Birthday Bureaucracy

Father & Son

There’s an awful lot of bureaucracy involved with child birth! Marty had barely drawn his first breath when they passed me a little red book and told me not to lose it. This is basically the “baby book”; a catalogue of essential information such as his size and weight, his inoculations and injections, and an exhaustive list of everyone who has poked and prodded him, together with a note to say why.

To be honest I’d never realised just how much care babies get in his country and I have to say I’m very grateful. During the first week we had midwives popping over to check on us every few days, then the local GP gave him the once over, then the health visitor started visiting; Marty could barely fart without it being weighed, measured and jotted down.

The only point at which all this intensive scrutiny broke down was when we received a letter from the local hospital to inform us that they’d made an appointment on the 19^th Jan for Marty to have his hearing checked. The letter then broke into stern officialdom to point out that we had failed to attend that first appointment, that this had caused great distress within the NHS and that we had better make sure we attended the next appointment or they were going to have a huff and not let us have another one. Fortunately we had a number of good excuses, firstly we hadn’t received this earlier letter and secondly Marty wasn’t actually born until the 5^th of February; an event that most in the medical profession regard as an essential prerequisite for a hearing test.



Spot the difference

Health aside, the only other thing they are very keen for you to do is to register the birth as soon as possible. This is quite a pleasant little quiz where they ask you all sorts of complex questions such as “Who are you?” and “When was your wife born?” Fortunately I’d written down most of the answers already so I scored 75% first time ‘round.

Once the lady in charge was happy with the answers she passed me a fine quality ink pen and I added my moniker to Marty’s birth certificate, and there he was; officially born!

So we had a little red book, we had the birth certificate, there was just one last thing to do and Marty would be officially “Here”.... So I stopped off on the way home and bought the official “Baby on Board sticker” for the car.

The Umbilical cord

The most bizarre thing that a newborn baby comes with is an umbilical cord.

For some reason it’s currently vogue for the father to cut this cord when the baby arrives and I have no idea why they think this is in any way a good idea. If you are expecting to spend a great deal of your later life ceremoniously opening shopping malls, then fair do’s, you might gain some valid work experience chopping your way through an umbilical cord, but aside from that I can’t think of a positive. That all said, everyone else at the birth thought it was a great idea so I meekly went along with it.

Cutting the cord itself is like using a pair of scissors to slice through a particularly gristle ridden steak; it’s not exactly pleasant but it’s hardly a horrendous experience. What was a let-down was the complete lack of flash photography and the fact that the massed hordes of Paparazzi were noticeable only by their absence. Shame really as it was the sort of occasion that seemed to warrant an explosion of flash lights and a tumultuous round of applause at the very least.

So, having made the cut that proclaims your child as an independent entity, they hand him back to you. By now the purple tinges are fading away and he’s actually starting to look vaguely human, except that he has what seems to be a large slug attached to his stomach. And, just in case you missed the slug, they fit a huge yellow clip to it. 

I asked the midwife why they fitted such a huge clip to the umbilical cord and the answer she gave was that ‘umbilical cords differ in size’. This didn’t seem to explain why the clip was almost the size of the baby and only really made any sense if the Maternity unit occasionally delivered young pachyderms and stocked up on umbilical clips accordingly. Anyway, at least the enormous bright-yellow clip made it easy to find the baby again if you did occasionally misplace him.

By day three the slug like umbilical had withered away and was starting to look a bit like a vanilla pod, yet smell like a 6 day corpse. All this time you have to try to fit nappies ‘hipster’ fashion as you need to let this cord dry out, and little or nothing is going to stay dry if it’s anywhere near a nappy. This is all a little awkward, especially when you haven’t a great deal of experience in nappy fitting but, fortunately, by day 5 Marty’s cord disappeared - only to be found later that day, hidden in the leg of his baby-gro. We were a bit worried at first as his belly-button bled a little, but apparently that was entirely normal and sure enough it stopped completely after about a week.

Kilroy woz ere

I’m still not sure what to do with this old withered umbilical and its gigantic clip. It seems a bit macabre to store it as a keepsake, yet it doesn’t seem right to just throw it away. On a bright note at least the nappy changing is easier now we’re cord-free, in fact Marty has taken the opportunity to start sporting them “Simon Cowell” stylie... which is surely a good thing.

Birth

Having experienced the dubious ‘joys’ of childbirth from the spectators point of view I think it’s fair to say that God is a man and, what’s more, he’s a man with a fairly bizarre sense of humour. That the child should exit via the route it does is enough to warrant a bemused shaking of the head but that the mother-to-be has to wait until the child has first developed a head the size of a cannon ball is, quite frankly, a joke too far.

Mind you, the shock of realising that God and Frankie Boyle share the same sense of humour is nothing compared to the astonishing realisation that women will still line up to go through it all! That they might opt for it once is vaguely understandable; they are after all being swamped by hormones and bedazzled by newborn babies. What I truly can’t understand though is why on earth they would choose to go through it all again. Yet they do!

Apparently we had a fairly easy time of labour, in fact I barely raised a sweat. It all started about 1am in the morning - I woke up about 5am - and we were both fully expecting to be back from hospital in time for lunch and nappies. Sadly, that time table proved far too optimistic and it wasn’t until 10pm that evening that the lure of “gas & air” finally persuaded Leanne to head into hospital.

My wife had set her heart on using the birthing pool and that all seemed to work quite well for the first few hours. Then she was given a choice between the pool or better pain killers. I’m sure I’ve seen people make faster decisions but I can’t recall any and we were out of the pool, onto a table and away with the fairies faster than you could say Pethidine.

Finally, at 5:40am the baby arrived, much to everyone’s relief.

Leanne was of the opinion that knowing the sex of the baby beforehand was going to take away some of the joy of the moment, so my first real task of note was to sex the child.

I had imagined that this would be a hit and miss affair but as it turned out it was fairly straightforward, largely on account of our little baby boy possessing testicles the size of dinner plates – at least by comparison with his size. Thank God our proportions change as we grow to adulthood, if they didn’t men would be walking around the streets carrying their balls in wheelbarrows and women would have headed for the hills long ago.

So, having established that he was a he, my next task was to cut the cord. I can’t say I’d been looking forward to this, in fact, to be brutally honest, I’d have been perfectly happy pacing the hospital corridors and smoking the occasional cigar, suitably distanced from the gory details. Sadly, this is regarded as very old fashioned and, whether we like it or not, the man is now obliged to remain in close proximity for the entire event, no matter how gruesome it gets.

As it turned out the cord cutting wasn’t that bad. It was just like cutting through a bit of gristle, although I felt strangly obliged to mumble “God bless this ship and all who sail in her”.

And there we had it, one child expertly delivered after 30 odd hours of shouts and screams and umpteen cylinders of nitrous oxide.