Introducing Edith

Sometimes life surprises you. Two hours after I wrote the last blog post, my contractions started and seven hours later, Edith Mary Buckley joined us in the world.

Brand new

Although she was a week behind schedule, when Edith decided that it was time to come out, she didn't hang about. I arrived at the hospital at 5.30pm unsure whether I had come in too early, and after being poked and prodded by one of the midwives, they packed me off to the labour ward at around 6.45pm. That's when Edith decided she was ready for the world, and with a sudden surge of contractions it became clear that she was going to arrive sooner than any of us expected, and 45 minutes later she was born. It sounds easy, doesn't it? It definitely wasn't. But it was worth it.

She's now a week old, and we're settling in to life as a family of four. Alec adores her, which is a huge relief for us, as we'd expected him to be nonplussed at best and had anticipated some jealousy and bad behaviour. But instead he keeps bringing me blankets for her to make her 'cosy', and he loves to stroke her hair, give her kisses and he makes sure to tell me every time she cries. "I've got a sister now!" he proudly told us in the car the other day, as he looked across at his new friend in the back.

Alec meets Edith

Ok, our weekends look likely to be quite sedate for the foreseeable future, and getting everyone out of the house at the same time is quite a major operation that definitely requires four sets of hands - I can't yet envisage how it will all function once Andy's back at work or away for any length of time. But presumably we'll get used to it, as thousands of bewildered parents have done before us.

For now, Edith is still in that blissful sleepy newborn phase where a juggernaut couldn't wake them from their slumber, so we are making the most of these easy early days. Give it a few months and I'll be blogging about napping techniques and sleep training all over again.

Preparing for two...

As I write, I'm a week overdue. Or rather, it's not me that's late (I'm never late) but Baby Buckley 2.0, who was due on 4th May. So I'm hovering about in that strange space between nothing and something, waiting for something Very Important to happen, but having no idea when that might be. Baby B has been a tricksy little thing, having been in the GO position for ages now and giving me a few twinges about two weeks ago that left me convinced I'd deliver early. But here I am, many days later, with Alec at nursery, Andy working away at all the physics, and me with little else to do but watch Downton Abbey and bounce hopefully on the birthing ball.

The odd thing is that preparing for No. 2 feels no more real than preparing for No. 1. Yes, I know there will soon be another small creature in the house - and the readied Moses basket and tiny nappies suggest that it's likely to be a baby - but it's still impossible to piece together this information with my bulging belly and picture a brand new human being. I know what to expect this time, of course: there will be sleepless nights, hours sitting on the sofa unable to move because of the feeding/sleeping baby and many, many nappies to change. But there are still so many unknowns too: What will he/she look like? Will they have hair? Will they look like Alec? Will they be a good sleeper/eater? Will they have colic? Will this one turn out to be completely different to the first?

And then there's the prospect of two. Given how much time is taken up just looking after our fairly competent toddler already, where will the extra time come from to look after the baby? And of course there's the dreaded destabilising of our happy status quo: what will Alec make of the baby...?

Friends tell me that yes, having two is hard. That you will marvel at how much time you had before you had two of them, how you had it so easy and simply didn't realise. How sleepless nights are so much more difficult to manage when you have a toddler to get up for in the morning, and how no time will ever be your own again - if you aren't with one of the children, you will be with the other.

But if this were the full story, no one would ever have more than one. They also tell me that seeing your two children together is one of the most beautiful things in the world and that even though you thought there was no more love left in you after No. 1, somehow you find it all over again for No. 2. So we're going ahead and doing it. It's too late to back out now. See you on the other side.