To A&E we go!

It’s Christmas Eve, and today has been a bit of a rollercoaster ride. We’re due at my brother-in-law’s place for the family traditional duck breast and sweet potato dinner with optional baked Alaska - optional based on how much we’ve all snacked, and how many gins the chef has had (full love to my MIL!)

It’s our first attempt at dinner out. Okay, not out out, but still leaving our house, which for day 9 feels like a big deal, and something we’ve been excited about trying!

Our wonderful girl has managed to worry us though, she’s slept pretty much all day, has been a bit listless, and a bit floppy. We’ve spent the hours flip flopping between she’s totally ok, and something just feels wrong. She’s slightly high on the jaundice scale, not enough to worry, but enough that we were told to look out for certain symptoms, listlessness being one of them.

But we cracked on with the day. We have only known her for 9 days, how much do we really know?

No, wait she’s really sleeping, though.

It’s totally fine, babies sleep a lot.

Pick up an arm and it limply just drops.

But all her nappies today are looking good, she’s hydrated, she’s showing all the right signs.

When did she last cry? Why did she not do her usual scream the house down when we changed her?

Right, let’s get out of our heads, get in the car and go to dinner. By this point my wife and I have got ourselves in a little tiz - en route to the dinner, we stop on the side of the road again she’s just so tired and limp!

In our worry we tried to double down on the food - maybe she’s not getting enough breast milk? No problem lets top up with formula. Well, it turns out my daughter has zero self protection instinct and will simply eat until she vomits. To be fair, it’s a tad like me at an unlimited dim sum buffet.

So here we are, panicked that she’s limp, over sleeping, and she has just performed her own minor scene from the exorcist and painted my brother-in-laws wall (he didn’t know about that, let’s see if he reads my blog!).

So we make the decision to head to A&E, potentially excessive, but the very second the thought popped into my head, I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if we didn’t and something was wrong.

4 nurses and 2 doctors later and turns out she’s completely fine, but if you feed a baby a combination of all the milk your wife has to offer and add a crap ton of formula, babies will sleep a lot! “Feed, feed and feed some more” was some advice we took perhaps a little too literally.

Do I regret heading to the hospital? Absolutely not! Both my wife and I got the proper relief knowing our daughter is perfect, but we also learned a thing, and it’s a thing that you can’t get from the books or other people’s experience. I think it’s simply a right of passage, and unlikely to be our last (hopefully completely unnecessary) visit to A&E!

But here we are - another day and another learning about our gorgeous girl.