baybeasts

Friday was the follow-up ultrasound on Loey’s hip. We were hopeful - particularly bean, who has done such a lot of time over the last six weeks with him in a sling that puts his legs in a similar position to the brace (I would have too but there was something in the way!). But our hopes were dashed - the ultrasound showed no improvement at all. So Loey is now in a Denis Browne splint, and will be for at least the next three months.

It’s not so bad - it can come off for an hour a day for baths, and he can still fit in the sling and the pram and the carseat, which is a relief. And it has the unexpected side benefit of making it easier for him to sit unassisted - something he has been working on very hard for the last month. It will put a bit of a dent in his pre-crawling activities though, which has been his other big physical project lately. And nights have been worse than ever (for bean - Huey and I are sleeping in the bungalow, because there is no point in both of us being cactus) with ten minutely wakeups and a lot of crying. Hopefully he will get used to it though.

Loey’s four months old now, and such a complex mix already of very intense and very joyful. He is constantly learning - his eyes wide, pushing himself forward in space, desperate to get on the move. He talks to us all the time, often with gorgeous coos and bubbles, but also often with pterodactal screams that shatter our ears but seem to give him a lot of pleasure. His life has changed since Huey in ways that he doesn’t understand - we are no longer both able to give him 100% of our attention and I think he is feeling that. But he is tentatively interested in Huey, kind of like he is interested in the chickens and the cat - every now and then he will stare at him intently. It’s very cute. We don’t want to wish Huey’s newborn gorgeousness away, but at the same time, we are very excited about their potential as brothers to play with each other.

It’s hard to find time to post (this has been in draft since saturday) but we will do one about Huey soon too. He is just divine…

I still can’t believe she hid 3.5kg in that small tummy. She is feeling pretty cocky - Huey weighed 15gm more than Loey. What’s that? A potato chip? Anyway, S wins!

We are unbelievably lucky to have such good friends around us at this point in our lives. We have been kept in food and delightful company all week, and this time around, the babymoon is actually enjoyable! (thanks everyone!) A friend commented today about how relaxed I seemed, and I realised how scared I had been of having another baby as unsettled as Loey. So far, Huey is a completely different baby. A textbook baby. He feeds and sleeps and sometimes squeaks if we do something not quite right. He wees when the nappy comes off and he stays asleep even if you move him or make a loud noise. It is giving us a chance to recover from the labour and birth and gear up for more tricky times to come… (thanks huey).

We are still pinching ourselves over the mind boggling gorgeousness of our boys (we’re not biased at all). Please note in the first photo, the gorgeousness-enhancing effect of the little outfits that were hand sewn for us by the girls over at enough grows. Thanks goils… You and your charming embryo are in our thoughts…

Then please turn and admire the birthday cake that I somehow managed to rustle up after we had been home from hospital for all of a day. We had a cake for Loey, so it seemed only fair!
(happy birthday huey).

We will write about the labour ordeal at some point. Suffice it to say it was even worse than my labour, with the added complication of a 4 month old in tow. We had two amazing friends working in shifts minding him, and I popped in and out to feed and cuddle him.

Once again, we had no sleep for 48 hours, and were completely delirious for a day, but now that we have had a little sleep we are feeling quite good. The ‘hit over the head with a frypan’ thing that happens to most of us the first time around does not seem to be happening again. thank god.

It is brilliant to have been able to bring them home from hospital so quickly. I felt heartbroken when I had to spend that first night away from them.

My two sons…

We are thrilled to be able to tell you that b2 has a new name… Huey! He was born yesterday by emergency caesarean section - Saturday 10th November at 6.38am after a long and difficult labour . He is a very spunky little blondie! Weight 3485gm (7lb 11oz), which is about the same weight as Loey was at birth.

S and Huey are both well - so well that we are now all home, just over 24 hours later…

Here he is just one hour old!

In hospital

Just home from hospital

So here we are. One day past due day. I took a photo yesterday for posterity:

Surely it must come soon?

These last few weeks with just Loey seem very precious. At the same time as we are both desperate (and I mean DESPERATE) to meet tootle, we are also devoting a lot of love and attention to Loey, with a slight sense of sadness about how that attention will drop off as soon as tootle is born. This is, of course, common to all parents of two children, and we do know that Loey will be just fine - that in the long run it will be fantastic for him to have a sibling so close in age.

He has been rewarding us by being delightful in every way possible (except for sleep, which is as tricky as ever). When he catches my eye, he smiles with this surprised, joyful expression that never fails to melt me. His smile involves his whole body - the tongue quivers, the eyes widen and then crinkle, the arms are brought into the chest and the whole body wriggles with glee. It’s magic. Sometimes he will smile at himself in the mirror, and we are nearly wetting ourselves as we anticipate him smiling at tootle when he or she deigns to make an appearance.

He has just started laughing as well, especially when we sing to him and make him do the actions. We’ve finally started singing him baby songs as well as eighties classics - I’m a little teapot, Incy Wincy Spider and so on. Sometimes when we sing to him I could swear that he is trying to sing too - he moves his mouth and makes little cooing noises and smiles madly.

He’s talking to us a lot - even his cries seem to have changed into a more conversational tone, like “I’m really pissed off here, what are you going to do about it?” rather than “wah”. He has these long, reciprocal conversations with us where he coos and ahhs and then waits for our response. For example, last night he spent a good five minutes telling bean about his day before he would settle in for a feed and sleep.

His physical development is racing along too. Bean started the sitting up game with him - when he is lying down, we hold his hands and say ’sitting up’ and he lifts his head and shoulders and basically gets himself into a sitting position by pulling up against the hands with very little input from us. He has discovered his penis - we wondered a lot whether we should blog this but it is really so impressive that it is worth recording. It’s making nappy change time interesting! He has got so strong that we no longer wrap him, not even at night - there is just no point because he breaks out of it too quickly. We’ve decided that he is teething - it’s a very convenient excuse for many things, including the bad nights. But it is incontrovertibly true that he is drooling like a cartoon predator, pulling at his ear, and chewing hard and long on anything he can get into his mouth. Apparently this can all go on for months before we actually see a tooth though.

Some things haven’t changed - he still likes to sleep upright with movement best of all, and the new sling has been brilliant for this. He is still ridiculously pretty. He still wakes up about every hour after midnight. And we are still completely, and utterly, besotted.

we cannot tell you how excited this news makes us.