of weeks of breastfeeding later and I am back to only three and a half kilos (seven pounds / half a stone) over my pre-pregnancy weight. Yay!
I have an extra couple of inches on my hips and several thousand on my bust so there should be something in my pre-pregnancy wardrobe that should fit.
Lots of my trousers and skirts now fit because I either brought or made them as the smallest size available and they hung on my hips. Now I know what it feels like to have fitted clothes. Everything else is just plain too small still.
For tops I always took fitted styles so anything very fitted now just looks like a dolls hanky when held up to my new Partonesque frontage. Fortunately I have lots of t-shirts which means I am not walking round in just my skirts and maternity bra. This makes going to the shops so much less embarrassing.
Dresses – well let’s just forget those as they were all fitted to my bust.
So now my post pregnancy wardrobe is lots of bottoms and t-shirts, a perfect excuse to shop for clothes or the makings to make clothes.
Carry on Matron - life in a Canarian ward
The Canarians are very family orientated and they love babies. Which is all good, apart from if you are in a maternity ward.
I arrived on a three bed ward on the Saturday night, on the Sunday lunchtime another lady arrived that had just had her baby by caesarean. She had also had some problem with her back so was immobile and hooked up to all kinds of pain killers.
Now to me that lady would need peace and quiet with maybe just her fella and her immediate family to visit. But then I am not Canarian. To Canarians what she needed was 30 visitors in six hours. It was like the world record attempt at the most people around a hospital bed.
I think at the peak I counted ten people visiting her and she didn’t even know all of them. One chap had brought his cousin, his cousin’s children, the cat, pet hamster and maybe the hamster’s invisible friend too.
Mind you she didn’t seem so bothered so I can only assume she had the patience of a saint of very strong drugs in her drip.
And because everyone loves a baby they all come over and look at your baby so you then have thirty odd strangers poking your baby and asking you all the same questions.
“yes it is our first”
“born on Saturday”
“her name is Baby C”
“yes she does have big eyes”
“gracias gracias”
“no thanks I wouldn’t like a chocolate”
And boy are the Canarians loud, I don’t think I would have managed if Mr. C hadn’t brought me a daily supply of tea and biscuits. When the Canarians got too much for us we just wheeled Baby C about the corridors.
After three days of this I was very pleased to come home to the peace and quite of a new born baby.
I arrived on a three bed ward on the Saturday night, on the Sunday lunchtime another lady arrived that had just had her baby by caesarean. She had also had some problem with her back so was immobile and hooked up to all kinds of pain killers.
Now to me that lady would need peace and quiet with maybe just her fella and her immediate family to visit. But then I am not Canarian. To Canarians what she needed was 30 visitors in six hours. It was like the world record attempt at the most people around a hospital bed.
I think at the peak I counted ten people visiting her and she didn’t even know all of them. One chap had brought his cousin, his cousin’s children, the cat, pet hamster and maybe the hamster’s invisible friend too.
Mind you she didn’t seem so bothered so I can only assume she had the patience of a saint of very strong drugs in her drip.
And because everyone loves a baby they all come over and look at your baby so you then have thirty odd strangers poking your baby and asking you all the same questions.
“yes it is our first”
“born on Saturday”
“her name is Baby C”
“yes she does have big eyes”
“gracias gracias”
“no thanks I wouldn’t like a chocolate”
And boy are the Canarians loud, I don’t think I would have managed if Mr. C hadn’t brought me a daily supply of tea and biscuits. When the Canarians got too much for us we just wheeled Baby C about the corridors.
After three days of this I was very pleased to come home to the peace and quite of a new born baby.
Sunday, October 05, 2008
Carry on doctor 8 - the grand finale
Baby C finally made her entrance to the world on 30th August, only four days after her due date, which in Gran Can terms of getting things done isn’t late at all.
My first clue that something was up were contractions at 5 am, I’ve been having the Braxton Hicks fako contractions for a while, but decide as these were getting more frequent that they might be the real deal.
I let Mr C lie for a while and told him at 8 am when I was sure that this could be B day.
Mr. C, of course, panicked and had all the bags by the door about ten minutes after he had got up and had a coffee. Meanwhile I sat there and contemplated sweeping and mopping the floor. Well it was dirty and I knew that Mr. C’s mum would be coming over later and didn’t want to think her granddaughter had a slattern as a mother.
In the end Mr. C swept the floor and I agreed to leave for the hospital at 10 am, given that I was having contractions every five minutes and the materno had told us that was when we should to go to the hospital.
We arrived at the hospital half an hour later and made our first mistake. We thought that we would have to go to the place where I had my scan previously, the new building of the maternity ward. But no, that was only for diagnostics so we had to find the old maternity ward.
We arrived, filled out admission papers and waited around. I was then taken through to the maternity waiting room, we managed to get Mr. C through by claiming I spoke no Spanish, rather than the little I do have but this was unusual as usually the fathers have to wait in the main waiting room.
So we waited and I was seen by a doctor who poked around, told me off for not speaking Spanish and then told me that I shouldn’t be there as he hadn’t seen me have any strong contractions and I was only 1 cm dilated. Which made me feel as if I wasn’t doing it right, they certainly felt strong enough to me. I was then hooked up to monitor the baby for twenty minutes, I was told everything was fine and I could go home, wait there or take a walk around Las Palmas and come back later.
We went for lunch and went home. Not best pleased.
After about an hour at home I decided I really wanted to go to the hospital, so off we went again and arrived there about 4 pm. So by this time I’d been having contractions for nearly 12 hours, I was not a happy camper.
This time we didn’t manage to sneak Mr. C through to the maternity area and he had to wait in the main area. So I waited and waited. The morning doctor walked past and asked me why I had come back, I ignored him. Finally the nurse took me to the exam room and left me there just telling me to go to the loo. So I did and then I waited some more and some more, the nurse came back and seemed bemused that there was no-one with me and went off again. Just as she did my waters broke all over the bathroom floor – great just how I imagined it happening – alone, with soaking wet clothes and beginning to panic. I tried to call Mr. C to send me a nurse but he had actually remembered to turn off his mobile phone. After a little while the doctor came and I tried to explain my waters had broken, but couldn’t get much past “mis aqua aqui” and for some reason I was worried I might have made a mess of their floor. So the doctor poked around and asked me when my waters had broken, “five minutes ago” being the answer, she then told me I was five centimetres dilated and they were going to monitor the baby.
Being monitored entailed being hooked up to a monitor and a drip and all the nurses buggering off to do something different or to plan their Saturday night off and me being left alone with some fella nurse at the end of my bed doing his paperwork on the computer. By this point I am swearing like a trooper and not at all happy. Then a lovely auxiliary turns up and explains he is there as my interpreter – yay – what a smashing chap. He asks me how I am feeling – tired being the answer and says he can explain about an epidural if I want one.
By this point as it was getting on for six pm I had decided that I would have the epidural as it was the only pain relief on offer and I didn’t fancy another few hours of evil contractions. They really aren’t very nice you know.
After half an hour of monitoring and I was taken to the labour room, still no sign of Mr. C and I am really beginning to try not to panic as much as I want to. The midwife examines me and tells me I am now fully dilated and will be ready to push. The auxiliary explains it is too late for the epidural now – yahuh!
Mr. C finally turns up, modelling a very fetching green paper pinny, mop cap and shoe socks – dashing!
Cut to an hour later after lots of huffing, puffing, pushing and swearing and Baby C is born. Mr. C was very brave, though he did turn a bit queasy when they changed the drip in my arm. He even popped down the business end of things to look at the baby crowning, though resisted their offer to touch her head.
So while the run up to the last hour, the actual hour of the baby being born, wasn’t great that final hour wasn’t nearly as bad as I had worried about. My main worries had been that I would have to have interventions or even a caesarean, but I was lucky, my body did what it was designed to do and the team I had looking after me were all great.
After that they poke you around a bit more and keep an eye on you for an hour or two and then take you up to the ward.
Overall, from first twinge to the baby being born it had taken 14 and a half hours.
Baby C weighed in at 3.3 kilos and 53 cm which is around 7 lb 4oz and 21 inches in old money.
And yes of course she is adorable, well she is now, when she was born she was covered in gunk and red and blotchy.
My first clue that something was up were contractions at 5 am, I’ve been having the Braxton Hicks fako contractions for a while, but decide as these were getting more frequent that they might be the real deal.
I let Mr C lie for a while and told him at 8 am when I was sure that this could be B day.
Mr. C, of course, panicked and had all the bags by the door about ten minutes after he had got up and had a coffee. Meanwhile I sat there and contemplated sweeping and mopping the floor. Well it was dirty and I knew that Mr. C’s mum would be coming over later and didn’t want to think her granddaughter had a slattern as a mother.
In the end Mr. C swept the floor and I agreed to leave for the hospital at 10 am, given that I was having contractions every five minutes and the materno had told us that was when we should to go to the hospital.
We arrived at the hospital half an hour later and made our first mistake. We thought that we would have to go to the place where I had my scan previously, the new building of the maternity ward. But no, that was only for diagnostics so we had to find the old maternity ward.
We arrived, filled out admission papers and waited around. I was then taken through to the maternity waiting room, we managed to get Mr. C through by claiming I spoke no Spanish, rather than the little I do have but this was unusual as usually the fathers have to wait in the main waiting room.
So we waited and I was seen by a doctor who poked around, told me off for not speaking Spanish and then told me that I shouldn’t be there as he hadn’t seen me have any strong contractions and I was only 1 cm dilated. Which made me feel as if I wasn’t doing it right, they certainly felt strong enough to me. I was then hooked up to monitor the baby for twenty minutes, I was told everything was fine and I could go home, wait there or take a walk around Las Palmas and come back later.
We went for lunch and went home. Not best pleased.
After about an hour at home I decided I really wanted to go to the hospital, so off we went again and arrived there about 4 pm. So by this time I’d been having contractions for nearly 12 hours, I was not a happy camper.
This time we didn’t manage to sneak Mr. C through to the maternity area and he had to wait in the main area. So I waited and waited. The morning doctor walked past and asked me why I had come back, I ignored him. Finally the nurse took me to the exam room and left me there just telling me to go to the loo. So I did and then I waited some more and some more, the nurse came back and seemed bemused that there was no-one with me and went off again. Just as she did my waters broke all over the bathroom floor – great just how I imagined it happening – alone, with soaking wet clothes and beginning to panic. I tried to call Mr. C to send me a nurse but he had actually remembered to turn off his mobile phone. After a little while the doctor came and I tried to explain my waters had broken, but couldn’t get much past “mis aqua aqui” and for some reason I was worried I might have made a mess of their floor. So the doctor poked around and asked me when my waters had broken, “five minutes ago” being the answer, she then told me I was five centimetres dilated and they were going to monitor the baby.
Being monitored entailed being hooked up to a monitor and a drip and all the nurses buggering off to do something different or to plan their Saturday night off and me being left alone with some fella nurse at the end of my bed doing his paperwork on the computer. By this point I am swearing like a trooper and not at all happy. Then a lovely auxiliary turns up and explains he is there as my interpreter – yay – what a smashing chap. He asks me how I am feeling – tired being the answer and says he can explain about an epidural if I want one.
By this point as it was getting on for six pm I had decided that I would have the epidural as it was the only pain relief on offer and I didn’t fancy another few hours of evil contractions. They really aren’t very nice you know.
After half an hour of monitoring and I was taken to the labour room, still no sign of Mr. C and I am really beginning to try not to panic as much as I want to. The midwife examines me and tells me I am now fully dilated and will be ready to push. The auxiliary explains it is too late for the epidural now – yahuh!
Mr. C finally turns up, modelling a very fetching green paper pinny, mop cap and shoe socks – dashing!
Cut to an hour later after lots of huffing, puffing, pushing and swearing and Baby C is born. Mr. C was very brave, though he did turn a bit queasy when they changed the drip in my arm. He even popped down the business end of things to look at the baby crowning, though resisted their offer to touch her head.
So while the run up to the last hour, the actual hour of the baby being born, wasn’t great that final hour wasn’t nearly as bad as I had worried about. My main worries had been that I would have to have interventions or even a caesarean, but I was lucky, my body did what it was designed to do and the team I had looking after me were all great.
After that they poke you around a bit more and keep an eye on you for an hour or two and then take you up to the ward.
Overall, from first twinge to the baby being born it had taken 14 and a half hours.
Baby C weighed in at 3.3 kilos and 53 cm which is around 7 lb 4oz and 21 inches in old money.
And yes of course she is adorable, well she is now, when she was born she was covered in gunk and red and blotchy.
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