The Great Summer Cull of 2009

The lack of sun at the moment has really put the brakes on my token dietary supplementation efforts.

In despair I have put a number of plants out of their misery including:

3 x Eggplants
6 x Snow Pea Vines
1 x Row of Spring Onions
1 x Row of Rocket
1 x Row of Swiss Ruby Chard
2 x Containers of Bok Choy
2 x Zucchini plants
1 x Chilli plant

Now I am down to just my herbs, a couple of cucumber vines on the way out, a zucchini plant that isn't showing much promise and a couple of tomato seedlings. It's a very sad looking balcony at the moment but on the plus side it gives us a bit more room to hang out Boudi's cloth nappies....

The Best Seed I've Ever Sown：ボーディ

On Wednesday morning 25^th the wife had a bit of a show on one of her pads and told me that she thought Boudi （ボーディ）　would be coming soon. At about 9:30pm that night she woke me up to tell me that she thought her waters had broken and by 10:00pm she started feeling some contractions. Because her waters had broken we had to go straight into the hospital for a check-up to make sure everything was OK and we were there from about 11:00pm until about 10:00am on Thursday morning 26^th with my Mum arriving at the hospital around 6:00am as the second support person for the wife.

As the wife wasn’t contracting regularly and there were no other complications we were able to go back home and were told to return to the hospital at 6:30am on Friday the 27^th for her to be induced if she didn’t start contracting more regularly in the meantime. My mum stayed with us that night and we all managed to get a few hours sleep (even though the wife was contracting she was still able to get a little sleep!). We were up early and the wife was feeling good but still not contracting regularly so we decided to go to the hospital a bit early at 5am to help the wife settle into her birthing room before the serious business began.

Once the midwife hooked her up to the inducement drip and a bunch of uncomfortable monitors and she started to up the dose, the wife started to contract a lot more strongly and regularly and Mum and I worked hard to support her as best we could. For a while the wife was standing up and squatting during every contraction but we managed to talk her out of continuing that in order to save her legs! The midwife found that Boudi wasn’t in the ideal position and got the wife to lie on her side during which time the wife asked to try some gas to suck on during her contractions which by this stage were getting quite strong. The wife was quite vocal during her time on the gas but Mum was worried that she would break her teeth on the mouthpiece so the wife agreed to stop using it. She said that it didn’t do much to help her pain anyway!

The midwife came back in to check on how the wife was going and was happy with her stage of dilation and Boudi’s position and so the wife was able to get on her back instead of her side. The midwife stayed to give the wife a quick lesson in pain management through breathing which she mastered in about two contractions and from that point on through all of the contractions to come and all of the pushing until Boudi was out, she barely made a noise and required no other medication for pain!!! The wife even managed to have a bit of a nervous laugh during a break between contractions when Boudi’s head was all but through. Once Boudi’s head was out, I helped turn and lift him on to the wife's chest and we all had a tear in our eyes listening to him screaming. We were surprised that he was so clean, he had really long soft fingernails and so much hair! It was 2:37pm on Friday the 27 of November.

After Boudi had a suckle, the wife was taken away to surgery to have an epidural and to get her 3^rd Degree Tear cleaned and stitched up. Ma went home and I was left with Boudi in the birthing room for about 20 minutes until we were both moved into a woman’s ward room to wait for the wife to get back from surgery. I set up her and Boudi’s clothes and other stuff in the room until one of the midwives came to check Boudi’s temperature and found that he was a little bit cold. To help bring his temperature back up he was placed skin-to-skin onto my chest which was a great father-son bonding experience for us. We were both a little unsettled for a while as he was scratching my chest with his long fingernails and trying to latch onto one of my nipples! He soon got tired of that and gave up and we stayed like that until mum returned from surgery.

Everything went well with the wife’s surgery and I stayed with them in the ward until about 9pm. Over the next few days I spent from 8am to 8pm with them (except for between 12:00pm and 2:00pm during which time there are NO VISITORS allowed) until we were finally cleared to go home at 4:00pm on Monday the 30^th December 2009.

ボーディ