One Month of Wilf

And just like that (well, after nine months of human-growing followed by a memorable trip to the Royal Devon & Exeter) I am now the proud owner of THREE children! Having only just ‘come back’ after a month away from social media (good for the soul, I’d recommend it), I feel like there is almost too much to update you on so I’m not really sure where to start. 

I’d like to document the birth at some point but I’m existing on such a tiny amount of sleep right now that I’m not sure I could do the story justice (quick summary: best birth of all three by a country mile, it started with contractions during Henry’s nativity, hypnobirthing was an absolute game-changer and the bloody placenta got stuck again). The most important piece of information is that at 11:50PM on Tuesday 12 December, exactly one week before his due date, Wilf Nicholas made his way down the lady-garden slide and into the birthing pool, all 8lb 13oz of him. 

We’re now almost 5 weeks in to life with our new bundle of baby boy goodness and so far, it has been a tale of two halves. The first fortnight was a blissful Christmassy bubble. Wilf did a lot of sleeping, I did a lot of staring at him sleeping and, after school had broken up for the holidays, our days revolved around lazy cuddles, Christmas films, short bursts of fresh air and the occasional trip to the shower so I could hand-express my boobs, which to start with seemed to produce enough milk to feed the five thousand. The hormones hit me in a good way this time and instead of the WTF is this? face of terror I wore for most of Henry and Jude’s earliest days (or Henry’s entire first year, to be honest), with Wilf, I had that sudden rush of love I thought was an urban legend and spent the night feeds stroking his little ears and beaming like a (happily) mad woman.

In fact, at one point I started wondering if I was going to have to shut this blog down or at the very least change it to The Mumsy Mum because I had never felt more at home or at ease with the role. This was it. It had clicked. The competent-mum gene or whatever it was that had been missing for the best part of six years and had made me swear under my breath and sometimes cry, well - it must have found its way to me at last. This was probably going to be the start of a new parenting chapter for all of us. Henry and Jude would benefit from this new mum who was kind of gliding around the house with a baby and a muslin draped over one shoulder as she rustled up sandwiches with the other hand, laughing at their jokes and making a mental note to sign Henry up for after school football practice and Jude up for something, anything, that wasn’t an afterthought or an add-on to that of his big brother. To tell you the truth, I was absolutely bossing it. Our mate Ruth would have been proud. 

And then came the shit-hitting-the-fan day. Christmas had been and gone, things were starting to feel a bit more like normal (or the after-Christmas limbo version of normal, where you eat a whole Chocolate Orange and some leftover cold meats for breakfast, because you can), and slowly but surely the bubble of bliss started to unravel before our eyes. Wilf became both ‘spirited’ and refluxy at the exact same moment that somebody kidnapped our charming three-year-old and replaced him with a behaviour-malfunctioning lookalike who smears his eczema cream on the walls for fun, screams blue bloody murder at everything and generally has zero fucks to give when it comes to guidance or instruction from his parents, particularly in public. We expected this to some extent, of course – our little Judy Pops has gone from being the baby of the family to the ‘middle child’ (nobody say ‘difficult,’ I can’t be hearing that right now) – but his ‘adjustment’ has been slightly more alarming than we’d anticipated. The WTF is this? face of terror made its appearance on the day when, after a clash of heads and lots of crying from Henry and Jude who had been wrestling, Wilf joined in with the crying and didn’t stop crying until he projectile vomited all over the sleepsuit I’d just put him in, having changed him out of the one he’d decorated with his korma-coloured excrement a few moments before. 

And that’s pretty much been the balance ever since. A mixture of days when we’re doing fine – sometimes more than fine, some days I smile and coo at Wilf and somehow manage to squeeze in a bedtime story for my other two babies to ease my cheating-on-them feelings of guilt - and other days when quite honestly, it’s purely about survival. Where James and I look at each other and shout, over the sound of the white noise that we had hoped would soothe his windy fussing, "Isn’t three a LOT of kids?"