Dadding, season 2: the first few days

Posted on 18 March 2020

It’s time for season 2 of my dad notes. I recently had my second child and I’m on paternity leave. So I thought I’d jot down some notes of my experiences again.

This isn’t a full week, it’s just a few days, but they were an incredibly intense few days.

The birth

I got a call at work from my wife, Sonia, at lunchtime. She was feeling contractions, but she had felt them before and they had gone away again. It’s surprisingly difficult to know if you are genuinely in labour. But my work is very flexible, so I was able to just go home and work from home.

I went to pick up my eldest, Luke, from nursery at 5pm. We decided to leave him with a neighbour, just in case. When I got home from the neighbour’s, I’d been away maybe 50 minutes and Sonia had clearly progressed. She showed me the timings of contractions that she’d measured on her phone, and I called the midwife immediately.

We had planned a home birth, so various people came to our house. We had a lovely team – two midwives, a student midwife, a doula, and my mother-in-law. My mother-in-law was an excellent host: she cooked a nice dinner for everyone downstairs while Sonia and I were in our cocoon upstairs labouring and preparing for birth. We could hear the happy noises of a dinner party while we just sat together and hugged and focussed on our love for each other. Sonia was in a really good mental state. She used hypnobirthing and mindfulness techniques to get into a calm mental state; it was her second time going through the experience of childbirth; and we didn’t have to worry about getting to the hospital (a significant source of stress from first time round).

As the evening progressed, the contractions got more and more intense. Her meditative composure had been gradually but entirely replaced by an animal instinct. Soon it was time to push the baby out. Even I got physically involved, supporting her body weight to help her get one leg up to give the baby more room. Our beautiful baby arrived at 9.06pm and was passed to mum for his first cuddle. It was an incredibly special experience to be with Sonia through this.

However, even though this was the climactic moment after 9 months, it was by no means the end. Once the baby came out, he was quite blue in the face and took some stimulation to get him to cry. He had a low-ish 1-minute Apgar score and, even though this had improved by 5 minutes, we were concerned. Sonia still had the third stage of labour to go through (ie delivering the placenta).

We decided to go to hospital to get the baby checked out. We had pre-packed hospital bags for Sonia and baby, and I threw some things together for myself, and we got in the ambulance and headed over. The paediatrician wasn’t overly concerned, but recommended we stay for a few hours of observations, which effectively meant an overnight stay.

Day 2

So we stayed the night in hospital. I think Sonia and I got an hour of sleep in total between us that night. Sonia had the bed – I had to make do with a blow-up camping mattress. But baby had been fine overnight and so we were free to go home.

The baby (we still hadn’t decided on a name) was very hungry that day. It seems a bizarre design, but mother’s breastmilk doesn’t “come in” until baby has been trying to feed for some time. There is small amounts of colostrum before that point but basically there isn’t enough food for the baby. Newborns generally lose quite a bit of their birthweight during this time.

In our case, our baby was clearly desperately hungry and kept feeding for an incredibly long time. This caused Sonia significant pain and discomfort but it did help her milk to come in in the following days.

We still had to come up with a name. We decided we wanted a name before Luke, our eldest, met him, which meant before Luke got back from nursery. In the end, we chose the name Robin.

We gave Luke a present “from Robin” to make the first impression easier. So far, Luke seems proud to tell other people that he’s a big brother but mostly continues as he was ignoring Robin’s existence. I call that success.

The birthday

Through poor planning on our part, day 3 of our baby’s life was also his big brother’s third birthday. Thankfully, it was the day of the week he spends with his nanny, who took him for a special trip to the Science Museum. He had a great time there.

Meanwhile, we had to do our newborn checks for Robin. The plan was for a community midwife to do them at our home, but the midwife was ill, so we had to go into hospital (again) to get them done.

It’s hard to communicate just how difficult a trip to hospital and back was for us in those early days. We hadn’t slept, Sonia had just given birth 36 hours beforehand and definitely wasn’t “recovered” – she couldn’t walk further than a few tens of metres without significant pain and discomfort – the baby was still hungry because her milk hadn’t come in, and in this semi-conscious battle-worn state we had to get our baby into a taxi and out the other side, then find the right ward in hospital to have his checks done.

We went home and tried to get some proper sleep. But Robin woke us every 2–3 hours, as newborns do.

My father-in-law also arrived on this day, giving us some extra practical support so we didn’t have to worry about cooking/washing up/cleaning/laundry.

In summary

Birth is an incredible experience, but it is also exhausting. Then, having gone through it, there’s no respite: the hours, days and week after birth are also exhausting. We couldn’t have got through it without wonderful support from lots of lovely people.