bye bye baby

Dear Marianne,

At the risk of making poo a regular feature of this blog, I have to tell you that Mike has just performed his third poo on the toilet - hurrah. He also invited me to check it out, "It's downstairs, go on, you can have a look if you want to." When Mike asks in that way I can't refuse. This isn't ground breaking news I know, but we were beginning to think that nappies would be with us forever, that the baby era would never pass. So for us it is Christmas come early, not the poo itself, but the fact that for the first time in thirteen years our days will be nappy and poo free.

The first nappy I ever changed was on Becky, what made it difficult was that she was lying in an in incubator in the post natal ward at UCH and I had to work through two hand holes cut in the sides. It was like a challenge from the Krypton Factor, I cried with frustration, but though difficult at first, it became funny and by the fourth day we were so accomplished that it was a competition between me, her Dad and the nurses to see who could do it the best.
She was OK by the way, she had fits in the first two days of her life, a ton of antibiotics followed by another ton of anti-fitting drugs, a lumber puncture, for which I wasn't there (I expect to carry the guilt from that for the rest of my life by the way), x-rays and other stuff I never really could understand. She was also attached to a heart monitor which gave an emergency bleep quite often, this made me jump up and down screaming for help, until the other parents (some of whom had been there for months)explained that it was usually a false alarm and they taught me to reset it myself, so that I wouldn't have to bother the overworked nurses.

I think all this is in my mind now because of the new guidelines which say that babies born before 22 weeks should not receive help to live, and those born between 22 and 24 weeks should be treated subject to a decision made by the doctors and parents. This is exceedingly sensible, sane and I think humane, unless of course I give birth to a child at 22 weeks and then I will use all my mental and physical strength and perhaps even a gun to ensure that the doctors keep my baby alive. I think I'm against animal testing until it turns out it helped my cousin with his epileptic drugs, or played a part in creating the insulin which keeps my brother and sister alive, or that may in future produce the drug which stops my dementia taking hold.

Anyway, back to poo. At work I described my delight at Mikey's ability to poo in the holy hole. My co-workers, though sympathetic to my joyful news, were really the wrong audience having grown their children mostly up. But I touched a nerve with them both and we three Mothers talked for quite sometime about the inability of boys (and men) to wee in to the toilet. What is it with the men? Despite a useful attachment with which to direct the wee, it is still beyond them. If you designed the whole task as a geometry project, requiring an ability to locate and measure acute angles, they would have it sorted, but since they have to hurry back to MSN Messenger and FIFA 2006, they just let it go and hope for the best. Then we Mother's come in, smell, snarl, complain pointlessly to all the men, who are outraged by the suggestion that they are responsible and so on and so on...

Mike might be the exception to the rule in the toilet department, what with the pride he takes in his work and all, but I wouldn't want to put that pressure on him; he needs to learn to be a real man and wee on the floor as Stan, Archie and Craig have done before him. I'm glad though that my greatest concern now is wee on the floor and not wee babies, thankfully things do pass.

Rx