Third meal in the crock pot and it’s a doozy.
Sweet, rich and yet still kind of light. This was our new year’s eve dinner and not a bad note to end the year on.
Slow Cooker Morrocan Lamb Tagine:
Ingredients:
450g stewing lamb, chopped into cubes and with as much fat as possible taken off
1 tbsp plain flour
1 onion, chopped finely
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 stick of celery, chopped
a handful of apricots, halved
a handful of raisins
half a butternut squash, cubed
1 courgette, chopped
2 cups (around 500ml) chicken stock
a few sprigs of rosemary
3 tsp garam masala (or 1 tsp cumin, 1 tsp coriander, 1/2 tsp ground ginger, 1/2 tsp cinnamon)
2 tsp paprika
1 tsp honey
zest of 1 lemon
Method:
Toss the lamb chunks in the flour and brown in a pan over a high heat (you can also do this with the onion and garlic too if you like).
Put the onion, garlic, carrot, dried fruit and lamb into the crock pot with the meat on top.
Sprinkle over the spices, herbs, honey and lemon zest, add the stock and give it a good mix.
Cook on low for 4 hours.
Add the butternut squash and courgette and cook for another hour, or until the meat is really tender.
Serve with couscous.
On the subject of couscous, I frickin’ love the stuff. We used to buy those little sachets of pre-seasoned stuff, but now we just buy it plain and spice it up ourselves before sticking it in a jar for use as-and-when. The current batch is seasoned with: garam masala, chicken stock, raisins, mixed seeds, chilli flakes and pistachios. To ‘cook’, just add a tsp of butter, pour over boiling water, cover for 5 minutes and voila.
It’s the last day of 2011 and it’s been quite a year. We’ve been busy:
- Moomin turned three and started nursery
- I got preggo and turned into a butterball
- Husby got qualified and got the job of his dreams
- I finished my book
- We welcomed a lil’ Rhubarb into our lives
Next year is gonna be a big one too, in various significant and optimistic ways. I hope. And I hope yours is too. So it got me thinking where we were a decade ago, and where we want to be a decade from now. I mean, we’re treading dangerously near the end of our twenties, which for most these days is basically a studenty, boozy extension of their teenage years. For us – by choice I will add – it’s been about marriage, mortgages and babies! We’ve come a long way and we’ve got a while to go…
10 years ago:
- I was in my last year of college.
- My parents had just split up.
- I was a chronic insomniac and I’d been depressed for a good 5 years.
- I had no idea that 4 months later I was going to meet the love of my life, soul mate and future husband and father to my children.
- I’d just started writing my first novel.
- I would have laughed in horror if you’d told me that 10 years later I’d live in the same town, married with kids, and that I liked to sew and knit…
10 years from now:
- Moomin will be a teenager! Rhubarb will be almost out of junior school and who knows? We might have another mini-Skip about the place too. Or maybe a dog.
- I hope we’re still in this house, though perhaps with a roof extension, a bigger kitchen and a mature garden.
- If I’m not a published author then at least you can bet your arse I’ll still be writing.
- Some rich, long lost mystery relative will have bequeathed millions to us, and we will buy some land, turn an old barn into a fully fitted pavilion and start a coaching academy for Husby to run, while I do the accounts and write on the gallery and the boys spend their weekends playing cricket with their dad…
Happy New Year y’all. Have a shiny, skippedydoodah of a brand new year.
I may be slightly overexcited about this crock pot thing.
While Rhubarb napped in the sling this morning I spent an hour and a half chopping vegetables and organising freezer bags full of ‘ready-meals’ to be chucked in the slow cooker at a pinch.
Pork and Apple Casserole, Chicken Paprika, and Moroccan Lamb Tagine
But first, today’s meal. Chicken & Chorizo Casserole. A favourite that I usually do on the hob, so it’ll be interesting to see how it compares coming out of the crock pot. I doubled my usual recipe so we’d have some to put in the freezer. I mean, what’s the point in having a 6.5 litre cooking device if you ain’t gonna supersize it, eh?
Ingredients:
600-700g skinless, boneless chicken thighs (you can, of course, use bone-in thighs, it’s just a bit fiddler to remove them when they’re cooked)
100g chorizo (tip: it’s usually cheaper from the deli counter than buying a pack from the cold meat section)
2 onions, chopped finely
4 garlic cloves, crushed
2 celery sticks, chopped
3 carrots, chopped
2 parsnips, chopped
half a butternut squash, cubed
oregano
750ml chicken stock
juice of 1 lemon
2 handfuls (1/2 cup?) bulgar wheat
1 tbsp cornflour
Method:
[I threw it all in raw, but if you like you could brown the meat and onions in a pan before you add them.]
Put veg in the crock pot first, and lay the chicken and chorizo on top. Pour on the stock and add the herbs and lemon juice. This really doesn’t need much more seasoning – the paprika in the chorizo does most of the work.
Cook on low for 5 hours.
Check the chicken is fall-apart-awesome by stabbing it with a fork.
Do a little happy dance.
Take the lid off the pot and turn onto its high setting.
Mix the cornflour with a little water and stir into the pot.
Throw in the bulgar wheat and cook on high for another 15 mins or so.
Serve in a big ol’ bowl and warm thy cockles.
Again, it made enough for dinner tonight, tomorrow, and 4 more portions to tuck away in the freezer:
Tip: Use whiteboard pens to label your tupperware before you stick ‘em in the freezer. It’ll wipe off when you next wash them, ready to use again.
Soooo I got myself a slow cooker for Christmas. Yes, it is enormous and takes up almost as much room as the microwave. Yes, there is the danger of it being a one-hit-wonder and then languishing on top of the kitchen cabinets forever more. Yes, I do feel a bit like a Stepford Wife just owning something like this. But I am stupidly excited at the prospect of throwing raw stuff at it at breakfast time and then finding a wholesome, delicious meal emerging from it at dinner time. I do realise it’s not *quite* that simple, but almost.
My first attempt was a mild coconut-y chicken curry, simply because it was just after Christmas and we had no decent food in the house to make anything more adventurous with. (Chocolate, chutney and cheese do not count.) It turned out well – tender meat, a creamy sauce (if a bit watery) and gentle melding of spices. Husby approved even though he apparently “doesn’t like coconut-y things” which is kind of bullshit seeing as I’ve been making this same coconut milk-based curry for years now and he always asks for more… <sigh> Anywho…
So. Today I went shopping. I bought a load of cheap stewing meat and root veg and am planning a day of chopping and mixing so that I can freeze a load of bags of prepared slow cooker ingredients that I can whip out on a whim in the morning and be a domestic goddess in the evening.
Tonight it’s pulled pork. I blame Man Vs Food for this one, with all that meaty food porn. Actually, I blame hog roasts all over the world for this one. I rarely buy large cuts of meat, because, well, I am a tightarse and spending £5+ on a single piece of meat just makes me twitch. *I KNOW* that one joint will feed us for several meals, but then I start thinking about scrubbing out roasting trays and basting and timing roast veg and I find myself walking right by the meat aisle with nothing.
Not today. Today I bought a shoulder of pork as big as my head for a fiver. I took the skin off, because a quick browsing of slow cooker recipes tells me that too much fat in a slow cooker makes for grossness and a stinky, coagulated mess. Then I laid it on a bed of veg, mixed up a bunch of spices and sauces, poured on some cider and whacked it on low for about 6 hours. (Full recipe below…)
(excuse the crappy photos – taken in a dark kitchen in a great rush while a small baby screamed for milk! Oh, and it tasted much better than it looked!)
Oh. Mama.
I mean… Oh my.
Seriously.
No word of a lie.
I say in all honesty (and no modesty), it was the best meal I have had in a long time. Husby agreed. Moomin stuffed handfuls of pork into his face.
Here’s whatcha do:
Ingredients
For the pork:
1 pork shoulder joint, approx 1kg (mine was boneless and I took the skin off, as I said above)
1 onion, sliced into half-rings
2 celery sticks, chopped
2 carrots, chopped
1 apple, cored, peeled and sliced into wedges
1 tbsp Dijon mustard
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp apple chutney (optional – I made a batch for Christmas so it seemed the right thing to do to add it to this. I reckon any sort of chutney would be good though.)
3 cloves of garlic, crushed
500ml dry cider (could be substituted for chicken stock if you want)
Herbs of some sort (I used rosemary from the garden, but anything like thyme, sage or oregano etc will do)
For the gravy:
2 tbsp butter/marg
2 tbsp plain flour
Method:
Put all your vegetables and the apple into the bottom of the slow cooker.
In a small bowl, mix mustard, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, garlic and chutney, and rub all over the top of the meat.
Place pork joint on top of the veg and pour the cider (or stock) around it.
Cook on low for 6 hours (or until the meat falls apart when you stick a fork in it).
[After about 6 hours I checked it and it was looking mighty fine. I put on some broccoli to steam and made some mashed potato. Then I took the juices/sauce from the slow cooker and put them aside in a jug (leaving the meat to cook on its own for a little while).]
In a pan on the hob, melt the 2 tbsp of butter and then mix in the flour to make a paste. Cook for 1 minute before gradually adding in the liquid from the slow cooker and mixing well to ensure there are no lumps. When you’ve added all the liquid, bring to the boil (stirring occasionally) and let simmer for about 5 minutes until it thickens slightly. (You can add a bit of cornflour if you want it even thicker.)
The meat is melt in your mouth and somehow you can taste all the different ingredients individually. The veg is super soft and has absorbed all the flavours and juices. The apple gives it a really sweet edge, and the gravy itself is soooooo beautifully rich. In a word: nom.
Serve with whatever you like – we had mash and broccoli, but you could do new potatoes, rice, or just stick it in a bun. This made enough for dinner for 3, an extra portion to go in the fridge for the next day, and about 6 more portions to put in the freezer. Would be great if you have people over for dinner, so much easier than a roast (and I think, tastier).
So there you have it. I am an utter slow cooker convert.
I might not be getting much sewing/knitting/writing/sleeping done with the new baby around, but at least I’m able to cook!
Somehow we managed it again. Well, the bank balance kind of held us at gunpoint to do it. Another homemade Christmas (almost). All I can say is thank goodness I can knit while breastfeeding…
This year I made:
4 pairs manly fingerless gloves
1 pair womanly fingerless gloves
1 pair odd socks
4 sock monkeys
1 toddler handbag
3 owl hats
1 scarf
2 crayon rolls
1 baby tank top
6 jars of bath salts
1 crocheted snowflake
3 photo books (well, Vistaprint did the hard work for me)
2 bottles parmesan oil
1 batch gingerbread decorations
1 (huge) batch cake pops
2 batches cheese straws
1 batch tiffin (which didn’t set, so we ate the WHOLE pan’s worth in one night…)
1 batch cranberry and apple chutney
1 batch spiced apple chutney
And now I am unable to sit in front of the TV or feed Rhubarb without feeling like I should have knitting/crochet/needle and thread in my hands.
T’was a good day though. I hope you all had a fantastic and indulgent Christmas and all your wishes were answered.
You never know, I might get back to blogging properly sometime soon.
Alright, alright, that’s enough of that. Life is a sneaky, twisted, wonderful motherfucker and it put us through the mill with little Rhubarb, but do you what? We have a gorgeous, snufflicious little baby. There’s a fair amount of trauma needing to be dealt with, another MRI to get through, nightmares to forget, but we feel like the luckiest family in the world. So there. I’m done with my birth story. Back to the grind. I mean, this new, overwhelming, insanely different and fulfilling normal that is passing so fast I can barely stand up.
Rhubarb is FOUR WEEKS today. Where the fuck did that go? Moomin is at nursery, sounding out phonics and pointing out semi-circles and shit. I’m currently a stay-at-home-mama-on-maternity-leave – wooooohooooo! It’s amazing and scary and how on earth do you get anything done with more than one child in your house? As Moomin quite rightly noted the other day when he was clamouring for dinner and Rhubarb had just shat all the way up to his armpits and there was a bag of washing still waiting to be hung up from that morning and I realised I hadn’t even brushed my teeth and Christmas is just over a month away <sob sob, panic panic>:
“Mummy? You need more arms.”
Never a truer word was spoken. Little bastard.
So. Back to skippedydoodahing as only a Skip can do. Heading for a partially homemade Christmas because we are skint as skunks, and so far we have this motley crew of botch-ups:
A crochet owl hat (actually, I made 3 of ‘em, for 3 of my 5 nephews). Pattern is from The Most Awesome Pattern by Kat over at Slugs on the Refrigerator. She is lovely, and ridiculously talented, and has the “I can achieve amazing things despite having 3 kids under 5 and apparently only 2 hands” thing down pat. She’s also designed patterns for a shaggy lion hat, pilot aviator hat and stegosaurus hat which are similarly fantastmagoric. And if you don’t crochet (or can’t be arsed) then you can order “one she made earlier” from her etsy shop. Aww shit, just remembered she does viking hats too. Go and buy one for every child you know.
A little handbag for my niece (YES the pocket is meant to be at an angle. Seriously, it is. I cut them off a shirt and they were angled like that. There’s one on each side. Tell me it doesn’t look stupid or I will get Rhubarb to puke on you.).
The first of 3 sock monkeys (2 for nephews, 1 for a friend’s little boy). He seems like a happy chap. I love how they always come out with their own unique, wonky personalities.
Oh, and a non-xmas make. Remember the sleepy sheep I made for Rhubarb? We got Moomin to bring it in to the hospital to put in Rhubarb’s cot in ICU, and then Moomin requested that I make him a big brother sheep too [insert "aaaaaaw" here]. Not long after that he decided that actually it needed “a green big brother rabbit … sheep.” Soooo, that’s what he got:
I’m on for a manic month. I have scarves, mitts and socks to knit, crayon rolls and taggies to sew, t-shirts to freezer paper stencil, biscuits and cakey things to bake, heads to explode, babies to burp, toddlers to prevent from squishing their brother’s head in a most affectionate way… Like I said, normal service will resume … now.
SATURDAY
Good morning. My boy is coming downstairs. I’d spent most of the night chilling out in a comfy chair cuddling my baby bubba in nursery 2. He only spent a night in there but the nurses already were making friends with him. I sat chatting to a nurse called Alice about our toddlers, the perils of family Christmases and child-friendly places to eat in town. Bizarrely normal and blase conversation while she pottered about her little charges and made jokes with sleeping babies. They know them so well, spend entire nights walking up and down with them on their shoulder, bathing and changing and adjusting and cooing. It seems unfair that all this gentle parenting (not to mention all the medical care that goes on alongside it) is left behind once the babies leave the NICU. There’s really no way to thank someone for looking after your baby in this way – I’ve written a long, rambling, blubbering card, and I’m going to knit a whole shitload of preemie hats and blankets to donate to the unit, but it doesn’t feel like enough.
While we waited for the consultant to come and give Rhubarb the all-clear to be moved down to the post-natal ward with me, I spent a couple of hours trying to tally this wire-free, full of milk baby with the unresponsive, tubed-up one of just a few days ago:
Like nothing ever happened. Like it was all a dream.
I almost didn’t want to leave the ICU and our gorgeous nurses – it’s hard going from such high dependency to relying on your own steam. They were all totally different but had their own ways of making us feel safe and comforted:
Jonathan, our first nurse, was Irish and cute and had a Twilight water bottle. He moved with sureness around all the tiny wires and kept apologising to Rhubarb for making him uncomfortable. He was genuinely upset, I think, at putting him through all of that, especially has Jonathan was the one who had to deal with Rhubarb’s first night of inconsolable discomfort. “He hears my voice and thinks, ‘oh no, not him again, he’s the one who keeps poking me’,” he said, but I know that by the second day, Rhubarb heard Jonathan’s voice and knew he was a friend. Jonathan saw me cry the most, let me rest my head in the cot against Rue’s, always had the right thing to say, icebreakers and conversation starters that somehow got me through those first days.
Our second nurse, on the night shift, was Sandra. She was a senior nurse and at first we thought she was going to be a little harsh. How wrong we were – she taught us containment holding (gently cupping baby’s head and feet, or placing a hand on his chest to make him feel secure) which was the closest we could get to a hug, she barrelled me into a hug of her own when I fell apart on that second day. She made me eat and rest and leave the ICU when I needed to but couldn’t tear myself away.
Then there was Claire: knowledgeable, sweet, funny, gentle but skilled when she had to adjust his IVs and lines. We didn’t talk much, but she was the one to bring me tissues when she found me having “a sneaky cry” one morning. “Look at him, doesn’t he look strong?” she said. “This will all be a memory soon.”
Rachel was only on for one shift with Rhubarb but she made me laugh the most. Very adept, very cheeky, and made the whole situation feel as if it was just another day in life, nothing to worry about, nothing to see here…
Jaya didn’t usually work in nursery three and the first shift she had with Rhubarb she was nervous and reluctant to do anything without the assistance of another nurse, but by the time we left the NICU she had obviously made her own bond with our little Rue. She was an utter sweetheart, so quietly reassuring and motherly. She showed me pictures of her grandson and I probably had more ‘normal’ conversations with her than any of the others, since she was on shift once Rhubarb was pretty much all-clear. She was the one who passed him to me when he was finally warmed up. She was about to leave her shift, to go on holiday to India for a month, but she stuck around so she could see him in his mama’s arms. I’m so glad she got to see us reunited in the end.
Corie and Alice worked in nursery two, and though we only spent a few hours in their company, I’m glad we did. Corie pretty much left me to it – Rue was feeding by then, and she could see I now knew my way around the little cart to find nappy changing supplies, so it was just a case of leaving me to get on with being a mum. Alice, on the other hand, never stopped talking, but that was fine too. By that point I was in love with everyone who crossed my path, and the sun rose across the sea into the nursery window and bathed all those precious little babies in golden light.
FRIDAY
Friday never looked so dagnamn beautiful.
I woke up smiling, expressed Rhubarb’s breakfast, wolfed my own and skipped upstairs to NICU (again, slight exaggeration of the hunchback of Notre Dame limp, but I was skipping in spirit…). My love hate relationship with the cooling machine was about to come to an end. I knew which button to press to check its progress, and though I already knew the timing, I checked once more just to see those words: programme complete at 12.00, meaning my boy would be gradually warmed up – half a degree per hour – until I could hold him for the first time.
Another day of expressing, visitors and my bedside vigil, except I spent most of the day laughing and grinning and bouncing around impatiently, waiting for time to tick on.
As he warmed, he slowly unfurled. His skin turned from angry red to peachy pink, his fists relaxed and his arms melted into the blankets around them rather than standing out stiffly from his body. He stretched out his froggy legs and splayed his toes. He started sucking ardently in his sleep, and a few degrees off normal body temperature his dark, dark blue eyes opened and started to take stock.
Everyone was relaxing with him. The nurses were grinning, the consultant was making jokes about accidentally knocking out the life support plug as he checked something under the table (!) and Rhubarb’s brain was used as a teaching instrument for the reams of students eager to watch Neil ultrasound his little skull. He showed me the tiny haemorrhage on the right side of Rhubarb’s thalamus – a few millimetres across – which seems to be his only scar from the entire ordeal. Hopefully it will mean nothing – his fresh, new brain may well build new pathways around the dead cells, finding different ways to connect itself to the right parts. If not, he might show some sort of physical problem or motor skills issue as he grows, but even this will be minor, so minor that we may not even notice. Certainly, if we weren’t now aware (and probably paranoid) about the possibility, we’d most likely just put it down to the differences between kids and how some advance faster than others… Worse case scenario, if it’s something that impedes him, we can fix it with physio. I’m grateful that it was the right, physical side rather than the left. Intellectual and behavioural problems aren’t so fixed by exercises and time.
Five o’clock, six o’clock, seven o’clock rock. Husby is racing against time and getting a poorly Moomin to bed as quickly as possible so he can make it back to the hospital in time for the ‘big reveal’. The final twenty minutes have me bouncing on the balls of my feet next to the cot, twitching my head around every few seconds to check if Husby has arrived. I have scabs all along my forearms where I unconsciously scratched myself in anticipation.
36.5 degrees. Bingo.
It took forever for the nurse to untangle the wires enough to lift him up, to turn off the detestable and lifesaving cooling machine, to get me a chair, a nursing pillow, offer a modesty screen. I said I’d happily whip my boobs out anywhere and everywhere just so long as I could feed my baby. Tears kept threatening to come but for some reason I wanted to save them for the moment and then when it came – when she passed Rhubarb over to me and I felt the weight of his body in my arms for the very first time – there were no tears at all. He was awake, but calm, and so very warm. He checked me out, nonplussed by this change in situation. Every nurse and parent in the room congratulated me and then the tears came… Then a million more as he latched on and happily chugged down a bellyful of milk as if he’d been doing it all his life.
And then in came Husby, who shortly had his own first moment, and the three days were behind us and we were close to the end. Rhubarb took another feed and softly went to sleep again. They said he’d slowly be unplugged from all the gubbins and horribleness, seeing as he didn’t seem to need any of it any more. They’d written me up a scary and detailed schedule for expressing with the threat of formula top ups if I couldn’t manage it, but they swiftly threw it away once they heard him gulping from the other side of the room.
Late that night, we left him still sleeping in ICU, Husby went home and I went to bed with a smile on my face, eagerly waiting for the wake up calls that would come when he needed a feed, and an almost-promise that he’d be down in my room the following day.
A couple of hours later I quite literally leapt out of bed when a midwife came to wake me and tell me the best news possible: “Rhubarb needs a feed. Oh, and he’s been moved to nursery two.”
He had been in nursery one, the high dependency, scary, flashing lights and hushed voices ward. Nursery two was mostly for healthy pre-term babies who just needed time to grow, but had no real problems. The atmosphere was so different – the nurses hummed and sang and joked and bantered with each other while they attended to their little teeny charges. The babies’ cribs were decorated with their own things, they had their own clothes, the parents who came in to change and feed and visit were old hands, and this was their temporary normal. Our giant baby sat in between two 4lbers and I sat and fed him, grinning, while the nurses laughed at how loud he sucked.
Best midnight feast in the world.
Another sunrise, another night listening to other people’s babies cry. Another breakfast of cold toast and another morning of collecting syringes for milk. One bonus – bam, milk came in. Hello Dolly Parton! And the crash of gloom from Wednesday seemed to have passed. I bounded (ok, shuffle-limped very slowly) up to see my boy, I even took the stairs because the lift just wasn’t coming fast enough. Pausing to try very hard not to pass out at the top, I made it to the ICU to greet my sleeping baby and continue to try to ease his tension as he lay on a cool, unnatural blanket.
I just had to get through today, and Friday meant I could hold him, feed him, maybe even take him down to my room. Just get through today. Express milk. Bolt down food and drink. Sit by his bedside. Organise visitors and explain what all the wires and tubes are for. Repeat for the rest of the day.
Moomin came to visit his brother for the first time and was completely nonplussed by the weirdness, the medical presence and the machines. “He’s mine,” was his summation upon viewing Rhubarb. Sounds about right to me. God I missed that Moomin. All he would say on the phone was “I’m sad because you went away.” Seeing his happy, loving reaction to Rhubarb made me a little bit more whole again.
But now it was Husby’s turn to crash. He’d been amazing, staying a chipper dad for Moomin while corralling both our families into some sort of orderly queue to visit and reliving the horrors of Tuesday to everyone who needed to know the details while staying strong for me and bringing me bags and bags of food and supplies and little gifts to boost my spirits. The man was due a shitty day, and he had it.
Poor Husby. During our meeting with the consultant, it came out that Husby had filmed part of the birth on my phone’s camera. The head was crowning and spontaneity hit him so he decided to capture that once-in-a-lifetime moment. Of course it wasn’t a moment, but ten minutes of panic and awfulness, but the consultant thought that the footage could possibly be useful for teaching purposes (and my arse would be immortalised for the NHS, um, yay?) so asked to see it. Husby obliged, except he doesn’t know how to work my new phone and managed to set off the video in the middle of the ICU with me grunting and screaming my head off at full volume. Husby freaked out and had to leave the room. The consultant made it even worse by handing him back the phone a little while later and un-tactfully saying thanks but no thanks, because Husby had stopped filming when the paramedic said: “There’s no heartbeat.” I mean, wow.
I sent him home again. The man just won’t look after himself without me threatening him, I swear.
I got to change Rhubarb’s nappy, and he contrived to fountain-pee all over his bedsheets – cunning – since it meant we then had to change his sheets and I got to lift him while they did it. Careful of all the wires and lines, one hand under his head, one under his bottom, I raised him up half a foot above his cot and though I probably wasn’t allowed, I shoved my face onto his chest and breathed him in. He turned his face to me wearing this look of utter shock at the sensation of a half-hug. Oh baby. This is what it’s meant to be like. But a whole hug is even better. They also decided he could start to have his first breastmilk that night – albeit through a tube, a few millilitres at a time. I visited later in the night with more milky supplies and the change of shift brought a gorgeous nurse called Rachel who shrugged and suggested we screw the tube and give him a dose straight into his mouth from the syringe. That little fella smacked his lips and took the whole lot before smooshing himself into his blanket nest and going back to sleep.
Bedside, visitors, express, eat. Eat… Yeah, I had my appetite back, for sure. All I can say is thank fuck for the food people brought me. I honestly have nothing but gratitude for how we were treated while were in hospital, but seriously, somehow post-natal women are meant to heal and regain their strength on meals like this:
Mmmm, seconds, anyone? No, thought not. Yay for homemade bacon and brie sandwiches and flapjack and going to bed giddy because tomorrow is Friday and Friday means a baby in your arms.
WEDNESDAY
Sunrise from my window on the second day. I woke at 4am, expressed two more syringes of colostrum and cried all over myself. I took a quiet elevator to the fourteenth floor and cried again in the corridor. I couldn’t stop. I needed to be able to breathe, to talk, so I could give my name into the intercom for them to let me into the NICU, but I was crying too hard.
A couple came out of the other elevator and the woman took me into a crushing hug against her chest. “This was me, yesterday,” she said softly, “You have to break down, it’s ok, it’ll pass.” And it did. Her daughter was in the same nursery as Rhubarb, put into a coma to recover from an operation she’d had at 1 day old. She took me through to the NICU and the nurses descended on me and my tears with more hugs, tissues, smiles. They tucked my hair behind my ears and sat me down at the cribside, told me he’d had a good night, wasn’t in any pain, was peacefully sleeping and doing so well.
He’d struggled the night before – all the soreness, punctures, a bruised hand where they couldn’t find a tiny vein, a fractured clavicle, the mother of all headaches… I’d sat and sang to him, stroked him, shhed and loved him, while he tried to sleep but just plain couldn’t. Every time his eyes fluttered closed, he’d remember how much things hurt and would let out a strangled little cry. They upped his painkillers – an infusion of morphine and paracetamol – but still he fought it. Eventually they had to knock him out with a sedative. My baby’s first day ended with that. Most babies go into ‘recovery sleep’ not long after their first feed – a long, calm sleep where they work off all the trials and stresses of labour. Rhubarb didn’t get a first feed – he was on a sugar water IV and nil by mouth until he came off the cooling blanket. He didn’t get a recovery sleep, not until the sedative kicked in. Man… I could cry forever for what he went through in his first week.
But Wednesday morning came and he had been sleeping deeply since midnight. They’d taken him off the heavy sedation and he was snoozing on his own steam now. No seizures in the night, nothing untoward on his readouts and charts and screens and wires.
The consultants had a big meeting that morning to discuss his treatment – there was a chance he could come off the blanket early, today, instead of the 72 hours, but they erred on the side of caution and three days it was. And so we sat and watched him lie there – tense, clawed up hands, shivering at times, grimacing at others, sleeping off the shock for nearly 24 hours straight.
I told him this was not what life was meant to be like. This is NOT how it’s gonna be. Life is full of cuddles and warmth and singing and boobs and warm milk on tap and smooshes and lying on your father’s chest and snuggling into your mother’s neck and being squished by your big brother and cooed at by your grandparents and held awkwardly by your auntie and hardly ever being put down, ever.
I sang Wonderful Baby and Nature Boy to him and cupped his feet and head when he sniffled. That was most of Wednesday, except when I was battling with my milk. I fought my stressed and unresponsive breasts to kickstart my supply. Every expressing session was a battle, siphoning off droplets into a syringe one by one, such tiny reward for an hour of hard work. My back was burning from hunching over myself, one hand clamped around a nipple, the other trying not to accidentally squirt the liquid gold back out of the syringe. I brought him breakfast, brunch, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner and supper in the form of expressed colostrum, and they stored it for me, for when he could have it – not through me but through a goddamn motherfucking tube. He practised sucking in his sleep with those full little lips, and though they warned me breastfeeding could be difficult after all of this, I knew he would be a pro.
Night fell again and the nurse kindly kicked me out of NICU to sleep, eat, get strong. I lay staring at the clock and had violent, physical flashbacks of midwife hands trying to turn him, his blue lips, how he must have felt to have been stuck, squeezed with the immense power of contraction after contraction while he lost consciousness. I cried a lot that day and night, but eventually must have fallen asleep, because when I woke up it was Thursday.
