*edited to add: it’s taken me three days to write this post. Free time is a valuable commodity all of a sudden.*

As I sit and type this, my sweet little baby snoozes contentedly by me whilst the four hundred and fourteenth load of laundry spins around in the machine. Yes, we made it through the first two weeks. Numerous people warned how rough the first fortnight would likely be, but only experience has *really* revealed the truth behind this statement as it has been the sort of rough that was really quite unimaginable unless you’ve lived through it to tell the tale. As if recovering from the marathon of labour and delivery isn’t enough on it’s own, there is the whole issue of sleep deprivation to contend with too. Anyone who doesn’t believe that sleep deprivation is torture, I challenge you to look after a newborn and see how you like it, or if you’ve done that before, I offer you a refresher course just to remind you how hard it is, and hey you don’t even have the birth to recover from so consider it the easy route. As I keep pointing out, Oliver is a really, really good baby, and his demands are really quite minimal. His cries are different and distinctive and usually relate to two basic things. He sobs when he is hungry, and his shrieks can be heard all over the house and across the neighbouring counties whenever his diaper is wet. Except for when he’s hungry. Even at two weeks the boy has his priorities. My only complaint is that he is at his most active between midnight and 4am, but I can hardly hold that against him. He’s only seen daylight 14 times after all.

For me, the past couple of weeks have been a bit rough but as if by magic, things got a whole lot better today. Although the whole labour and birth thing was relatively straightforward (except for it being back- labour), it all went a bit pearshaped after that. It’s ironic really- I managed 17 hours of back labour with no pain relief whatsoever (just a yoga breathing technique) but then after 11 minutes of people yelling PUSH and him coming out, I end up on a pretty strong cocktail of painkillers including a shot of morphine in my back side. Yes, the whole process of childbirth was mild compared to the pain that came afterwards that left me writhing and screaming, begging for something, anything to take the pain away, even an epidural, or otherwise I really would have preferred to die. At the time they thought that I might have fractured my coccyx giving birth, but now it looks like I aggravated an old injury and the swelling that followed delivery was the thing that tipped me over the edge. This is cutting a very long story short of course, for there was also the severe blood loss (more than double the norm during delivery and more after) and associated anaemia, and the deep purple bruising that covered my entire back side and partially down my thighs that had been ‘rarely seen before’ (to quote my midwife) that warrants a follow-up appointment at two weeks post-hospital-discharge instead of four-to-six. Add to that the complete breakdown in the functioning of any of my inner workings between my waist and knees, plus the sleep deprivation and it all made for quite an ugly past couple of weeks. Reflecting back on it, it seems more and more apparent that childbirth has to be one of nature’s biggest jokes. Birth takes an awful lot out of you and it’s the perfect example of a situation where the best recuperation ever would be to lie in bed and sleep for hours. But no. Nature doesn’t allow that. Babies need to be fed. The sleep deprivation was probably the hardest bit of all. Except for that pain bit after he was born. Oh the pain. Even the morphine didn’t stop it, but it did make me sleepy. I will perhaps document the whole birth story at some point, but right now I’m tired of re-living it each time I have to go to the bathroom, so it’s going to have to wait for a moment where I’m feeling mentally strong

DrMrNin has been great of course, and having my parents here has been fabulous. I don’t know how I would have got through it without them. xx