5 My second-born...

I haven't blogged in a while as I have been busy taking some "paternity leave" over the last couple of weeks. My wife gave birth on February 2nd, 3 days overdue, to our beautiful baby daughter Alaina Julie Atkin.

I was definitely less panicked this time around than I was with my son Clark. I heard Liz get out of bed at about 4am and I mumbled something along the lines of "you aren't going into labour are you?". She said "yes". I did the natural thing that you would expect in this situation, and snap went back to sleep :-)

She woke me up at about half seven, and we got all our stuff ready, took Clark to my mum and dad's house and drove to the hospital. Of course there was no-where to park and we ended up having a fair trek from an outer car-park. This especially sucked for me as I had to carry all the bags. Why do us men always have to do the heavy carrying. It took a long time to walk there as Liz was lagging behind and had to stop occasionally, which I thought was rather inconsiderate given that it was about -2 degrees or something. ;)

Turns out the hospital was pretty rammed with other people in the same situation, so got a bit of a poky room in the hospital. Liz was a bit bummed that there wasn't a bath as they helped her through the last time she was in labour. But meh, it was fine, and we got a really nice midwife assigned to us.

Me & Alaina

The next few hours were basically me trying to help Liz through her contractions, and her telling me to GTFO and not touch her! I just about managed to talk her out of having any drugs, which she had been adamant about (until her contractions started). I'll give her some major credit though, she did the whole labour without any drugs whatsoever. What a hero(ine).

The whole process was a lot quicker than last time, and the actual birth seemed insane. She was 'measured' for only the second time at about 1.40pm, and it turned out she was fully dilated. About 90 seconds later, there was a screaming baby on the bed! The mid-wife and student doctor were still trying to put their gloves on! It literally fell out lol. I can see the hea...oh she's here!

I've been pretty busy since then, it seems that having two children is a lot harder work than one. Liz is basically taking care of the baby whilst I take care of Clark. He's dealt with the change pretty well so far, aside from trying to feed her from Cheese and Onion crisps when he met her for the first time, and trying to bosh her on the head with a wooden giraffe ornament (and being adamant that he wanted to do it, when he was sternly told no, lol).

Brother & Sister

Liz had to have a few stitches as a result of the hyper-turbo birth (poker references ftw) so she found the first week pretty tough going, but I think we're getting into the swing of things now, and hopefully I can get back to working full time as I rather need to earn some nappy money!