NotSheep

I think we’re boring him…

He - to be known here as Louie - certainly likes to sleep. I’d worry, but he’s bright and alert when awake. I’d read how some babies slept many hours a day, but I always thought they were mythical until now. Sometimes I wonder if he’s thinking, “I was meant to have another two weeks of peace and quiet before I came out and dealt with all this racket, you know.”

(I found some interesting information about fibroids, including that they can cause labour to occur about two weeks earlier. That would explain my going into labour at 40+4. That article also mentions something called red degeneration or carneous degeneration, a rare condition in which there’s bleeding into the middle of the fibroid, and which can cause sudden, severe but short-lived pain in the second trimester - which would fit well with what happened here at 29 weeks.)

Much of Louie’s sleeping is done on the chest of one person or another - and there are plenty of willing volunteers.

Barney isn’t volunteering this morning, though - he isn’t here. He’s away for the day with Air Cadets, at the local RAF base. Since he’s away, we all fit in one car, so I took the opportunity to get out of the house for the first time since coming home from the hospital. I’m not allowed to drive for a few weeks (not even my lovely new car!) and since we don’t all fit in one car, that means we can’t all go out together. It might be just as well though, as this morning’s exciting, less than half-hour-long outing to the bank has left me exhausted.

When Toby isn’t declining to have his own photo taken (left), he can sometimes be found on the other side of the camera (results below).

I wondered if Louie’s apparent love of sleep was because of all the painkillers I’ve been on, but I’m down to a couple of over-the-counter pills a day now, and he’s still sleeping. I’m trying to avoid the next round of drugs now - some pretty strong antibiotics, prescribed because a swab of my drain-wound grew staph aureus and strep a and some other nasty I can’t remember now. I’ve had septicemia before, so I know it’s nothing to trifle with, so if I felt at all unwell I’d be on the antibiotics like a shot. But I don’t feel at all unwell: I’ve no fever, no shivers, no aches and pains apart from the normal post-abdominal-surgery ones - and it’s a week since the swab was taken, so I’d expect to feel fairly horrendous by now if I were battling all those nasties and losing. And I want to be enjoying my new son, spending time with my family - not coping with nausea and stomach upsets and all the other potential consequences of antibiotics - nor passing yet more drugs into this little one’s body. So I will continue to check my temperature regularly and hope that the second swab, taken yesterday, has a much better result.