RSS feedPeople have been asking why I haven’t been videoblogging this, and I agree that it would make a fantastic disaster movie. Well, we are videoing lots of things, and in vlogging style, but the two main reasons they’re not here on the site are: a) I just don’t have the time to log, edit, render and upload, which is annoying because a few years ago I was hoping this problem would have been solved by now, and b) because I’m protecting the privacy of Molly. Regular readers will know my predictions on privacy, but that doesn’t mean I wish to accelerate it’s ultimate downfall. Video and photos of Molly this young aren’t for public viewing, but friends and family can see them if they ask for the password. So stick that in your videoblogging manifesto.
The last few days have been pretty routine. The hospital want parents to do most of the work, which while exhausting, is best for everyone so the parents are well rehearsed by the time baby is out of hospital. So our days now revolve around 4th hourly cares and feeds, 24×7.
On days I’m not working at a client, Louise is up at 6am to express, and I’m up at 9am to check in on urgent work emails. We’re at the hospital by 11am and we do cares (temperature and nappy change) and a breastfeed, followed by Louise doing an express and me giving Molly a bottle top up. Molly and I then hum, sing songs, and burp a lot, while waiting for Louise to return. Molly’s won most of the burpathons, but I must admit I’ve cracked a few corkers over the course of the week.
Then we head home to do mandatory home chores, I have a few hours sleep and Louise does an express and catches up on emails and other stuff. I’m awake again by 6pm, just after Louise has done yet another express, and we’re at the hospital by 7pm to do exactly the same thing we did at 11am. We’re out by 9pm and head home to have dinner, and lunch as well if we haven’t had it. I catch up on any urgent work stuff, and spend a few hours on stuff that’s been waiting since before this whole thing happened a month ago, such as bills, invoices or projects, and this blog on the odd occasion I finished things early, and Louise catches some sleep on the lounge. Around 1am or 2am I’m off to bed, and Louise wakes up to express, and then comes to bed as well. That’s a normal day for us, and there’s no relaxing time, it’s all work.
On the days when I have paid work during the day at a client, I simply miss out on everything up until 6pm, and then have to shoe horn everything into the few hours I have left before I go to bed. Also, every second day is Molly’s bath day, so that gets factored in as well. They never said it would be this hard in parenting class, it was just all about the pros and cons of epidurals vs. gas, and how to breath. They didn’t say what to do if you don’t actually have time to stop and breath.
For the last week I’ve been humming to Molly at feed time, while Louise is off expressing. Moby Dick by Led Zeppelin is a favourite, but tonight we also did Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water, and Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven.
When Louise turns up, she usually pulls out the old boring standards, like Miss Polly and Her Dolly, or The Teddy Bear’s picnic. I tried the The Teddy Bear’s picnic tonight and Molly started to cry, I don’t blame her. When I switched back to Stairway (“if there’s a bussle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now”), she started smiling and having fun again. She really enjoys lead breaks, whether it be guitar or drums, but that just may be my delivery.
But Louise is insistent, so we haven’t heard the last of those childish Teddy Bears. Louise has also promised to learn the actual words at some point, so that’s certainly worth looking forward to.
The photos are continuing to be updated every few days. The most recent ones are with Molly in the pram on her very first trip outside of the nursery.
Today the container load turned up. Hooray! We’ve yet to go through it, but it’s calmed us down a little. Also today, Louise heard the lactation consultant say “she should be allowed home soon” or words to that effect, which just scared the shit out of us again.
Did I mention Led Zeppelin at all? “Your head is humming and it won’t go, in case you don’t know, the piper’s calling you to join him…” Classic.
Today went to plan. Give or take. We had our very first family perambulation, form the nursery to the local cafe in the hospital, effectionately known by some of the staff as Hepatitus Harry’s. Molly slept through the entire thing, and didn’t actually see anything outside the nursery. The nursery and the operating theatre are all behind a pass coded security door, so it was a big deal for Louise and I to take her beyond that for the first time in the almost three weeks she’s been out. It’s a pity she didn’t feel the same way. 🙂
Tonight we had a really good breast feed, the best yet by far, followed by a bottle top up. The nurses are now saying she needs to have done 48 hours of breast or bottle feeds before she can go home. At the moment she’s only doing two out of the six she has each day, so we have a while to go yet. We’re now betting on next weekend, so around the 26th/27th July, before she can come home.
The DIY instant baby car container kit is now locked in for Tuesday at 11am, which is thankfully well before Molly will be getting out. Tuesday is also Louise’s next check up, when hopefully they’ll reduce her medication again.
So this week will most likely be a slow week, with nothing much happening.
We’d planned the weekend. Even though it is only Sunday morning, dear reader you should have already guessed the rest of the story.
Saturday (yesterday) morning we did a little breast feed, and Louise’s brother, sister in law, nephew and niece all came to see Molly. Special Care has a bunch of rules that we need to follow, such as: not allowing more than three people at a time to visit, including parents; not looking at any other babies in the ward; no long sleeves; scrubbing hands and arms up to the elbow; and no children allowed unless they’re actually siblings of the baby. So unfortunately Louise’s niece couldn’t see Molly, but that’s OK, she’ll have a special treat once Molly is home, to help make amends.
So with Louise bottle feeding Molly, I brought them all in one at a time. Most people are used to dropping a baby, having it in the mother’s hospital room for a few days and then heading home, so the RPA nursery can be a bit of a shock to parent who’ve done it the easy way. It’s effectively an emergency ward for babies, which makes sense considering Molly is now roughly 36 and a half weeks old, and in theory still having about 3 weeks before she’s supposed to be born. Even though she’s now coming up to her 3rd week birthday.
We had a sleep in the afternoon and came back to do a quick breast feed in the evening. She’s still not doing full feeds, she needs a 40ml bottle top up after the breast feed, and she’s still having only two of those a day, with the other five feeds still going in via the IG (feeding tube).
So around 7pm we did a breast feed and a bottle top up, and Louise went off to express some milk while I held Molly. We sang a few songs (“Moby Dick” by Led Zeppelin was a favourite, so maybe she’ll be a drummer), and played hi-5 a lot, until Louise came back 30 minutes later. As I stood up, I noticed an extra yellow patch on my Scared Scriptless tshirt, which for a second looked just part of the tshirt, until I noticed it was… poo.. lots of it. Then we noticed the poo all up her legs and arms, now all over the cot, and even inside her identification bands.
Molly is notorious for peeing during nappy changes, and a few days ago I got to eight nappy changes in a row where this was the case. But this was the first time she’d pooed so much that it all came out the sides.
In the ward there’s four disposal bags. One each for baby clothes, towels and linen, soiled (to be destroyed) waste (pooey things), and normal waste. I was cleaning my tshirt off, because I had nothing else to wear, not knowing whether I should be cleaning it over their sink or not, and I ended up with completely soaked clothes, but still a slight poo stain. Meanwhile, we’d planned to have a lovely Sunday having a bath day, so we decided with the nurses to move that forward, and do an emergency poo bath.
After some quizzing from the nurses, we realised that Molly had probably just experienced her first cajun spicy chicken, which Louise had eaten the night before. Start them early I reckon. Louise has been trying all sorts of things she hasn’t been allowed to eat for the last nine months, so who knows what delights Molly will experience over the next few weeks. Louise had just had curry chicken for lunch, so the next few days should be interesting.
Meanwhile at the bath, she was completely covered in poo, from arm to toe, which was a wonderful experience. But as the nurses keep saying, a few weeks in Special Care can be a blessing in disguise, because while most parents are left to fend or themselves from the get go, Louise and I will have several weeks of learning the ropes with the experts. We’re already completely comfortable with all her regular maintenance and cares, and know a whole bunch of tricks and techniques, and we haven’t even gotten her home yet.
So we got her all cleaned up and tucked in and headed home to sleep. I of course still had my own cleaning to do once I’d gotten home, after producing our very first piece of soiled clothing.
They said we can now take her outside for an hour in a hospital pram, to either the hospital cafe, or the McCafe up the road, so that’s a our focus for today, a family pram expedition, most likely just to the hospital cafe for lunch. Whether Mum decides to have another curry is another story altogether.
The Great Escape is now looking more like Wednesday. Molly is now having two breast with bottle top up feeds per day, out of a possible four, but it’s tiring her out. She’s going to need a little more time to get used to it. Now whenever she’s IG (Intragastric, feeding through the tube), she also gets a dummy, to try to stimulate the sucking impulse. It’s working, it’s just a lot of work for her. Today she also had her very first proper cry, a sign of things to come I’m sure.
Louise stepped up her milk production today, jumping from the mid sized container up to the large sized container. Sounds like one of those big metal milking pales in a dairy the way I mention it, but the large ones are about 40mls and made of disposable see through plastic, much like an oversize takeaway tartare sauce tub you’d get with your fish and chips. U.S. readers can look that one up in wikipedia under English icons.
My client with the failing server is still ticking away. Tonight we moved the hard drives and RAM into a new chassis, to try to find what’s causing our ongoing hanging issues, so we’ll see how that goes. The race is on against my client, the DIY instant baby care container, and Molly coming home. My bet at this point is on the container.
And the days don’t get any shorter or less weirder. The city was completely empty of traffic and people today as Young Catholics Week took over Sydney, and his papalness did several laps of the CBD, perhaps in preparation for Randwick on Sunday. It was just like the Olympics and APEC, only Sydneysiders were this time not so much frustrated, but more let’s get it over with already. And if you missed him, no problem, you can see him from anywhere on the harbour, projected up onto the south eastern tower of the Harbour Bridge, 24×7 until Sunday. Some government marketing wizz must have come up with that one. I wonder if they’ll offer the same thing to the Dalai Lama next time he visits. We also had our first Scared Scriptless show at the Harold Park Hotel tonight, which was a pretty good start, and surprisingly free of pope jokes.
How quickly fortunes change. A few weeks back I got addicted to McDonalds soft serve cones. Feel free to have a go at me for supporting the pig fat breeding programs in the Amazon, sponsored by the timber industry and gay whales etc., but they’ve been a sanity saver. In times of trouble always find a naughty soft addiction I reckon. I’ve been rating my days by how many cones I have. Most days have been a two cone day, but I did have a really bad four cone day at some point.
Louise is now having cone days as well. And surprisingly it’s got a lot of cred attached to it, depending on your delivery. We were in Woolworths on Monday night for our first shop in a while, and as a trendy Newtown couple came past us, I said to Louise “I so need a cone later, what do you reckon”. I could actually feel the indie cred oosing out of me, and wafting all around us. I hoped the couple were listening, I think they were. Or at least I did up until the point where Louise replied “which McDonalds, Parramatta Rd?”
But bad cone days have now turned into happy cone days, and today is (so far) a happy two cone day.
We got to the hospital at around 10:45am, and threw out the day’s schedule at around 11:50am. I did cares, while Louise got ready to try a breast feed. Suffice to say, it worked. Today was Molly’s first real breast feed! The nurses have even given her a little certificate to prove it (photos coming soon, just keep watching the photos page).
Louise then headed home to catch up with her sister and her boyfriend, who were going to help her clean up a bunch of stuff lying around from her pre-birth work, you know, that infamous Thursday when Louise thought she’d be back from hospital after lunch. And as it is Wednesday, she also went to meet the cleaners. After all, I’d done it last time. I just went to find the post where I talked about Molly day #2 and the cleaners arriving just as her grandmother arrived at the hospital, but it looks like I never wrote that one up. I’ll have to do that another time. So much for the disasters you write about, and the ones you don’t.
So then I finished up by doing a bottle feed, just me and Molly, and her first one! What an exciting day, her first breast feed and her first bottle feed. We figure that’s a great start to our secret escape plan, to bust Molly outa there by next Monday!
Did I mention that my car’s rego expired a few days ago, and I obviously can’t get a pink slip until I have four wheels on the car?
Up until yesterday, we’ve been kindly refusing help from family and friends. Mainly because our days never go to plan. At night we come up with a schedule for the next day, and as soon as we get to the hospital, the day spirals completely out of control, and fitting in other people becomes impossible. My parents have spent hours in the waiting lounge for Louise and I to find a gap when they can visit, and this is after making a huge hole for it in our schedule the night before. Also, most jobs or tasks would involve me having to stay at home and explain them anyway, so we simply told people to wait off until things started to settle down.
Yesterday that all finally changed. I’ve already mentioned getting the tyres fixed, but my Mum and Dad were beaten to the punch by a few hours when Louise’s sister and boyfriend delivered what can only be described as a DIY instant soup convention! Our fridge and freezer are now completely full of soup, all shapes and sizes, all colours and densities, and going by last night’s effort, all damn yummy and easy to prepare. Not to mention so much more cheaper than takeaway every night.
It’s been about 4 weeks since we did a food shop, but we were finally able to do one on Monday, so it hasn’t been all bad food wise. But this will now set us up for about ooh, a month? Or at least until Molly comes home that’s for sure. Maybe that will be our first meal as a family.
And also yesterday, my Mum gave Louise a shawl that she had used for me when I was a baby, knitted by my grandmother. It is in absolute pristine condition, as if it had just been bought from a high class knit shop, and while this is quite normal for Mum, apparently there is a small stain somewhere, not that we could find it. Apparently my (younger) sister had also used it. Ahh, whether to use it for Molly, or file it away as a valuable heirloom… When we opened it, both Louise and I were in tears. I even had to sit down to steady myself… Mum’s been doing that recently, every few weeks something turns up from when I was a baby, 42 years ago. Strange times indeed..
Molly is doing well, Louise is doing well, and Richard is doing well. We’re all getting sleep, and while the world is still spinning upside down, we are starting to get a handle on things.
I was with a client all day in town, but I was looking forward to heading to the hospital tonight with Louise. We’d both done small little bits of bathing Molly on our own, but this was going to be our first real family bath, just the three of us. It got me through the day.
Around lunch time, my Mum and Dad came to town and helped Louise get the tyres fixed, because she’s not allowed to drive for six weeks. Turns out the tyres had been slashed. Nice one. Just what we need right now. Because they were slashed, they couldn’t be fixed, but had to be replaced. Louise was lucky, but mine was no longer available, so now I have one odd wheel, and three the same. Well, not really, because the dicky wheel is still on my car, and it won’t be for a few days yet until I get some time to change it with the new odd one. Louise also got her car cleaned inside and out, ready for the big trip home from the hospital.
Over the last few days, we’ve kept hearing “a week”, so we’re estimating Molly may well be heading home next Monday, fingers crossed. But if it takes longer, then that’s fine, she’s in the best place in the world right now for a baby. And we got an official ETA today on Louise’s DIY instant baby care container. Tuesday. 🙂
I got home from work and we headed off to the hospital at around 7pm, and the hospital already knew we were coming. The plan was a bath and a change, then a feed, just the three of us. Louise had been at the hospital for several hours today, but could only spend a short amount of time with Molly, as she had a check up and other bits and pieces to do, and of course I hadn’t seen her since Monday.
When we got there, we started to get everything ready. We were a little nervous, first time alone and all, but felt confident. I’d seen it done quite a few times (and different every time), but Louise had only seen it once, so I helped her get ready with what I already knew. We started filling up the bath, and turned to see that Molly’s nurse had brought the cot over, which was a little annoying because I was going to do that once everything was ready. No matter. Louise and I had a quick chat about what clothes to put on her, form the ones provided by the hospital, and I turned around to see that the nurse had now moved Molly onto the table and undressed her. Grrr.
Louise prepared a few wipes and again the nurse jumped in a finished filling and checking the bath, then quite condescendingly told Louise how she should be doing it at home, which was completely different to how the other two nurses had described it.
Then things got out of control, the nurse let us remove and clean the nappy, but then jumped in again a washed her hair and head, and then went to place Molly in the bath, before Louise jumped in and said she’s like to do it. At this point I had to stand back, because two women were competing for Molly, and I couldn’t see anything that was happening. The nurse gave Louise some more condescending advice, and then took Molly and bathed her front as yet another demo, but didn’t let Louise do it. She then placed Molly on a towel, Louise started to dry her, and then the nurse jumped in and did the rest. So much for our family night. The most annoying thing, was the whole time the nurse kept telling Louise what she was doing wrong, but she wasn’t actually doing anything wrong!
Louise was supposed to try another breast feed tomorrow, with one of the lactation consultants, but the nurse said she would help her now, and ran off to get some screens. Screens? We’ve never used screens before. Would there be room for me behind the screen as well? Or just room for the nurse and Molly. While she was out of the room, I sneakily ran over and dressed Molly. Naughty me, dressing my own daughter. Hope I don’t get in trouble for having 2 minutes with her today.
At this point Louise had a phone call from a brother and a nephew, who were about to visit, so she walked out to take the call. I turned around and saw that the nurse had positioned three screens around a lounge chair, with only really enough room for the chair. I put Molly back in her cot and went to tell Louise that she was going to have to go through with it. I ended up changing places with Louise outside, with her coming in to do the feed, and me waiting outside for her family to arrive.
After about 15 minutes, Louise came out again and said the feed wasn’t overly sucessful, and that the nurse had corrected her on everything she did. However Louise had then explained that we actually did have a plan for the night, and said that she would wait for the family with me feeding Molly. I tried to say no, because only three at a time are allowed in, and when the family arrives it would make much more sense that they go in to Louise than me. But no, Louise was insistent.
So I went back in and found that not only had the nurse put Molly back in her cot after the attempted breast feed, but she’d completely wrapped her up and tucked her in. She’s also put in her feeding tube, and she said “oh, and I took her temperature and she’s normal”. We didn’t even get to take her temperature ourselves, which we always do. Then she asked if I wanted to hold her for the feed. Well, what on earth does she expect? She’s completely tucked in, and she was falling asleep, so as if I’m going to take her out again and wake her up.
The nurse started to get the feed ready, but at this point I’d had enough and said “I’ll do that”, and so I think she started to figure out we weren’t particularly impressed. So I ended up spending 10 minutes injecting her food into her mouth while she was asleep in her cot, which involves mainly looking at the syringe the whole time, not Molly, in order to get the injection rate right. She then fell asleep, and Louise and I talked over her for about 15 minutes about rebellion and escape from captivity, our metaphoric fingers in the air against “da man”, before we had to head home again.
The only nice part of the night was when Louise’s brother and nephew came in, one at a time of course, because only three are allowed at a time, but I love it when Molly can melt anyone’s heart, even from several metres away.
We’ve had a mostly wonderful experience at RPA. It’s an awesome hospital, with great staff, and leading edge ideas about parent and baby bonding, with a focus on the parents driving as much as possible while baby is in hospital. Obviously not everyone’s perfect, but I will personally single out the exceptional work of Bridget (who was fantastic in HDU), Helen, Jenny, Dianne and Hayley.
I won’t say tonight was a disaster, because we did have time as a family unit, even though it was ever so short, and we didn’t really do much. But it was a bit of a shame, after such a build up we’d both had, and it did cause me to lose even more sleep by staying up until 2am to finish this blog post. Lots more happened today, but I’ll blog that another time.
The three of us did however come up with a cunning escape plan. Louise is going to distract the nurses by having Molly switch to fully breast or bottle feeds, and then Molly will have to be discharged from Special Care, and we’ll make our escape. Me? I’m the getaway driver of course. I just need to get that fourth wheel back on, and the capsule fitted… but that’s for another day.
Molly’s still plumping up at the fat farm, AKA RPA Womens and Babies Special Care Unit. Louise is getting more sleep, and more regular on her expresses. And I’m having more client server problems which means this may well be the first day that I don’t get to see Molly.
About six months ago, Louise’s brother offered to send us her family’s traveling container load of clothes and equipment, as they’d been the last ones in Louise’s large family to have a baby. I was initially resistant because I wanted to experience the joy of learning about what we needed for our baby, to do detailed research into what the best or appropriate ones were to buy, and to not just have a DIY kit of everything you need just turn up on our doorstep. Louise didn’t see that side of it, she just wanted the container full, her family’s instant baby care kit.
So anyway, I never did any research, but they were kind enough to send us a list of what would be in the container load, and as I was reading through, my head went into spin, realising that I really had no idea what I was getting myself into. So I passed the list back to Louise and said “just tell them to send it all”. Molly hadn’t even been born, and she was already making her own decisions and thwarting my plans for how I wanted to experience fatherhood.
Now the rush was on to make room in the house. It never happened. Louise kept on holding off on sending it, thinking that at some point we’d have a nice free day to go through the house, clean up all the junk, and make some space. But we didn’t. Then Molly dropped in, and I just looked at Louise and said frantically “where’s that &*^%#@$&^ container load!”.
So it’s been a daily thing, Molly’s doing better every day, and every day we get closer to her coming home, and every day we think “we have nothing, where’s that damn container load”. Our neighbours suggested that an old drawer has been known to double nicely as a cot and with a bit of Selleys Liquid Nails, also a bath. Phoebe our cat will probably double quite nicely as a soft toy. And I have an old billy cart that will probably end up being our pram.
It’s all my fault of course. I have these silly ideas about how I want to experience life, and quicker than expected, we’re in the thick of it all. We think about a week until Molly comes home, and somewhere out there there’s a train heading it’s way to Sydney, with an ETA of roughly… ooh, about a week.
Apart from some more server work and finally getting my hair done, we spent two shorter stints at the hospital today. Molly as per usual is doing excellently, and is completely asleep and at peace when all of the other babies in Special Care are crying their heads off. We did well and got some sleep over night, be we wrecked it tonight, as you can see by the time stamp of this post. No other news really, just counting down the days until she gets out. It’s kind of like prison I guess, she got 3 weeks locked away for being too cute. More photos to upload, but too tired right now, I’ll do them tomorrow.