It's been a hell of a five days...
Here's a quick re-cap of some vaguely noteworthy moments:
Large swathes of both sides of the family have been to see Olivia now. This weekend, K___'s elder sister and her two kids have been down as have both of my brothers and their other halves.
My dad is coming back on Wednesday. He tells me that although his mother is near-as-damnit demented, she had managed to keep K___'s name in her head and has taken on board that she is a Great Granny.
I've been changing nappies like a demon and I've actually become pretty efficient at doing it too. I spoke to my friend
B____ and I commented that the smell was not too bad at the moment and barely worthy of mention. She tells me I should wait until weaning and reconsider at that point. I expect she's right, but at least I should hopefully be a master of dealing with nappies by that point.
This makes it all the more unfortunate that when my brother and his girlfriend arrived, I was changing Olivia. I got distracted in talking to them and after cleaning her up, I then proceeded to put the baby into a new vest and all-in-one at which point my brother's girlfriend said, 'er... Shouldn't you put a nappy on her?'. Yeah, made me look really clever, that did. Gallingly, it's the first time it's happened, honest!
I did cause another unwitting comedy moment when the doctor came over for the world's most pointless house-visit. He came over to say congratulations and to give us a packet of papers about post-natal care, including a hearing test for six weeks after the birth. Why not send them in the post instead of sending a doctor to carry out errands, taking him away from the surgery? Still, I was possibly just having negative thoughts because I found it hard to believe this young chap could possibly be an actual doctor. He looked about twelve! This notion rather disturbed me so I wasn't paying proper attention when he asked, 'And how are the discharges down below?'
'Not bad,' I answered, 'They've gone green!' The doctor looked rather appalled for some reason.
'Darling,' said my wife gently, 'He means me...'
I have also discovered that Zygote Daddy was lying when he claimed the
baby smell was vomit and stale milk, since Olivia has the most gorgeous smell you could possibly imagine and had it before she'd had either milk (colostrum only by that point) or vomitted.
Olivia's umbilical cord came off today during a bit of skin-on-skin lovin' (very important for babies to bond by getting used to the smell of their parents!) and she now has a clean looking 'stump' that will gradually turn into a normal belly-button. Well, we hope so!
The BlogI'd like to make a few points about the blog, if I may.
I've re-written the description at the top, as having a thing banging on about 'My wife has just missed her first period (etc)' is rather redundant now Olivia is here.
We're going to stop numbering the days too. I hope we'll continue to post on here often and have every intention of doing so, but at the same time as we're finding plenty that is noteworthy about this parenting lark, we've got very much less time than we ever used to have to write about it and putting ourselves under the obligation to do so every day is a pressure too much.
We'd also like to thank everyone who has read the blog over the past 9 months and kept us company on this amazing journey and particularly those whose own blogs have provided inspiration, laughs and companionship along the way (and let's raise a pint to whoever thought up the wonderful labour-saving notion of RSS feeds too!).
It's a weird old thing this blogging lark. In many respects it's hideously egotistical to put your thoughts down in a public place and dare to imagine that what you have to say could possibly be of interest to anyone else. But we've come across people that we would never have met otherwise and I hope that we've managed to be informative too. However, as I did once write somewhere before, the reason I wanted to start the blog in the first place was so that one day, I could give it to my baby. Now, of course, that baby has a name and a sex and a personality, and I want her to be able to read about this stuff more than ever.
