Jasmine Stalker-Firth

Jasmine was sick around 6am and at 7am she pulled out her NG tube. I was a bit annoyed with myself as I had seen at 6am that it was a bit loose and instead of dealing with it there and then, I lay back down and thought that I would sort it out later. If I had just restuck it to her face at 6am, at 9am I wouldn’t have found myself repassing it down her nose and making her upset. Still hindsight is 20/20.

She was a bit cross most of the day and quite rightly so. If it wasn’t enough that it was hotter than hell all day outside and in, I had already stuck a plastic tube down her nose and into her stomach before Neil gave her a bath which annoyed her. And then, we changed her PD dressing. Then her Grandparents came round so we were passing her round for cuddles.

Later we went to Mimi’s party. We are now the annoying folk who turn up at 5pm and get in the way instead of arriving at party time. Mimi and Ben were really nice about it and didn’t even make us help with the preparations. Mimi gave Jasmine lots of cuddles. We left just as she was due a feed (Jasmine not Mimi) as we didn’t want her throwing up on their nice settee.

After her feed we wandered along to see Chris and Lorna in The Regent. Unfortunately it was 7pm at that point and we were standing at the bar, Jasmine in arms, trying to order beer when we were asked to leave. Lots of people were staring and it finally dawned on us that it must seem a bit shocking to have a small baby in the pub. We had only popped in for a swift pint and a quick hello as we had planned to get back for 8pm to put her on her machine. But it must have looked pretty bad, especially as I was quite tired at that point and giggling a bit. They must have thought we had been on an all day pub crawl with her. On reflection, six months ago if I had seen a couple come into a pub with a small baby in the evening I would have tutted and been outraged too. Now I realise that we don’t know the half of what goes on in other peoples’ lives. The barman was very nice and said that it was the law and we could come back another day in the afternoon and no we couldn’t have beers to take outside!

Well and truly barred, we sat on the wall outside across the road from the pub and fed Jasmine the rest of her feed through her tube (ignoring the shocked stares of passersby). She was doing ok and even got some wind up so we felt safe to hand her out for cuddles when everyone turned up but alas she threw up, up the wall, so it was time to leave.

Got back about 8pm and popped her on her machine, but the excitment and heat of the day was all too much so she took ages to settle. What we learnt from this was: it is good to get ready before you go out as you only have five minutes sterile handwashing at that point thus preventing a wearing time of a cross baby and 15 minutes of sterile handwashing before all the other procedures. And also, it is good to have left-over curry from the the previous evening so that you don’t have to fiddle on cooking dinner when you are a bit worn out with it all.

We fed her more milk around 9pm as she was too hungry to wait to get hooked up to her feed pump and then she went off to sleep and was snoring away until 5am.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 10th, 2008 at 11:43 am and is filed under home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.