The Frank Diaries: His Bright & Bold Bedroom

What feels like many, many moons ago, when Frank was just a plum in my tum, I started dreaming about his nursery having found out we were having a boy. Having pinned like a demon, I deduced that my ideal baby boy’s room was not very babyish at all. Instead I wanted a room that he could grow in to; a stylish, fun, eclectic space full of colour and pattern. I planned to share the various stages of progress with you, but here we are nearly six months later and I’m skipping straight to the finished product. Meh- who likes the middle stages anyway?

Shall we have a quick reminder of the room when it was essentially just a bland, beige dumping ground?

But now… Ta-da!

Now, I’m no interior designer and I’m sure I’ll be adding and tweaking as time goes on, but both Paul and I are thrilled with our (mainly my) efforts. Frank’s pretty indifferent but that’s to be expected.

The first big decision after painting the room white was the triangle feature wall. I knew I wanted a feature wall of some kind, and had considered stars, polka dots and just a simple block of colour, but it was triangles that seemed to fit my brief the most. They’re fun, modern, stylish and just a little bit masculine. And being stickers they’ll peel off easily when Frank decides he wants to cover his walls with Arsenal and car posters instead. Sigh.

I ordered the stickers from Etsy, and Paul and I spent an August afternoon applying them. Paul was just going to ‘supervise’ seeing as this bizarre triangle wall was all my idea, but ended up masterminding the insanely complicated pattern, and doing the majority of the labour seeing as I was 8 months pregnant and had a good excuse. The stickers were easy to put on (and take off when we went completely wrong with the pattern), and we probably had the wall done in about 3 hours.

On the opposite side of the room is the changing corner. I went for the ever-popular Hemnes chest of drawers from Ikea, and this houses all of Frank’s clothes. Next to it is a simple and not so attractive Argos storage unit containing his ‘toiletries’: nappies, wipes, creams, cotton wool etc. And yes, that is a portable cd player you see on top. I’ve gone old school.

The multi-coloured string lights are from Cable & Cotton, and are probably my best purchase of the whole room. Frank can’t get enough of them and we’d often take him up to the changing table when he was going through a particularly miserable phase, just to stop the crying. You can’t see it so well but there’s also a black and white mobile hanging  in front of the mirror. It was a gift from a friend and the spirals and stripes also have Frank squealing with delight. Never has having your bottom wiped been so much fun!

The final ‘zone’ is the reading wall. Once again, the picture shelves are an Ikea favourite (now discontinued), and the bear print is Not On The High Street. The white bench was part of an Ikea dining set and we keep it for when we have more guests than chairs, so to make a bit of a feature of it I sourced some colourful storage boxes for underneath which are currently full of toys, books and, erm, more baby wipes.

What else? I agonised over what rug to go for and ended up with two; a grey sheepskin rug for under the changing table and a pale blue one (featuring more triangles) for the middle of the floor. (I can’t remember for the life of me where it’s from, apologies.) And in terms of artwork I tracked down the Be Happy My Baby print having seen it on a Pinterest image, and both the Lion print and the Amazing Things Will Happen print were gifts from lovely friends.

It is genuinely a really happy, fun room to be in, and no matter how miserable I am when I’m having to change or feed Frank in the middle of the night, I always feel calm and content sitting in there with nothing but the fairy lights on. I am slightly nervous about him being overstimulated when he starts sleeping in there as there is lots to look at… but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

You like??

Sama x

 

 

 

The Frank Diaries: Surviving the Newborn Stage

Hello you ruddy marvellous lot. Happy 2016 and and all that. We had the most un-celebratory New Years Eve on record I think. Homemade pizzas (one of which we forgot about and completely decimated), the last episode of the Agatha Christie that was on over Christmas, and the London fireworks on our phones whilst in bed. Watching the clock on Big Ben count down from 60, whilst simultaneously hearing the fireworks from 11 miles away due to the time delay, was a slight anti-climax though. I won’t lie.

Christmas was equally as low key but very pleasant indeed as we travelled round various parts of London and Kent visiting our four families. Other than dressing him in the obligatory Santa outfit, we didn’t make a huge fuss about it being Frank’s First Christmas™. Paul and I didn’t even bother getting him a present (shock horror!), although he did get some lovely bits from doting grandparents, aunts and uncles. And I enjoyed copious amounts of cheese, chocolate and alcohol. As I said, low-key but satisfyingly pleasant.

To accompany this blog post I thought I’d share some pictures that were taken at my Mum’s house over Christmas by my brother in law. He is by no means a professional photographer, but likes to sit and quietly click away on his fancy Dan camera. I love seeing the day from a reportage point of view, and as most of my photos of Frank are iPhone selfies enhanced by a clever Instagram filter, it’s truly lovely to now have some more natural images of him (and my gorgeous nephew, Eithan) that capture the ‘every day’. So thank you very much, Colin 🙂

But anyway, this post isn’t about Christmas or the New Year. It’s about survival. Frank turned three months last week, which means as we enter 2016 I no longer have a newborn baby. My mind is boggled. In many, many ways it is a huge relief to be in the ‘infant’ stage. He’s still very young and vulnerable, but now that he sees so much more and his synapses have gone in to overdrive, his personality is really starting to emerge and he’s just so much more enjoyable. He’s also chubbed out big and is cultivating quite the double chin, which is super cute.

Frank was not an easy newborn. I don’t think I had unrealistic expectations, but he did (and still does, to be honest) cry an awful lot. See, there are babies who whinge when they want something and whimper when they’re unhappy, but are generally happy to gurgle and look around in blissful unawareness. But then there are babies who fly in to inconsolable rage at any given moment, turning purple in the process, causing the cat to fly out the cat flap in fear of his life, and stopping only to eat, sleep or poo. Frank was most definitely the latter.

In the depths of the night feeding sessions I would more often than not find myself asking the internet a desperate question. Why does my baby cry so much? How do I get my 4 week old to sleep for longer? Does my baby have reflux? What is colic? Baby forums became my sanctuary, and I’d scour the posts looking for other new mums who had asked the same questions, eagerly reading the answers and words of advice from those who had been there, done that.

But the problem with babies is that they are extremely changeable and totally unreliable. What seems to work one day might not work the next, and what might work for one baby may have the complete opposite effect on another. So it’s all trial and error, this baby rearing lark. However, three months in I’m pretty sure I know what my baby likes and doesn’t like now. We have a bit of a routine going. I’m down with the kid.

Here’s what works for us:

Baby wearing

Whilst pregnant I knew that I wanted some sort of sling. The hippy in me wanted a wrap as opposed to a structured carrier so I bid for an Ergobaby Wrap on eBay and had fun practising the basic wrap for newborns before he arrived. At three days old and with Paul instructing me via a YouTube tutorial, we somehow managed to get Frank in snugly and I felt like some sort of Earth Mother Goddess. It soon became clear, however, that when I most needed the sling (i.e. when Frank was massively overtired and screaming inconsolably), the Ergobaby just wasn’t going to cut it. Too time-consuming and complicated to get on. Some quick research and a call-out on a baby forum later and I had a NCT Close Caboo winging its way to me which is SO much better. In the early weeks Frank would usually nap in this once a day when I would potter around making lunch, tidying up etc. I wouldn’t say he particularly loved or loves the sling. He nearly always protests as I put him in and will generally take 5-10 minutes of frantic jiggling and shushing to settle him, but there’s no denying the sling is a great tool in the early weeks for a baby who just wants to be close to you.

Swaddling

In the first month I put out a couple of desperate, baby-related pleas on Facebook and got a multitude of helpful messages from my mummy friends. SEVERAL people suggested swaddling but I have to admit I was really reluctant in the early weeks, and I’m not too sure why. I think I thought he wouldn’t like it. Eventually I gave in and it changed everything regarding Frank’s sleep. He had a pretty severe startle reflex and having his arms bound to his sides improved his sleep enormously. I started with a Gro-Snug which worked well initially but kept riding up around his face in the middle of the night, and am now on Swaddle Me blankets. I use them for every sleep, day and night. In fact, I rely on swaddling so much now that I am quite scared he won’t settle properly once he starts to roll over and we can no longer swaddle! But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it…

Dummies

Ok, hands up who said whilst pregnant that they wouldn’t be giving their babies a dummy? I know I did. I’m not even sure why these little plastic wonders are frowned upon by many, but what I do know is that I’d bought a pack of two ‘just in case’ prior to Frank being born, and had effectively shoved one in his mouth within the first few days.

Nowadays his dummy is used as a sleep aid and I intend for it to stay that way. When he’s swaddled and on my shoulder, he’ll often start sucking on my jumper. In goes a dummy and he falls asleep fairly quickly, spitting it out just as he starts to fall in to a deep sleep.

White noise

Apparently it’s bloody noisy in the womb, so many babies are calmed by white noise. I use an app on my phone called Sleepy Sounds and Frank LOVES it. There are lots of different sounds on there but it’s the hairdryer he really responds to, calming in an instant if he’s hysterical, and sending him to sleep when it’s bedtime. I do have my concerns as it needs to be pretty loud to have any effect, and as it’s on my phone I don’t like having it too close to his head. But again, this is a big part of our sleep routine and something Frank struggles to settle without.

Rocking

Paul takes the mick out of me for calling Frank a ‘motion baby’ but he really is. Whether he’s rocked, bobbed, swayed or swung, Frank likes to move. However, I can already feel this constant motion already taking effect on my back and knees, and it’s only going to get worse as he gets bigger, which leads me to…

…The Swing Chair

A few weeks ago his napping was driving me absolutely mad, as he would wake- without fail- 30 minutes after going down. Every time. I’ve read a lot about it and realise now that it happens as he is coming out of his light REM sleep cycle. Whereas he should slip in to a deeper sleep at this point, the transition wakes him up and he can’t re-settle. You can’t get anything done in 30 minutes, and with me needing to get back in to Utterly Wow mode this month, I desperately needed a solution. The internet told me a swing chair would be my saviour, so we asked for one as an early Christmas present from his Nanny and Grandad, and I think I actually wept tears of joy the first time he napped in it and I had to wake him 2.5 hours later.

A few weeks in and it doesn’t work every time, but as I type he’s upstairs gently swinging away, having been down for 1 hour 4o and counting. The swing chair may be huge, cumbersome and ghastly to look at, but boy it delivers.

So there we go. These are the tools that settle my demanding diva and have got me through the newborn stage. The ‘routine’ is quite extensive, and many a time I lament the fact that I have to do all these things to get Frank to sleep when other people seem to simply lie their angels down and walk away, but needs must. Some might say I’m ‘making a rod for my own back’ (possibly the most over-used sentence on baby forums), but I’m confident these are all just temporary solutions. As it happens, I’m pretty much following the method of American paediatrician, Harvey Karp who wrote The Happiest Baby On The Block. His method is all about the 5 S’s: Swaddling (yep), Side or Stomach position (Frank goes to sleep on my shoulder or in my arms on his side), Shush (white noise), Swing (hell yes), and Suck (pass me that pacifier). And he’s a Doctor, so he must be right.

Right?

Sama xx

The Frank Diaries: Out of The Fog

I have logged on to finish this blog post so many times now, I’ve been that close to scrapping it altogether and writing about something totally different. I wasn’t exactly a regular blogger to begin with, but now I have a young baby who fights sleep all day long unless it’s on me, it’s become even more difficult to find the time to get online. Ok, let me rephrase that. I spend all day online. On my phone. One handed whilst breastfeeding/cuddling/housing a sleeping baby. But it’s become even more difficult to sit at a laptop and type. Is there a machine that will allow me to dictate future blog posts, I wonder? There should be.

What I originally set out to write about was the torrid time I had in those first few weeks. Reading this post back to myself, it now seems incredibly bleak, and, I’m pleased to say, out of date. Nearly 10 weeks in, we’re well out of the fog and I’m very much enjoying my beautiful, stubborn, funny baby and starting to enjoy the monotonous repetitive simple existence that is maternity leave postpartum. But I’m going to share it anyway. As is the way with this blog, my witterings serve not only as a permanent reminder for myself (and a good form of contraception when I start to think I could handle a second child), but hopefully as something for other shell-shocked, grieving, exhausted new mums to relate to.

So anyway. Here it is.

The First Two Weeks

I vividly remember what a close friend (and now mum to two beautiful babies) once told me when I asked how it was going after her first child was born. She said: “The only way I can describe it is devastating. Our life has been devastated.” I think there may even have been tears in her eyes as she said it. (Or I could hear it in her voice- I can’t actually remember if this was by phone call or face to face.)

Either way, the emotion behind and the conviction with which she said this simple statement really did take me by surprise. At this point I didn’t have many friends with babies, so my contact with new mums had gone little beyond a congratulatory card in the post, followed perhaps by a “Hey! Sprog is gorgeous. How’s it all going?” text several weeks later.

As I’m sure many of you can relate to, my Facebook feed these days is full of baby-related status’ (amongst the Buzzfeed articles and cat compilation videos). Proud arrival announcements, babies dressed as pumpkins/Christmas puddings/Easter bunnies depending on the time of year, selfies of mum and baby in bed together, all traces of exhaustion masked by a carefully selected Instagram filter (ahem, guilty). Prior to having my own baby I was led to believe that giving birth was horrendous and that sleep deprivation would be a killer, but that it would all be worth it because once he was here I would realise what true love really felt like, unicorns would sing, and life as I knew it would be complete.

I’ll be honest, the first two weeks with Frank were horrible. HORRIBLE. Whilst there were moments when I’d stare in wonder and bewilderment at this tiny person I’d created (usually when he was asleep), and tentatively whisper “I love you, Frank”, hoping that I meant it, the vast majority of the time I was experiencing one or several of the following emotions:

fear

Arriving home from the hospital I just remember feeling scared. Scared of the night ahead without professional support, scared of Frank, scared of the next time he’d want to feed (breastfeeding was excruciatingly painful before I discovered nipple shields, but that’s a whole other story), even scared of my much-loved home that now felt totally alien due to this strange creature we’d just brought in to it.

grief

Paul and I were shell-shocked. We were exhausted. Nothing was the same and everything was different. The life that we had spent ten years building together, the daily routines we’d established, the evenings we’d under-appreciated and the simple things that made us happy… gone. Those first few days were largely spent mourning our freedom and old life. And this made us both immensely sad. One evening I vividly remember gripping his hand tightly and whispering “I want to go back”. And meaning it. Which of course leads to…

guilt

How could I be mourning our old life? How could I even be contemplating a desire to go back and not get pregnant? It’s what I had so desperately wanted and struggled to get. It’s what thousands of women across the globe desperately want and struggle to have. Paul and I had created a life, a little miracle, yet in those early days I genuinely believed we’d made a ginormous mistake. And don’t even get me started on Lenny. Our ginger fur ball, our ‘first-borne son’ as Paul affectionately calls him, who was completely freaked out and all but disappeared in those first few days. Several times I would seek him out in a lonely corner of our house, bury my wet, snotty face in his fur and whisper “I’m sorry, Lenny, we still love you, don’t hate us”.

exhaustion

You don’t know what true exhaustion is unless you’ve made it to the final interrogation stages of SAS: Who Dares Wins, or you’ve just had a baby. In the 62 hours between going in to early labour and leaving hospital I think I got about 3 hours sleep. Once home, I was lucky to get 2-3 hours of broken Z’s a night for the first week. Physically, you can deal with it; the adrenaline somehow keeps you going. But it’s the mental exhaustion that’s the killer. That’s what had me in tears multiple times a day for a reason I couldn’t even begin to understand or articulate.

lonliness

Due to Paul’s job, he was only able to take a week off work, and before I knew it he was kissing me goodbye at 8am on a Monday morning and shutting the front door behind him, leaving me…and Frank. After the initial what the hell do I do now panic, we’d somehow make our way downstairs and set up camp on the sofa. And there we would remain for the majority of the day.

My favourite time of day, a moment of calm and respite, was late morning. Frank would either be feeding or asleep on me, tea and biscuits would have been consumed, Facebook/Instagram/Bloglovin’ scoured, Holly and Phil’s friendly, familiar faces on the tellybox. Despite the severe lack of sleep, this was cosy and comforting and quite nice.

I was also lucky enough to have someone pop in nearly every day- whether it was my Mum, Paul’s mum, a close friend or even the midwife. I wasn’t good company of course- more often than not I would just cry and talk about how bleak life had become and how much I wasn’t enjoying it- but the support was there, and for that I will always be so, so grateful.

But, by heck, those first couple of weeks were lonely.

misery

What you get when you combine all the above. The ‘Baby Blues’ as they like to call it. There’s no doubt about it, for the first two weeks I was seriously glum.

Glum. (But definitely enjoying sofa snuggles.)

8 days old and doing his best Mr Burns from The Simpsons impression.

The calm after the ‘hysterics at 3am’ storm.

Things didn’t suddenly get better once we entered week three, but it was at this point that I realised I had to snap out of my misery and self pity, and began to see the woods for the trees. (I have no idea what that phrase means, but I think it’s contextually accurate.) Feeding had become infinitely better, I was getting more like 4 hours of broken sleep a night which was meagre but manageable, Frank and I had established some sort of daytime routine, and- wait for it- I was getting out and about, even if it was just to walk down to the corner shop to buy yet another pack of bourbon biscuits.

Much has happened between now and then. We’ve had the dreaded ‘colic’, on-going jaundice, dabbles with cranial osteopathy, a bout of mastitis, and a tongue tie division (and subsequent regrowth). I may well go back and expand on some of these events at some point, but given the time it’s taken me to share this particular passage of time, I wouldn’t hold your breath.

In the meantime, I want to say to any new mums what I was told again and again in those early weeks.

It does get better.

Infinitely better, in fact. He will still frequently and inexplicably scream the house down, his sleep is seriously questionable and I worry every day that I’m not doing this parenting lark very well. My breasts are unrecognisable, Paul and I get infuriated with each other far more often than we used to, and I still miss my independence immensely.

But I can now say that I am well and truly, head over heels in love with my little boy. I mean… look at him!

Calendar pose.

Til next time…

Sama xx

The Frank Diaries: His Arrival

I have given birth.

The majority of you will know this already due to my social media updates, but if you’re an occasional blog reader, you may have been wondering why it’s all gone a bit quiet about these parts of late.

Life has changed.

Meet Frank.

Four weeks old today, Master Frank William Hemsley is entirely responsible for my radio silence. I’ve been attempting to write this blog post since the week after his arrival but have just managed a paragraph here and there before he’s required my attention again, or I’ve chosen sleep instead, or more visitors have arrived, or I’ve just decided to stare at his face in total and utter shell shock.

I want to talk and talk. I want to go in to vivid detail about the first few days, about our feeding dramas, the baby blues, the devastation that is severe sleep deprivation, the endless googling, and, of course, the moments of stupendous awe and wonder that wash over me when he’s asleep on my chest, or clasping my finger, or gurgling away happily in his daddy’s arms. And I will… in time. Hence why I’ve started The Frank Diaries. Entries might be super short- just a little snippet of life with Frank I feel compelled to share in a spare moment. Or they might be a little longer, written over a few days or weeks as this post has.

Many of you may not be interested in baby stuff, but life with a newborn is all-consuming so I’m afraid I’m finding it rather hard to focus on anything else at the moment! I have wedding updates from Jennie and Paris to share, as well as Part 2 of my Utterly Wow 2015 Season post… but I’m hoping for now you will indulge me and my need to talk baby.

But first… his birth story.

A couple of days before…

At my 39 week midwife appointment I asked for a membrane sweep. I wasn’t desperate to have him then and there but I really didn’t want to be two weeks late and hoped the sweep would just move things along a little bit. After 2 minutes of painful prodding and poking up there, my nice midwife peeled off her gloves with a shake of her head. My cervix was high and to the side- which meant it didn’t look like labour was imminent. I thanked her anyway for inflicting such pain upon me unnecessarily (although I had noone to blame but myself), and gingerly went about my day.

At 1.30am that night I woke up in some discomfort. After going for a wee, I got back in to bed and the back ache began. Two hours of ouch ouch OUCH surges that felt almost on top of each other and had me lying awake wondering if this was the start of something. At 3.30am I downloaded a contractions app, crept downstairs to a dark living room and began timing. They were roughly every 8 or 9 minutes lasting about 40 seconds each. Painful, but bearable. At around 6.45am I took my oblivious husband a coffee and informed him that I believed I was in early labour. Ever the gallant knight, he leapt out of bed to get me some paracetamol, propped me up in bed with supportive pillows, and finished packing the hospital bag in preparation for our imminent departure.

Ah, who am I kidding? Bleary-eyed and just a little bit dubious, he questioned my claims, thanked me sarcastically for having an early sweep when he’d wanted me to wait it out, and asked if he could go in to work still as he had an important meeting. Of course, I knew from friends’ experiences and reading too many online birth stories that early labour can take hours and even days, so I allowed him to leave me on the condition that he’d come home immediately if things ramped up. As such he didn’t need to. The contractions continued steadily all day and he arrived home at 5pm to find me bent over the birthing ball with a TENS machine attached to my back like a total cliché. By this point the contractions were every 2-4 minutes lasting a minute each, so on my third pleading phone call to the hospital, they allowed us to make our way in to be assessed.

After a lengthy wait in triage due to a lady giving birth in the corridor toilet outside our room (!), a nice but somewhat distracted midwife told me I was 2-3cm dilated- not enough to stay at the hospital, much to my despair. Back home we went in a car journey from hell, with the instruction to have some dinner and a bath and they would see me back at the hospital later on that night, they were sure. Contractions had really ramped up by this point, and after managing a couple of mouthfuls of rice whilst bent over the birthing ball (I avoided the chilli as really didn’t want to see it make an unwelcome reappearance later on), I waddled to the loo only to discover I had begun bleeding quite heavily. We were back at the hospital within an hour and a half.

The bleeding was a concern so at 3-4cm dilated they allowed me to stay, this time hooked up to a machine so they could monitor baby’s heart rate and the contractions which, by now, were excruciating. It’s worth pointing out that Paul had truly stepped into his gallant knight shoes by this point and upon my very un lady-like commands was leaping up to furiously knead my lower back as each surge swept in. Birth partner brownie points to him.

About 9.30pm we were told a room was ready for me in Delivery Suite and I waddled round, clinging on to Paul for dear life. “And this is the room you’ll be having your baby”, declared a young, smiley midwife, as she showed us in to a vast, clinical and totally unremarkable hospital room. I thanked her anyway (I was half expecting her to reveal the ‘room rate’ next, Four In A Bed stylee), and veered straight for the nearest piece of furniture I could bend over.

My birthing midwife arrived and introduced herself at this point, and I found myself begging for pain relief, to which she completely flummoxed me by saying “Sure, what would you like? Epidural? Pethadine? Gas and air?”. For some reason I thought an epidural would only be offered when I was in the throes of active labour or when I’d exhausted every other possibility, but my ability to think rationally or decisively had, by this point, completely vanished. I looked bewilderedly at Paul who suggested I start with gas and air which the midwife proceeded to get ready for me.

Still standing (I think- it all becomes a bit of a blur at this point), with the next contraction came an extreme pressure down below. Having watched way too many episodes of One Born Every Minute, I knew this was something I should make the midwife aware of, who seemed intrigued by this announcement and told me to get on the bed so she could assess me. “Do you want the good news?” she asked, after a few seconds of poking and stretching, “you’re 10cm dilated.”

I genuinely don’t think I have ever been as shocked in my entire life, and my response (something along the lines of: “SHUT THE F**K UP”) I suspect conveyed this. To have gone from 4cm to 10cm in around 40 minutes went some way to explaining why I’d been bleeding so heavily, but having glanced at the clock when we came in the room and thinking I would most likely be labouring all night, I couldn’t believe that it was time to push and that it was very possible I’d be giving birth THAT DAY.

The next and final half an hour is a little more difficult to recollect, as by now I was sucking furiously on the gas and air and speaking mainly gobbledygook. What I do know is as follows:

• The midwife briefly disappeared (presumably to get ready for the pushing stage) and whilst Paul tried to understand my attempts at gas and air fuelled communication, we became aware of an alarm sound that was coming from the heart rate machine and steadily getting louder.
• Paul popped his head out in to the corridor to alert someone, and within minutes a swarm of doctors, nurses and whoever else was passing by (or so it felt like) were in the room, wheeling in various bits of machinery and talking at me urgently.
• I heard “baby’s heart rate” and “forceps delivery”. I also heard my name lots. One woman raised the stirrups next to the bed and put my legs in them; another callously ripped the tube from my mouth that was feeding me the blissful high and told me to hold on to the bed handles instead.
• I briefly caught glimpse of the ginormous forceps and instantly wished I hadn’t.
• When it was time to push- “In to your bottom, Sama, like you’re doing a big poo“- I got way too het up about the technicalities. “Like I’m actually trying to push out a poo? What if I do poo? I don’t want to poo!”
• My fear of unwittingly releasing my bowels in front of an entire medical team meant the first three pushes I did were pathetic. I knew they were pathetic at the time, and yet I did them anyway. I effectively just tensed my stomach and groaned for effect. The doctors weren’t impressed and at this point starting shouting at me.
• Realising it was actually quite urgent, and with the numbing effects of the gas and air fading away, I pushed properly and I pushed long and hard. With shouts of encouragement from everyone around me, and a doctor pulling on the forceps as hard as she could (I swear she was pushing against the bed with her foot), his head crowned and a baby’s cry filled the air which was simultaneously surreal, terrifying and wonderful.
• Cue a very surreal minute as we waited for the next and final contraction: me, so grateful and relieved the hard part was over, Paul, glancing down to look at his first borne’s head and seeing a view of his wife he would never be able to unsee.

And with a final push this little purple alien was pulled out of me and plonked on my chest, crying as loud and as hard as he possibly could. Due to the forceps and the speed in which he must have been forced down my birth canal, he looked completely bashed up. I’d like to say I felt instant love but it wasn’t like that. I felt a connection, no doubt about that, but the main feeling I had was that of shock and bewilderment. He was here. This was my son. This was Frank.

Holy shitballs.

Minutes old.

16 hours old and fresh out of the boxing ring.

‘Til the next time I make it to the laptop…

Sama xxx