I will spare you the goriest of gory details as many of you know them already. To nutshell it there was a long labour, a cord around a baby’s neck and a last minute caesarean. Before we had a chance to get acquainted he was whisked off to Intensive Care to ‘get checked over’ and it wasn’t until the next morning that he was wheeled in to be introduced to his Mummy, as I was tucking into a breakfast of sausage, egg and morphine (not a tongue salad in sight). It was only then that I realised what a scary business it had been- had the caesarean been two minutes later he wouldn’t have made it- but whilst I was being kept in the dark the little guy was fighting hard and being very well looked after and he made a full recovery within his first day of his life.
Furthermore there were no ginger suspicions at the time of birth since Baby Brother (BB) has such a lot of dark hair that it can be worn in a number of styles (I know this from experimentation- three days is a long time to be in hospital) and he looks as much like his Daddy as The Ginger Prince looked like me when he was unceremoniously slapped onto my chest three years ago in a very different kind of introduction. The recovery from the caesarean has been better than I imagined and I was up and about the following day and thereafter spent three days in hospital, pottering about in my horrible post-surgery hospital socks (forced to wear 24/7), reading magazines and being waited on hand and foot, whilst BB was wheeled in and out in his large Tupperware container.
The spark of interest that The Ginger Prince showed in his Baby Brother whilst he was in hospital vanished when we got home and he saw that the little guy was here for good. Questions like “Can I get his blanket for him, Mummy?” were replaced with “Can we take him back?”, “Is he naughty?” and, worse still, “Is he a poo-poo head?”. In between these cheerfully framed questions were magnificent tantrums over bizarre things like being offered the wrong kind of spoon. These were the dark days but fortunately they didn’t last long and over the past six weeks TGP has been through every kind of emotion imaginable and has come out feeling and acting a bit like a big brother, most of the time, which we are all relieved about.
I, too, have tumbled through a few different feelings but am finally adjusting to having two munchkins, to the fact that TGP now looks enormous and to the fact that it takes me at least an hour and a half to get us all ready to go out. I cannot, however, adjust to dealing with Discovery Healthcare, our insurance company, who tried to refuse to pay for the emergency caesarean because they claimed I planned it secretly in spite of the fact that I went into labour naturally, had a midwife and had letters from the hospital saying it was a life-saving emergency with no alternative (PMB). Two weeks after the birth both me and AA suffered from repeated bouts of Telephone Rage which were unhelpful to everyone. They may have borne the brunt of my disrupted hormones but I think they brought it on themselves. One call was a record two hours of denial and disbelief. You will be pleased to know that they did pay up in the end, but only after we got a consultant involved. We were told from a couple of sources that they try to think of any excuse and hope you give up. If you are on this blog because you typed “Discovery Healthcare” and “Telephone Rage” into google then email me- we can loath them together. Not really, you should simply get over it, just as I so obviously have!
On a more positive note BB is very, very, very cute and we are lucky to have him. And as you know new mothers are never biased. He may even turn out to have ginger persuasions after all - not of the TGP variety, more of an auburn hue going on around his dark hair, a touch of the Terry Wogans. We shall see.
Either way he fits into our family perfectly, and I think we’re going to keep him.
Baby Brother's foot- cute
My hospital socks- not so cute!
