On Tuesday evening we blatted it up the motorway to Stevenage to meet the newest addition to our extended family, our new nephew. He had only been born 10 hours previous so was still at the incredible newborn stage, with little twitching purple hands and the “Yoda” expression that little kids have. I’m not going to post a picture because his family aren’t bloggers and wouldn’t welcome the intrusion but I am blogging about it because it was so ace holding a little 8lb lump of baby again. I’ve not done that in over two years now, since Ned was born. It was odd in a sense because this was the hospital that wifey had Ned in and our experiences of it weren’t brilliant at the time. I still think that the Lister could single handedly fund the NHS in it’s entirety if they owned and ran their own carpark, keeping all the fees. We were there for 64 minutes and it cost us £3.70. It was worth it to see our nephew but scandalous in terms of charging people to visit hospital bound relatives or attend an outpatient appointment. The other thing I didn’t miss from our stay was the tropical temperatures that they seem hellbent on having in hospitals. The big glass window in the room my sister in law had managed to wrangle for herself was mouldy around the frame from the condensation that seemed a permanent fixture.
Still, he was gorgeous and cradling such a new life in my arms was a special moment. It makes me think how quickly our three have grown up. I was looking at some old video of the boy and Fifi from 2009 and it’s incredible how quickly they’ve grown up. Where has the time gone?
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| Ned the Terminator. He never sleeps, never stops |
However any potential broodiness from either of us was driven away fairly sharpish on our return home. We got back at 9ish, or as wifey put it, just in time to fail to hear any of episode two of Jamaica Inn. Ned was still up and running about, although he did eventually go to sleep and I transported him from our bed to his bed and he slept through some of the night. Again last night he kicked me out of our bed (literally) at around 3ish. We had put him to bed at his normal bedtime but an hour or so later he woke up crying. We left him in there making a god awful fuss until he woke up the boy and then wifey had two small children in bed with her while I escaped to play football.
I’m absolutely smitten we our nephew and I think it’s great that they’ve got a full set- a brother for his bigger sister- one of each- but I’m under no illusion that we could cope with the additional years of broken sleep. It’s been over 7 years since we (and by we I mean mostly wifey) have had a period of more than a handful of days with uninterrupted sleep. Oh in total we might manage six hours in a night but the quality is poor because of the wake ups. If Ned refuses to settle until 9 or ten in the evening, he often wakes up howling at around 3:20 in the morning, only to go to sleep in our bed until maybe 6ish. It’s draining, so perhaps we’ll just borrow our nephew and give him back in the evening so he can get a good nights sleep with his mum.
Welcome to the world, small wrinkly baby of loveliness.