Shit Happens...in-it

I remember when it was just Barnaby and I, the first few months had been marked out with all ‘the firsts’. Not the first smile, but the first bloody difficult unaided task – like fitting the car seat in with a screaming baby, or going swimming, or taking on the endless steps at the train station with the pram. I would tend to dread the challenge ahead of time, and then it would either go swimmingly well, or so spectacularly badly that any future recurrence would seem relatively easy. Second and third times would be child’s play, relatively.

Now there were two of them, the first 'first' that stands out in my mind was bath and bedtime with Alex away.

Barnaby seemed to recognise my sense of challenge when we returned home from nursery. In fact for once he was looking forward to it, and rather than a battle to get his clothes off, he whipped them all off in seconds unprompted in a determined effort to get in the bath first before a naked leg kicking Harriet followed.

It must have been a Wednesday, because the white tiled floor in the bathroom was exactly that, a tell tail sign that our cleaner had been, and our lovely Missoni bath mat, bought as a wedding present, had just been washed and was drying over the bath. With one arm clasping Harriet in the nook of my elbow, and Barnaby ahead of me, I pulled at the bathmat and dropped it on the floor, straightening it with my foot. It was at the point when the eruption happened.

Shit happened actually. Quite literally.

I don’t know if it was the sound, smell or touch that caught my attention first, but I quickly worked out that the machine gun mustard fire was coming from Harriet, and the bathroom and my body were very much in the line of fire. Instinctively, I straightened out my arms and held her away from me, inadvertently putting Barnaby in jeopardy below. Within seconds, pellets of bright yellow pooh treacled down his blond sun bleached hair, spraying his arm, tummy and leg, and splattering his face just below his eye. For a moment I was frozen to the spot, as if waiting for the firework display to come to an end.

When all was still, there was a split second where I tried to work out what to do first. Reaching for some toilet roll with my right hand I had to decide whether to clean the slippery bathroom floor and mat; myself; Harriet, or Barnaby first. In the end, my self-preservation instinct triumphed over my maternal one, as I cleaned myself up first, then moving swiftly onto Harriet’s bottom so that I could place her on her blue deck chair in the bath water. Finally I turned to Barnaby who was still obediently frozen is some kind of ‘urghhhh’ shock, his eyes fortunately glued to the mess on his tummy and leg, seemingly unaware that his left ear hole was completely filled with yellow liquid, nor did he have a clue that yellow splatter marked his face and hair alike. I wiped the areas he could see and got him into the bath opposite the perpetrator. Sitting there he looked at me, and back at Harriet and together we burst out laughing.

“Harriet’s pooed all over us mummy, and it’s sooo yucky!”

It’s pretty funny isn’t it” I replied, at the same time taking the flannel to his face, and reaching for the orange plastic tea set to pour water over the sheen of pooh on his hair and in his ear.

“It’s not hair wash night mummy. Stopppp!”

“That’s funny too, isn’t it” I replied – now shaking his mucky hair with my hand to try my best to get it out, but stopping shy of provoking a battle with the shampoo. Harriet is beaming back at Barnaby from the other side of our rather tiny bath, delighted by the release.

And I wondered then if Kate Middleton had been splattered with mustard coloured pooh yet.

The one NCT class that I have always remembered is the one where Cathy recounted an anecdote with the vivid lesson that you should never leave a baby in the bath alone, whatever cradle or deck chair you have them in. With thanks to her near miss story, it’s one of the few rules I have not broken, together with the Madeleine rule that Crime Watch reminded me of last week.

Scooping Harriet in her white eared towel, I decide that Barnaby however was now big and confident enough for the rule to no longer apply to him. But his desire for constant social interaction led me to return to our cramped chaotic bathroom with Harriet. I closed the toilet lid, crossed my legs and began breast feeding her. Splash and Barnaby’s incessant chatter bounced off the walls and led to a pretty unsuccessful last feed, and of course a win for Barnaby in his attempt to get Harriet to smile at him, whilst she should be concentrating on feeding. This staging would not be repeated in future, but nevertheless, by 7.15, a near record in our household – the two were in bed content and more importantly quiet. I trundled downstairs to discover we had run out Gin and Tonic. I’d be more prepared and at ease on both counts the next time.

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In September we reduced Barnaby’s nursery hours to 3 days per week. It was something that I always felt we should do, and I’d felt guilty that I hadn’t done it sooner. I know countless mothers (not least my sister) who seem to breeze through summer holidays and those times where you have your 2+, 3+ kids around your feet, and entertaining them appears effortless to an outsider. Not for me though, or so I had forecast on the day before the honeymoon period ended, when it had just been me and Harriet. And I guess a sense of fear had dawned on me on that car journey home from our blissful holiday in Cornwall. It was the fear of entertaining my toddler full time for 2 extra days per week, when he’d been used to a full time diet of structured stimulation at nursery. Harriet and I were on the precipice of peace, simplicity and relaxation and I knew that the other side would be filled with noise, classes, Harriet neglect, and that killer comment from Barnaby:

“Mummy, I’m bored, where are all my friends?”

Along with the prospect of interrupting my relatively easy rhythm with Harriet, was the deep seated fear that I might not cut it with Barnaby as a mum, or Alex as a wife, when he would come home to find a messy house and no food prepared. My brain especially would be out of its comfort zone - addicted to a manic working environment pre maternity leave – jumping from dealing with my
Outlook inbox, to crisis phone calls from my team out in the field, to preparing to deliver a presentation to a large audience, laptop and iPhone hovering under my finger tips, blurting out noises to signal an update or overdue meeting. Switching my iPhone to silent mode and truly putting it down in order to spend hours of concentrated playing, and tuning my mind to toddler chatter for 13 hours per day is one of the most challenging things I’ve had to do in my thirties. I didn’t anticipate then, that I would have an infinite urge to correct his speech, which I would blame equally on the irregular verbs that clutter the English language and on Barnaby’s key workers at nursery – most of whom seem to stem from Croydon and have pretty useless English - slightly aggravating given the extortionate fees they charge, init!

“Today we was playing a lot in the garden, wasn’t we Barnaby, and we done some writing practise”.

ALMOST £90 A DAY FOR THAT SUMMARY, THANK YOU PUTNEY!”

Anyway, I digress. So it was the car journey home from Cornwall, devoid of a plan of structured entertainment for Barnaby for the next day, coupled with a desire to make the most out of London before we say goodbye to it - when I came up with the ambitious and stress busting plan to arrange a trip to the Horniman museum in South East London for our first Monday together in the new regime.

Tomorrow I’ll pen the story of that ill-fated trip and I’ll keep The Surgeon story buried for another week, as Harriet and I have only just returned to a decent sleep pattern at night (hence blog gap), and so not ready to evocatively re-open that wound just yet.

C Section and the happiest moment

We arrived at Kingston Maternity Wing at 10 am on Monday 10th June with no contractions and no stress.

I felt a bit like an imposter, walking unaided to the reception desk, not stooping over clutching my back, not in agony, not wondering how long labour would last. I carried my overnight bag over my shoulder laden down with that day's newspaper, a fat copy of Vanity Fair magazine, as well as the essentials for a 3 day stay in hospital. It would be a completely different experience to the 5 day ordeal of natural labour to introduce Barnaby to the world.

Just 35 minutes before the delivery, I had entered theatre with my iphone glued to my right ear as I took our first booking for our yet to be completed Cornwall house. I relayed the pre-booking to Alex excitedly, as I bent on my side in a foetal position on the bed, whilst a huge giant of a man called Jack inserted a needle into my back to deliver the epidural. And not for the first time I wondered why I hadn't opted for this magic numbing liquid the first time round.

The worst bit of the whole procedure was just inserting the catheter into the top of my hand. I remembered it really hurt with Barnaby, but I had so many other pain triggers and exhaustion to contend with, that it got lost in the mire. For those who haven’t and will never have a Caesarean Section, it is very hard to describe the feeling and sensation other than to assure that it doesn’t hurt and it’s incredibly quick.

Dressed in blue scrubs, Alex was at my head end (of course), together with the anaesthetist and his junior, and 3 others whose role I couldn’t confirm. I looked above to the ceiling and in front to a blue curtain which hung above me and dropped down to just below my chest, leaving me with my breasts which I cupped with my hands, not sure of what else to do except to flex my hand which was still irritated by the catheter. If that’s the worst pain, then this is a synch, I thought.

For the first 15 to 20 mins after the epidural, the anaesthetist had sprayed my body from my feet to my chest with an icy compound to check the function of the drug. On my left hand side, I could tell the epidural was working well, but on the right hand side, the numbness stopped mid-way up my body. Like with all medical procedures, I started to doubt myself as to which was the right answer when asked.

"What do you feel? What do you feel now?"

“Air, cold liquid, nothing” were my answers.

The Consultant Obstetrician arrived just 5 minutes before delivery and left shortly after, to cross the corridor to the other operating theatre where they were tag teaming deliveries that morning to catch up on their schedule.

Everyone involved in the procedure had read my notes, and so the small talk of choice was:

“so what’s going to be done about the aneurysm?"

At least it gave me an identity, I had reflected, in this ‘one born every minute’ maternity ward conveyor belt. The other question was of course

“Do you know if it's a boy or girl?"

To which I had replied “not really, but we’re both convinced it is going to be another boy”.

Only Barnaby would be proved right.

There was no sense of pain as the Doctor and midwives prepared to pull out our second born. I could sense a fair amount of ‘shoving’ going on, which climaxed with the sensation that all of my internal organs seemed to be shoved up towards my breasts which I was still clinging onto. Just as I was beginning to get concerned with this crescendo of activity, I heard a baby’s cry, and saw a tiny bundle covered in white gunge, held aloft the blue curtain.

"Do you want to see what you've got" the mid wife said.

The next words were from Alex:

"It's a girl!" he exclaimed, and a huge smile lit up both our faces.

It was a complete shock, and I think this was the happiest moment that I have ever felt. And the sense of wonder and joy, that had been absent during my second pregnancy, instantly came coursing back, like a shot of adrenaline into my heart.

Of course the day we got married, and the birth of Barnaby, were extremely happy occasions: but the wedding was spread over a period of a day, and when Barnaby was born, as happy as I was when he latched onto me, I was quite delirious with exhaustion and pain. Whereas, when Harriet arrived, just 35 minutes after entering the operating theatre, I couldn’t have been more lucid, more shocked that it was a little girl, and more appreciative that she appeared so perfectly well, after the assault course of MRI’s that she had joined me for.

The night before, Barnaby had gone for a sleep- over at his best friend’s house, and as my head had hit the pillow at our home in Putney, I had looked up next to Alex and said

“A healthy girl with brown eyes please”.

Her eyes were blue at birth, but no matter, like the rest of her tiny features they were gorgeous, her cry already seldom and I felt an instant protective bond. I couldn’t have felt more blessed, and a summer of great sport, sunshine and family happiness would follow.

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I write this blog from the same buzzing café in Putney that I wrote my blog for 5 continuous days in the hormone laden week preceeding Harriet’s birth. Today, Harriet sleeps beside me in her slightly tatty blue Bugaboo pram, satiated from a good slurp of milk post 16 week vaccination at the clinic opposite, fuss free as usual.

I reflect that I feel completely relaxed on each day when it is just Harriet and I. Maternity leave on these days truely feels like a holiday and her mellow nature is contagious. My heart is full with the sense that we have been blessed with our hilarious, demanding and happy Barnaby, and his smiling, placid sister. But all the while in the background I have the thought of saying goodbye to my family ahead of the impending operation that I need. By the time I get the aneurysm dealt with, it will likely be fully 12 months since it was first accurately diagnosed and I became aware of a 3cm diameter time bomb in my neck. I long to get it over with, and return to this café to describe the moment of emotional relief when I wake up from the operation and realise the surgery had gone to plan. I pray for that moment and hope that it will come soon. In the intervening days, weeks and months, I will continue to bury thoughts of the alternative scenarios in a pocket deep in my mind.

“The Surgeon” up next, when Harriet’s lunch time sleep, and a day at nursery for Barnaby next permits.