How Can It Hurt

We went to get Olivia's belly button done AGAIN today. Hopefully this will be the last treatment but we will have to see how it goes. The nurse was much better than the one we have seen before - she applied a ring (kind of like a corn plaster) to Olivia's tummy to make sure the Silver Nitrate only treated the affected part of her belly button and put a little round plaster on afterwards. I don't think it can hurt her as she never even cries when they treat it.

Hopefully once this finally clears up we can actually move to the Bambino Mio nappies. When we tried her on them last time F_ wasn't very happy as when they were wet they were wet all the way up to her belly button and as this is still weeping on her vests we didn't think it was good for it to get covered in wee all the time. In the meantime we have continued to use biodegradable disposables which is better than standard nappies but is still making a huge pile of landfill somewhere.

She'll Carry on Through it All, She's a Waterfall

Well, looks like we might have to change baby clinic after the mortification of yesterday afternoon.

I take Olivia to a local clinic every Monday afternoon to get weighed. When you get there they take your red baby health book from you and you enter a queue. There are rows of changing mats on tables along one side of the room and when there is one free, you take your baby over and strip them down to their nappy. Once their name has been called you take them up to the front to get weighed.

Now, the getting weighed part involves removing their nappy... and I'm guessing that some of you might already have guessed the end of this particular story. So anyway I take off her nappy and she lies quietly, like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth, on the scales. All is well. Then I carry her back over, sans nappy, to the changing mat. Her buttocks had barely touched the mat when she issued forth a veritable torrent of wee and liquid poo. It was streaming down the mat, over the end like a waterfall, down the front of my skirt, over my shoes and then finally coming to settle and soak into the carpet. The lady in charge looked at me like I was a disappointment and asked, 'Would you like some more tissue?' Rather than some tissue, I was actually just waiting for the ground to open up and swallow me.

An awful lot of tissue and mopping up later and she looked like a cute little baby in a pink and white babygro, while I looked like someone who had tried to mop poo off their front with a wet wipe. When I got outside I just had to phone F_ and ask if he minded if I returned her and got a refund as her bottom is clearly defective, or should that be 'defecative'? Or else I think I'll have to adopt a cunning disguise before going back next week.

By the way, she weighed 9lbs 15oz, or at least she did when she came in...

We took ourselves apart, We talked about our faces

Olivia is growing well. She is now within 3oz of her birthweight. We are going to keep a close eye and get her weighed weekly to make sure everything is progressing well. It is a difficult balance to make sure she gets enough nutrition when we don't know how much breastmilk she gets.

Dad to be (or should that just be Dad!) or F as I will now be calling him noticed changes in her after he had been away for 5 days. He says she looks like him. I guess that now I just think she looks like herself!

It is funny because although she is only just over 3 weeks old it seems like we have always had her. We are in a routine now and so we've kind of started to forget what things used to be like. I guess things will change again next week when F goes back to work. We will miss him so much. If only we could have that elusive lottery win so he didn't have to work, although I think the main thing hindering us in winning is the fact that we don't buy tickets :)

Olivia is still in biodegradable disposable nappies due to the truly explosive nature of her poops and the fact that we were away at my parents' but we are going over to the washables at the weekend - watch this space and see if our eco-parents credentials crumble in a tidal wave of poo. She had a whole day and a half where she didn't poop once, then a large firm poop and then the poop gates were opened and she was back to doing one every feed. I bet Daddy will miss that when he goes back to work...

News from the Front

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!

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The Blog

I'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.