I hadn’t banked on a 6lbs 4 baby with a preemie sized head! The one on the right was more sleeping bag than hat.

I made the larger one on a loop, using a short knit pro cable and short 4mm tips and all the ends of the Lang yarn from the blankets. When I came home I remade the preemie size and tried out dpns. I’ve been scared stiff of those but it was nothing like as hard as it looks and I’ll probably use them next time I make a larger size too.

Here is the result. A full on rainbow boy The bear is Toffee, a lovely present from lovely friends, who has gained a hat to look after!

I’ve got socks to try next, a blanket to back, a cardigan to make up and a bag to have go at. Plenty to occupy me while I curl up on the sofa and expand a baby

Today, thanks to some help from a friend with several early babies, I’ve got a bit more of a grip of getting food into him despite earlyness and jaundice making him sleepy – and we are doing better. After 2 highly successful breast feeding experiences, I was not expecting to get caught out this time but the problems are minor and resolving and I think we have reversed the circle before it got critical. But that’s a post for another day. 

For Ben and I, today has been all about feeding and pumping and getting him to be full and awake enough to latch properly. Fran was at school, thrilled to the core with a glowing report card stuffed with 5 stars for effort and behaviour and predicted grades which would already please me – and which I am quite sure will improve further. The others have been engrossed in Lego games and Lego building, having earned a day off by working hard each morning this week despite new baby. Josie has read to me in bed each morning, Amelie has tried really hard and Maddy has been great. This week her achievements are two 500 words stories, creating a net for a folding box that opens up into a pack away smurf house, a gorgeous cake and fabulous music and generally lovely behaviour. It’s been a low key week while we all sort out our emotions, but rather wonderful. 

I’ve been keeping my daily photo diary over on Merrily.Me but I had to put this one here too.

However, our new feeding methods seem to mean he now understands bout awake and hungry, so no time for more now who knows how tomorrow will feel, but today has had a more even feel to it, a sense of mental and physical relief that is long overdue. 

Ben is beautiful but it took us all a few days to acknowledge that he doesn’t actually stop Freddie being dead. None of that is gone way, Freddie should and could be here, a bundle of 22 month old gorgeousness and he isn’t. Ben should have a big brother to poke at him and he just doesn’t. Last night that all suddenly seemed much too wrong especially when I suddenly caught a sleeping angle of Ben’s face that was the image of a photo of Freddie on one of his deepest sleeping days. Sleeping babies have horrified me for nearly 2 years; just before I had Ben I said “I need to know he can open his eyes and breathe, nothing else matters” and of course he came out with his tiny, not ready eyes stuck together with vernix and needing to be reminded about breathing. An early baby is an exercise in watching a healthy baby sleep and watching babies sleep is not entirely something I find easy to do. Getting thought pregnancy was such a minefield that I didn’t actually give any thought to afterwards; it hadn’t occurred to me I would transfer paranoia to him just keeping living once he was here. And I keep nearly calling him Freddie too, which is hard, though I am not the only one apparently. Max says he does it too. Oh that little boy left himself on our heart so very hard :/ I wish I could’ve had both of them here. Two boys would have been brilliant. 

Ben shifted most of his baby spots yesterday, met my lovely midwife Wendy and managed to lose less than 10% of his birthweight, if only just less.  Half way through the day he finally connected hungry with waking up and feeding and he’s been more alert and feeding well since. Max and I are trying to work out if he’s actually been physically on his own for more than 10 minutes since getting home but I don’t think he has. He’s always in someone’s arms not that he actually seems to mind his own company particularly. He isn’t a fussy baby, as yet anyway. 

Yesterday had plenty of visitors and today has some too but we both feel the girls need to otherwise get some normal back as they are drifting and dwelling a bit, so Max is going to get them a bit busier. I need to sleep as I think snatches of sleep are not sustaining my emotional resilience as well as it could be. Besides I need to recover so I can get on and start back to running I have race for life to do on July 10th. I’m encouraged to see I have less than a stone to lose to be back at my lightest, which is good given I can still see I’m swollen up in places  I think about 7lbs of what’s left is baby remnants, so I reckon that’s good.

I’ve come up with the perfect way to watch him grow. We can take pictures of him measured against blanket squares

These are a few of his favourite things. 

 And this was my favourite thing yesterday. Being used enough to being born to stretch out till his toes pointed out the end of the blanket. 

 And an evening snuggling on the sofa, just three of us, getting used to how thing are now and will be. 

36 hours at home has done much to restore me. I feel like my old self, more or less. Not my pregnant or ttc self either, but some self there hasn’t been for a long time. Actually, I’m not sure where she came from, possibly a self from something like 2005 but with a layer of maturity I guess I didn’t have then. I’m someone who knows how to be grateful now, I hope and enjoy the moment.

Maybe that’s a new self

Max is being very protective. I think he saw me managing in hospital and then saw me actually rather floored and panicked by coming home to huge boisterous children and noise and multi-channel conversations. He’s done a great job of helping the girls to just back off and let me settle in and acclimatise and yesterday felt much more manageable.

Benedict is continuing to be utterly gorgeous and charming and he is just so very cute.

Being 3 weeks early is a novelty to me and he’s a very different thing to my term babies. He’s struggled with jaundice from a few hours old and yesterday, released from the phototherapy blanket at the hospital, he got very yellow and was sleepier than made me happy. We sat under a window all day and eventually I put him down with a minimal amount of clothing until he woke up and had a huge feed on both sides. He’s been more alert and waking for feeds in his own since, but I’ve had some good advice from people with early baby experience and I’m going to manage him a bit more proactively for a few days.

I had to take a photo of an awake moment yesterday just for proof he really could!

The best thing about yesterday was my sister coming to visit and bringing Nina too as well as a heap of gorgeous clothes that include things from Kit and things my friends gave me for Freddie and which I bundled off to her when we didn’t need them for him. It was good to get them back but even better to see my sister, who has managed supporting me through the minefield of my loss and having two babies of her own with such grace and brilliance.

We thought this was pretty funny.

All the time I was pregnant, the girls would ask how big Marmite was and I would compare him to a water bottle. Turned out to be quite an apt comparison.

He is incredibly dainty, though with comically long arms. His legs are all scrunched up still and his arms hang out of the bottom of his baby gro so half the time he looks like he’s been sawn off in the middle. He’s not really thin or scrawny though, just the exact opposite of his brother, who was long and stretched. Benedict is a titch who likes to be all curled up. He had a horrendous crop of spots yesterday but squinting at him in the dark, I’d say they’ve all gone now. Only Fran had them so badly and he is fair like her so I suspect he’s not going to be one of my olive skinned babies.

Letting mummy eat dinner and trying out the other blanket. I was going to put the back on it this weekend ready for today, which was supposed to be d-day. So much for making plans. I wonder if it will ever get done?!?!

Waking up to congratulate Fran on her upstart retrieval at gym.

I’m loving every moment of this. Max and I curled on the sofa with him last night and just stared at him for about 3 hours. I’m trying not to be too sad just now, I want his baby moon to be his but all this love does make us both acknowledge again that really, there was nothing bearable about losing Freddie, no matter how new to us he was. (I knew that, but Max and I are very different and much of our loss is unspoken between us). It takes no time at all to be passionately in love with a new child. Being born on a Friday too, Benedict is on the same timeline as Freddie and I keep remembering what was happening at this point or by this day. We travelled so many miles of pain in those days and this is such bliss in comparison.

I think today will be a milkier day, I’ve seen him root for the first time overnight which is a good sign, so I better get some more sleep. I’m much less sore since lunch time yesterday and my brain is expanding to cope with the tumble of family life, so hopefully today will be a good day.

I don’t think either of us could quite believe it. I don’t think I’ve ever known both of us so similarly emotionally affected by something. It was an incredible day. And now we are home and sometime in the next few weeks, Benedict will become ‘one of the kids’. With stuff. And his spot. And things he does which are him and which we will look back on and say ‘yes, you were like that right from the start’.

He’s all here, all that potential and character and individual-ness. And this time we get to enjoy it.

It was only really looking at this again last night that brought it home to me. I will never quite forgive the universe for what it put my children through; for my stoical little Maddy to be the one that broke down….

I’m prepare to forgive it a bit, now that we are here on the other side, but only just. We are a family of 8 who have to make do as a 7. That will never be okay.

Yesterday the girls got to cuddle baby Ben, something we never were able to give them with Freddie. It was glorious to watch.

I can see the strain and grief melting away from them. And there is nothing quite like seeing your husband being smitten by his son for falling in love all over again

Ben started to be more awake last night and he and I did the feeding and cuddling night that is the start of many. I slept upright him on my chest and it felt like I had been given my world back.