We're Home!

Hurray!

We came home on Sunday evening and great was the rejoicing. It is good that we have hospitals (and such good ones), and they have come so far in the last 100 years. But it is hard to be in hospital for any length of time. There is a bewildering sense of vulnerability and unfamiliarity which colours every hour.

Thank you to everyone who prayed for us. God has been immensely kind to us and we are grateful for the way he has preserved Jonathan from his conception through to now, his 12th day in the world. It has been a great encouragement to us that so many people have cared about us and Jonathan and prayed for us all. Thank you.

And it is good to be home. We have spent the last 24 hours settling in and trying to find the bones of routine which might work for us. Jonathan is a lot more settled than some babies I have known, and certainly very settled for a child who shares our DNA. He has put on quite a lot of weight in the last week (thankfully) and we are slowly working out his feeding. I am, I must say, heartily sick of theories of breastfeeding. They all seem different and at least partly contradictory, and those who hold them do so with some degree of fanaticism which is tiring, to say the least. However, we muddle on and will eventually get things sorted I am sure.

The other great thing about being home is being able to sleep more. We are currently sleep deprived, obviously, but in the way we'd expected: we've both been students and know what losing sleep feels like. And it feels so much better than subsisting on 2 hours/day in 20 minutes blocks! It's also good to have another person around to decipher Jonathan's more incomprehensible moments. Having a new baby is really an exercise in interpreting loud mime.

One of the curious things people keep saying to me is "Enjoy your baby" or something similar. I do find this odd as Jonathan is one of the great things about the last 12 days. It would be hard not to 'enjoy' him. He is a tremendously brave, charming little baby, even when he is unsettled. In fact his reaction to the world - a place where he gets hungry and feels pain and so forth - has reinforced the sense that this world is really a hard place to be in many ways. Throwing your head back and wailing fits with the kinds of suffering (minor and otherwise) that we endure here. To introduce a little person to this, and to comfort him and tell him about a God who loves him even in a world like this, as he gets used to this difficult, puzzling world is one of the most useful things I've ever done.

As for Jonathan's eyelashes, well yes. But then his Dad has really gorgeous eyelashes so it isn't too surprising! When I have time to recharge the camera (which is very high up on my to-do list), and export the photos I will do so and all the world will behold these eyelashes, and other general cuteness. In the meantime, you'll just have to take my word for it that Jonathan is really rather adorable! I couldn't possibly be biased or anything... JMB

Update

Thank you for praying, God has been very generous in how he has been answering our prayers over the last 48 hours. I thought I'd let people know how things have been going before I turn in.

Jonathan is responding very, very well to the extra milk he's been receiving. He's no longer listless, nor crying constantly. He has good colour and is generally very contented (even to the point of lying happily in his cot for half-an-hour today when he woke up before his feed time). He doesn't enjoy the twice-daily regimen of antibiotics that he gets through a cathater semi-permanently located in his arm. He enjoys even less the taking of his blood that has happened one to two times per day to run various tests. But that's ok, his parents aren't the world's greatest fans of that either. This is not least because of the ambience of the place where it happens - special care, where all the drastically premature babies (and similar cases) are looked after. It's a place where they have pictures up of the babies that lived...

The blood cultures have shown no infection after twenty-four hours, which is what we want, but isn't conclusive until 48 hours have passed. His ammonia levels (I think) came back under the high end of safe within about 24 hours. All up he's doing very well, and is getting even more compliments for his cuteness (and yes, about half the comments focus in on the eyelashes). At the moment they want to finish the five day course of antibiotics and, if nothing else goes wrong, will probably release Jennie and him when they're done- either Saturday night or Sunday morning, Oxford time.

Jennie is doing much better, getting between four and half and five hours sleep over the last two days - usually broken up into chunks of no more than one hour. Nonetheless, the drastic change in Jonathan has done her a world of good. She laughed for the first time two days ago, and we began having the space and energy to just enjoy Jonathan for the first time today.

We're very grateful for God's goodness towards us in this. Thank you who have prayed. I'm off to bed. A new day starts soonish. MDB