YoungestGirl’s Second Birthday

YoungestGirl turns two today. Entering the world with much less drama than her elder sister (planned C-section, opposed to Big Red Emergency Button, massive team of medical experts and all types of emergency), YoungestGirl quickly looked to rectify this and in her first ten days in the world:

• She refused to wake up on day 5 – turned out she’d lost so much weight that she didn’t want to feed, and got herself into a sleepy cycle. I didn’t even know this was a thing, and felt guilty for about a week. Actually, no, I’ll let you know when I stop feeling guilty about that one, as I sort of nearly accidentally starved her. We ended up back in hospital for two days for weight loss. (Hers, not mine, sadly.)
• On being released from hospital, we were phoned that evening, told we had some “very bad news” about her blood test. The “very bad news” turned out to be the fact that they had lost the blood sample. I gave that particular registrar some “robust” feedback about his usage of the term “very bad news” in conjunction with a newborn’s blood test. We went back into hospital the next day and waited three hours to give another blood sample.
• That night we were phoned again by the hospital at 10.30 p.m. who said  we needed to go back to hospital immediately as YoungestGirl had low sodium levels and could start fitting. They needed to repeat the blood test. It couldn’t wait until the morning. I was unable to drive (see C-section), so we had to wake EldestGirl who had Proper Actual Flu, and drag her into the hospital with us. Where we were kept waiting for four hours with a baby whom we were told was “very ill”.
• At two in the morning they repeated the blood test (a procedure that took approximately seven seconds) and we were told that it had been a lab error and we were free to go home, but, oh, she’d actually lost even more weight. Try harder.
• Then we had tongue tie diagnosed
• Then she caught her sister’s Proper Actual Flu. At ten days old.

It took her three weeks to regain her birth weight. I still suspect she was just trying to upstage her sister.

So we had a rocky start. We had also moved house about a month beforehand, and being born in November in the rainiest year I remember, we didn’t go out and about much. It all blurred together in a blob of sleepless breastfeeding, pumping, breastfeeding again, try to sleep, time to pump and so on. The newborn days are relentless.

But it fades, and quickly. Now she is perfectly capable of shouting, “MORE SPIDER” (a request for Woolly and Tig), is able to list all members of Paw Patrol (including Tracker), “READ PIG BOOK” (a lift-the-flap book) and is quite specific about the need for the rapid invention of “breakfast pudding” which each morning appears to be a travesty of injustice designed purely to ruin her day.

To be very honest, breakfast pudding sounds like a pretty good idea.

Well then, happy birthday, YoungestGirl. May your day and your year be filled with all the things that bring joy to two year-olds, even if it is endless bastarding Woolly and Tig (given the choice, I’m not sure which one I’d like to trap under a glass and throw out of the window first).

And perhaps today we’ll let you have some breakfast pudding.