Rebirth

A parent I bumped into recently said that going from having one child to two is like going from owning a dog to running a zoo. There certainly seems to be the sort of volume of poo I'd expect from a medium-sized animal sanctuary, so perhaps he wasn't too far off.

Yes, we have a new baby, with all the upheaval it entails. And it's been so long since I've Plogged that I barely know where to start. So how about at the very beginning?

This time I had a planned Caesarian section because I could not face full labour followed by an emergency Caesarian section like last time. Major surgery is never to be undertaken lightly, but it was the best choice for us.

Here are some things you might be interested to know about a planned C-section.

• They are much, much scarier than an emergency C-section because you are totally drug-free and compos mentis. In an emergency, choice is taken out of your hands and you just kind of go with the flow. 
• They still use forceps if they get stuck. I really didn't know this.
• They have the radio on. Our daughter was born to James' Sit Down whilst surgeons rummaged in my tummy.
• If you have a bastard surgeon, they will stick the surgical dressing to your pubes. This isn't a problem at the time, but two days later when you try to remove the dressing, you'll realise that your pubes are a mass of glue and plaster and you will vow to hunt your surgeon and his family down. You can't just pull off the dressing with a sharp rip because you have a massive wound. So you have to pick it off slowly, one pube at a time, whilst your partner stands outside the shower room with your screaming newborn.
• Your surgery might get bumped. I anticipated being bumped by an hour or two, or possibly a day because of emergencies. Then they tried to bump my surgery by ten whole days, until I cried down the phone at my midwife, who pulled some strings. Had I had to have been pregnant for another ten days, I think I would have tried to perform my own C-section, using Ikea kitchenware.

I have two weird and pointless skills in life. The first is knowing - usually to the second - when the oven timer is due to go off. The second is being put in the worst hospital bed in the country.

Last time I gave birth, the woman in the bed next to me used her hospital pay-for TV, but unplugged the free headphones provided, so the whole ward could hear her programmes; she then pumped up the volume, and fell asleep. She then snored so loudly she drowned out the sound of her own baby crying, waking up only occasionally to pop downstairs for a fag.

This time, I had a similar chav in the bed next to me. She was incredibly passive-aggressive, phoning people at all times of the night to boast (quite rightly) about how her own baby didn't cry at all, but everyone else's babies were - and I quote - doing her fucking head in. What she didn't mention was the reason everyone else's babies were crying was she would fall asleep and snore so incredibly loudly, she would wake up every single baby on the ward. They would then start crying; she would wake up, and make another passive-aggressive phone call complaining about the crying babies. It would have been funny had I not been desperate to sleep.

Too long, did not read?

- A planned C Section is better than an emergency one

- I attract chavs

- We have a new baby. She looks like this.