Baby Magic

If you found this as a home ed blog and are looking for posts on maths, you should probably move along for a few days. We are all loved up on babies and likely to be so for a while 😆

36 hours at home has done much to restore me. I feel like my old self, more or less. Not my pregnant or ttc self either, but some self there hasn’t been for a long time. Actually, I’m not sure where she came from, possibly a self from something like 2005 but with a layer of maturity I guess I didn’t have then. I’m someone who knows how to be grateful now, I hope and enjoy the moment.

Maybe that’s a new self 🙂

Max is being very protective. I think he saw me managing in hospital and then saw me actually rather floored and panicked by coming home to huge boisterous children and noise and multi-channel conversations. He’s done a great job of helping the girls to just back off and let me settle in and acclimatise and yesterday felt much more manageable.

Benedict is continuing to be utterly gorgeous and charming and he is just so very cute.

Being 3 weeks early is a novelty to me and he’s a very different thing to my term babies. He’s struggled with jaundice from a few hours old and yesterday, released from the phototherapy blanket at the hospital, he got very yellow and was sleepier than made me happy. We sat under a window all day and eventually I put him down with a minimal amount of clothing until he woke up and had a huge feed on both sides. He’s been more alert and waking for feeds in his own since, but I’ve had some good advice from people with early baby experience and I’m going to manage him a bit more proactively for a few days.

I had to take a photo of an awake moment yesterday just for proof he really could!

The best thing about yesterday was my sister coming to visit and bringing Nina too as well as a heap of gorgeous clothes that include things from Kit and things my friends gave me for Freddie and which I bundled off to her when we didn’t need them for him. It was good to get them back but even better to see my sister, who has managed supporting me through the minefield of my loss and having two babies of her own with such grace and brilliance.

We thought this was pretty funny.

All the time I was pregnant, the girls would ask how big Marmite was and I would compare him to a water bottle. Turned out to be quite an apt comparison.

He is incredibly dainty, though with comically long arms. His legs are all scrunched up still and his arms hang out of the bottom of his baby gro so half the time he looks like he’s been sawn off in the middle. He’s not really thin or scrawny though, just the exact opposite of his brother, who was long and stretched. Benedict is a titch who likes to be all curled up. He had a horrendous crop of spots yesterday but squinting at him in the dark, I’d say they’ve all gone now. Only Fran had them so badly and he is fair like her so I suspect he’s not going to be one of my olive skinned babies.

Letting mummy eat dinner and trying out the other blanket. I was going to put the back on it this weekend ready for today, which was supposed to be d-day. So much for making plans. I wonder if it will ever get done?!?!

Waking up to congratulate Fran on her upstart retrieval at gym.

I’m loving every moment of this. Max and I curled on the sofa with him last night and just stared at him for about 3 hours. I’m trying not to be too sad just now, I want his baby moon to be his but all this love does make us both acknowledge again that really, there was nothing bearable about losing Freddie, no matter how new to us he was. (I knew that, but Max and I are very different and much of our loss is unspoken between us). It takes no time at all to be passionately in love with a new child. Being born on a Friday too, Benedict is on the same timeline as Freddie and I keep remembering what was happening at this point or by this day. We travelled so many miles of pain in those days and this is such bliss in comparison.

I think today will be a milkier day, I’ve seen him root for the first time overnight which is a good sign, so I better get some more sleep. I’m much less sore since lunch time yesterday and my brain is expanding to cope with the tumble of family life, so hopefully today will be a good day.