A Year Ago, Our Lives Changed Forever

On this night exactly one year ago, I found myself unable to sleep. The then-heavily-pregnant me tossed and turned and ended up going going outside to camp on the couch beside DD who was, at that time, engrossed in some Champions League match. I can’t remember who Liverpool was playing that night but I remember that they won. (I just checked — it was PSV).

I ended up sleeping very little that night, and it felt like no sooner had I gone to sleep, I was roused at around 7am by a “click” within me, and what felt like a trickle of pee. I rushed to the toilet and all was well. But when I returned to bed and lay down, I felt the same sensation again. This time I had an inkling that this day might not be just another ordinary day after all. After the third time, and after I’d ascertained that it was probably not pee that was flowing, I woke DD with a tentative “I think my water broke”. He was wide awake in a flash. The contractions came soon after, and we timed them at about 8 minutes apart. A call with our gynae confirmed that we were to head to the hospital. It was time — our baby was coming, 8 days earlier than expected.

I don’t think the rest of the day is of any interest to anyone but the 2 (maybe 3) of us! I do remember many things about it like it was yesterday though — the despair of being in pain and left to the mercies of the labour ward nurse when DD when to complete the admission procedures, going through happy photographs from our holidays that dear DD brought to distract me from the contractions, the weird woozy feeling from the painkiller to dull the contractions before the epidural was administered, the really awful gut wrenching VEs (I really hated those), feeling awfully hungry but throwing up the milo that they finally let me have in the evening, the shivering which was a side effect of the epidural. Through it all, we knew our precious baby waited at the finish line for us and that kept us going. And by God’s grace, everything progressed smoothly, albeit a little more slowly than we hoped after the epidural was administered.

By 6pm we were ready to push and push we did. Bet you didn’t know that that was the moment that Noey was actually named. We were 90% sure that he was going to be Noah, but since we’d waited that long anyway, we thought we’d have a look at him first to see if the name fit before confirming. As it turned out, in the middle of the pushing process, our gynae and the nurses turned to DD and asked him what Little Being’s name was. At that time, DD proffered the tentative reply that we were thinking of calling him Noah and immediately our gynae and the nurses started calling out to our as yet unborn little Noey: “Noah, come on out Noah!”. And that was that.

Noey came into our lives at 7.32pm that night and, cliched as it may sound, our lives have never been the same.

 

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Tonight I cradled my baby as I nursed my 11 month-old to sleep for the last time. Tomorrow he will be 1 year old. Officially a toddler and no longer a baby (even if he will always be MY baby). I let him nurse longer than I sometimes would, and when he was drowsy but not quite asleep, I unlatched him. He sat up with half closed eyes and dived towards me, his palm opening and closing as he signed “milk”. I gently moved away from him. “No more milk-milk darling. Come, go to sleep. You can do it,” I whispered in his ear. He protested a little, thrashed around a little, but he went to sleep on his own. (Ok, with his hands clutching me and his face buried in my shirt.)

I’m so proud of my big boy.

Happy Birthday Little Noey. We love you more than you’ll ever know.