The hospital was having a very busy day, but this turned out to be very positive for us. When we went in too early midafternoon we were sent back home, and so spent an extra 4 hours at home than we would have done on a quieter day. I was asked to cut the cord as there weren't enough pairs of hands available, and because there weren't many in the room at the actual moment of birth that weren't focussed on whether Marisca was actually breathing, I was the very first to know that our new baby was a girl. We then had much longer together in the delivery suite than we would have done had there been more people with spare time to usher Elspeth and Marisca upstairs to the postnatal ward. This was brilliant to have some bonding time for us all for quite a few hours before going home for my last night of full sleep for some time.
I remember being struck by how blue Marisca's extremities were in those first hours, and how wrinkly. I remember wondering how we knew when we were supposed to clean the muck from her hair, and then realising there were going to be a lot of such wonderings over the years to come. I remember the strange emotion of shock when she was actually born - as predicted by my choice of laminated emotion cards at NCT - that we actually had a baby and had turned from a couple into a family. I remember the blackcurrant jam on the toast that the midwife provided. It's only been 16 days but the picture above reminds me how much has changed in those two weeks and how much we've learned. It's been such a full fortnight that the term "I remember" makes as much sense now as it will in 2 months, years, decades.
Her fingers were much pinker by the time I got to the hospital 30 seconds after visiting hours started the next morning. Eventually we persuaded the hospital staff to release us at 3 (a busy delivery suite one day makes a busy postnatal ward the next) and we took ourselves home.
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