The First Week

What an incredible week of highs and lows this has been! There have been times of great physical pain and exhaustion, and times of overwhelming highs as I look at our beautiful son.

Here are some opinions on parenthood that I had last week compared to this week:

Last week:
I wouldn't let my child sleep on me at night because then they'd never want to sleep in their own cot.

This week:
ARGHHH I don't care about the future as long as I can make it through tonight.

Last week:
I'm going to breast feed because I love a bargain and I'm quite lazy and boobs are just right there.

This week:
Yes breast feeding is free if you don't value your time at all, If you paid yourself minimum wage every time you breast feed it would be a proper income. Also if you want to know what it feels like ask someone to continually nipple tweak you for half an hour.

Last week:
Oh no I have forgotten to buy pyjamas for the baby.

This week:
What even defines day and night?

The lack of sleep has lead to some crazy delirium as demonstrated in this video where I nearly wet myself.

It's been a bad week for Lola the rabbit, her cuddle time has been very reduced and she got in a fight with a cat.

The cat attack sent Dan into a parental rage and he has vowed to punch the cat if ever he sees it.  I pointed out that a cat does have the right to roam free and maybe we shouldn't let our rabbit out in the yard, but Dan's protective anger continues, he actually congratulated the rabbit on the fact that the blood on her foot was the cat's blood, we think. I hate to think what would happen to anyone who picked on Percy.

It would be wrong of me to end the blog without more photos of Percy.  Here he is with his girlfriend Elodie, Steph and Nick's new baby born one day after Percy.

Hey Elodie....

Did you know I'm a rap star?

I think I'm falling for you (mainly coz I can't keep my head up)

Let me suckle on your arm.

Elodie: I wonder if he's husband material?

Birth

HE'S HERE! and he's a he. On 22nd October at 1.30pm Percy Samuel Jones arrived into "the outside" weighing slightly over 8lbs.

I know mother's have the like biased hormonal thing which makes them think their own children are beautiful, but he is lovely right? (if you don't agree it's probably best not to say.)

So birth....that was less beautiful. Here's a photo of me not looking my best but I wanted to include it because it's what the face of a real life woman is like after birth.

Compare and contrast with this one that was taken after a makeover when I was 21.

 It should be like a warning to all men on the pull (if you can't cope with a woman looking like this then stop trying to pull her)

Anyways back to birth... In my last blog I wrote how I was imagining birth to be the pain of when I dislocated my elbow with the endurance of cycling 70 miles through mud. So how did it compare? Lots of people say you forget the pain when the baby is born, well I haven't forgotten it yet!

It was horrendous. I don't want to scare you if you're pregnant though. I think I had a worse than average experience. I spoke to my friend Steph today who gave birth the day after me and the only pain relief she had was paracetamol!

Warning skip this paragraph if you don't want to know the gory details.

So for me once I got onto the delivery suite after about 14 hours of having contractions on the induction rooms, I was shown how to use gas and air but I did it wrong and it had no effect on me. Then everything started happening really fast. The baby's heart beat was dropping, the midwife called in another midwife, who called in a doctor who called in another doctor.  I started pushing even though they told me not to because I wasn't ready yet and it would hurt.  But you can't control that, no one in their right mind would push when they've been told not to but I just couldn't help it. They had to cut me, and use the suction thing on the baby's head to get it out. Then they put the baby on me while they stitched me up.

People say 'once they put the baby on you the pain is gone and you're just so relived and in love with the baby that you forget everything' That was not the case for me, I was still lying with my feet in stirrups being stitched up, just in less horrendous pain.   But I do remember in the middle of that looking down at the baby and saying "who is it?" Then I moved the umbilical cord stump and said "it's Percy!" (which was our chosen boy's name.)

I would say the love for him came a bit more gradually over the next 24 hours.  But it's safe to say that we are now both completely besotted with him.

The only final thing to say for today is that Dan was an absolute legend and I have a overwhelming fresh new love for him too.

Baby News!

I've not had the baby....but our big news is I'm going to be induced at 38 weeks which is in 10 days time!!

Here is why:

So I've had itchy skin particularly at nights for a week or two, I ignored it because I though it might be an insect based thing, I did have a few insect bites and there are some annoying little fruit flies in our house sometimes. Then eventually I googled "itchy skin during pregnancy" and found out that it was most likely to be a hormonal thing but there's a chance it could be a liver problem.

So then I phoned the hospital to speak to a midwife who called me in for some blood tests. The next day they asked me to come in again because I did have the liver problem (Obstetric Cholestasis.) It's only a problem while I'm still pregnant, but if someone with this condition is left till 40 weeks or more then their risk of having a still birth is higher. So they will induce me at 38 weeks to reduce that risk.

It's not a big risk at all so no one worry, we're not really worried we're just excited to be meeting baby Jones soon. My induction is 21st oct at 8pm so their most likely birthday will be 22nd October.

I've been wondering what birth will be like and as I've never given birth I'm trying to think of the nearest I've come to it in terms of pain, endurance and medical professionals looking at my privates. So this is what I've come up with:

The most physical pain I've ever experienced was when I was 16 and this happened:

Yeah ...if a random guy in Tescos car park asks you to unicycle don't unicycle forward while looking backwards to check he's watching. It's arrogant (and dangerous.)

The biggest endurance test I've done was day 2 of our 61 day trip to the middle east. We cycled 70 miles from cheshire to Birmingham in the rain on roads like this:

It took 11 hours and I cried after 50 miles.


My tyres and feet looked like this:

Also like almost every female over 25 I've had a smear test, not pleasant but no big deal really. Surprisingly enough I didn't take a photo of this occasion.

So anyway if giving birth is like cycling 70 miles in the rain with a dislocated elbow while having a smear test, I'm all prepared.

The Wedding of Jo and Elisha

On Saturday my little sister got married! It was a fantastic day probably the best wedding I've ever been to other than my own. In fact last night I started comparing different elements of their wedding objectively with my own wedding (I know that's a terrible thing to do).  When it started to look like they may actually win this comparison I stopped comparing (because comparing weddings in a terrible thing to do!)

Jo looked absolutely beautiful, and as you can see we were more than a little excited!

There were 7 bridesmaids, 8 if you count bumpy the littlest bridesmaid/ pageboy.  When walking down the aisle Bumpy led the way closely followed by the rest of me, and then the other bridesmaids all in pairs.  I'd asked Dan to take photos as we entered he decided to take a video, but forgot to take the lens cap off.  Elisha (who is also called Dan by some people) looked very pleased to see his bride walking in.

After the service I got to see some of my extended family and some good friends including Bex who is due in 2 weeks!

Then after a long discussion about who should go in what car it was on to the lovely reception venue.

The speeches were great apart from when Dad accidentally raised a toast to the Mr and Dr Jones.  I think he was concentrating so much on pointing out his daughter was a Dr that he forgot the surname. (Which is Hastings.)  The meal was followed by dancing and a photo both ran by my sister in law Rebekah.  I can't wait to see the photos from that...  I'm on almost all of them, sorry other people.

Love the macarena it's the only time I'm not the worst dancer on the dance floor.

We returned to Liverpool very tired at lunch time on Sunday to greet poor little Lola the rabbit, the only one who didn't enjoy the wedding. Unfortunately I had forgotten that Rachel who I had asked to feed our rabbit didn't have a key to our house. Luckily we had purposefully left the cage unlocked so she had access to our garden and Rachel was able to go round our neighbour's house and throw a few rabbity treats over the wall. We spoiled her when we got in and hopefully she has forgiven us now.

Last night ended with some unexpected maths problems while we lay in bed with a hot chocolate. I was asking Dan about when they say 'you're 10cm dilated' -what is that? It must be the diameter right? So what is the circumference? That's when we both had to think back to some year 8 maths. Dan thought the formula was Pi R Squared (sorry there's no pi key) this came out as 78cm which I was sure sounded too big. I then got a roll of masking tape some ribbon and a ruler and worked out that the diameter of the masking tape was 9cm while the circumference was 28cm. That's 9 x 3! What number is roughly three?! Pi! therefore we have discovered (a long time after someone else) that to find the circumference you times the diameter by pi. That other formula (Pi R Squared) is the area.

So how exciting! when the midwife tells me 'you're 10cm dilated time to push' I won't have to worry about the circumference because I'll know that it's 31.45 assuming my cervix is a perfect circle which I'm sure it's not.

Oh the joyous things we would never do if we had a TV.