After three days of “are we/aren’t we” moving today, and always being told “definitely later today”, we have finally moved to our new home in the Children’s Hospital.
When we first visited the ward a week ago it was really overwhelming. It feels like a proper hospital, unlike NICU which was a different world of cute but very poorly babies. Now we are here, the thought of it is more overwhelming than the reality.
We walked Clara to the Children’s Hospital from NICU via all the internal corridors. Not quite the same as the first walk we imagined to be around our picturesque Cotswold village! However, we’re very lucky to have such excellent facilities not only nearby, but attached to each other on the same campus (via a maze of corridors that take half an hour to walk end to end).
Clara was in her first ever pram – not the fashionable Silvercross travel set we bought her, but a retro classic :
The corridors are freezing so we swaddled Clara, pipes wires and all, and wrapped her in extra blankets. The cherry on top was a hand knitted bobble hat, donated by a very talented volunteer. It just happened to compliment her raspberry inspired outfit perfectly.
Clara is a little girl in a big girls bed now! Only this morning she was sticking her feet through the bars of her cot in NICU, now I can barely reach the other side of the bed myself.
In NICU there is one nurse to one or two babies. In the children’s hospital, it’s one nurse to four, sometimes eight, babies. There’s a lot more responsibility given to parents to feed, nappy change, bathe, entertain, give oral medicine, comfort. All the things any parent would be doing but at home. It’s not quite the same having to ask for the portable bath, or wait until a nurse is visible to request some extra equipment. It’s not quite home just yet.
I’m staying with Clara tonight, sleeping on the sofa beside her cot. Finally, I get to do another ‘mum’ thing I hadn’t been able to do in NICU – those ever exciting 3am feeds. Bring. It. On.
Clara and the Gutcracker 