RSS feedI was in town today working with a client. I’d just reached a major project milestone around lunchtime, when I got a call from Louise at the hospital. She was there to do the 11am cares, as previously mentioned in What a crazy year, part 35, and she said “they’re saying she might go home tomorrow”.
Like everything that’s happened in this long saga, nothing ever comes with a warning. Events always seem to sneak up on you unawares, and then when you least expect them, bam, something happens.
And so here we are, in no fit state to support a baby at home, yet like it or not, she’s probably on her way tomorrow (Thursday) morning. While the nurses all usually tow the the same line, every now and again you get varying opinions, so I ask who actually said she might be going going home. “Oh, one of the doctors came over to us with the nursery registrar”. Hmm… OK, that’s probably fairly accurate then.
I still have to get my car registered, so this morning I got up early to take it in for a service and rego. But first I had to drive it from up the street down to my house, in order to put the fourth wheel back on. It was parked too close to the curb to do it, hence I had to move it. Unfortunately though, the battery was flat, because I hadn’t used in the three and a half weeks since the tyre was slashed. So, I had to drive Louise’s car up to mine, in order to jump start it. This meant blocking the entire street, which is the main sneaky connector street between Newtown and Marrickville that everyone uses in the morning to bypass King St. I annoyed quite a few people, but they could all see that I wasn’t to be messed with at this point in the birth of my child, so I didn’t get any crap from people. I then parked Louise’s car, drove mine to our house, and switched the dickie wheel for the real one, all with the engine running so it would charge the battery. Don’t do this at home folks.
Meanwhile, back to lunchtime and Louise’s phone call, we agreed that we’d both head home and then run through the plan for the day. We both got home around 2pm, which left us a few hours of shopping time to get the following necessities that we so far didn’t have: nappies, towels, singlets, a new matress for the bassinet, a matress protector, wraps, and some clothes. Any clothes.
The other big thing we hadn’t done, is fit the car capsule, or in our case, the car seat. It’s the law, so if we didn’t get it fitted in time, the she wouldn’t be coming home. We’d booked in a fitting for Friday, because that was the soonest the people we preferred could do it, and we figured there’s no way she’d be out by then. And of course we just may have found some time to go through the container of gear to find the seat by then as well. Instead, I had to drag it out this afternoon, and call around for someone to install it. We found someone. It took them 5 minutes. Our biggest concern, sorted on the spot in 5 minutes. Nice one. I enjoy life when things turn out better than expected.
We also have to get her from the hospital nursery to the car, so instead of just wheeling her out in the hospital cot, we figured that her own pram would be the way to go. So tonight was spent putting the pram together (from the container load) and assembling the bassinet so she can sleep (also from the container load). The pram was one of those ever extensible types, where you can keep adding extras until it resembles a space ship or an out of control Katamari. It actually came already extended, with an additional toddler seat attached to it, for a nice two level baby effect. Unfortunately I didn’t realise this at first, and couldn’t work out how this vertical tandem contraption unfolded correctly to form a simple pram. I eventually worked it out by downloading the manuals of several prams in the company’s line and working from those. For some reason our parm hasn’t got a manual available on their site. No matter, I eventually worked it all out.
Now it’s 3am, and I need to get sleep before Louise gets up to express, and we go to pick up Molly at 11am. I still haven’t talked about industrial chemist man and his foolproof breast feed volume measuring system, but that will have to wait until another day.