Starbaby is here!

There's so much I need to write in here. And so little time! So I have decided, rather than waiting for that pipe dream of having enough time to write everything I want to, I'm just going to plunge in and get going. I can always add in entries in the future.

Starbaby was born on 20th March 2013 at 39+3, 11 days after his big sister's 3rd birthday. Far from the calm home water birth we had planned, I ended up having a very much unwanted but needed caesarean in the wee hours of his birthday. Over the previous day his movements had slowed and I felt like something wasn't right. On the doppler, his heartbeat was faster than usual, and I heard a couple of decelerations. My midwife and I went to hospital, hoping that I'd have a CTG which showed everything was OK and he was just having a sleepy day. Unfortunately the opposite happened... the CTG showed, without a doubt, that he was in distress and needed to be out immediately. Daddy and BigSis rushed in from home in the middle of the night, I was taken into theatre and Starbaby was born at 2.23am weighing 5lb 11oz. He was covered in thick meconium and very floppy. We got him out just in time.

After a few hours of skin to skin and breastfeeding, he was taken to NICU due to his blood sugars being dangerously low and him being so floppy. The week he spent there was the hardest week of my life... being separated from my little boy was so horrendous words cannot describe it. We both came home on 27th March.

Here he in NICU at 4 days old... lots of breastfeeding and skin to skin helped his stay there be as short as possible.

Starbaby has unilateral talipes in his right foot and muscle weakness/problems in his left foot, both hands and left arm/shoulder. We don't know the long term prognosis for sure, but we're hopeful that he should have fairly normal movement in his limbs when he is older.

It is obviously a relief that Starbaby doesn't appear to have any serious medical conditions - we knew there was a good chance he would, and compared to many things, talipes is cope-able with. Still, the treatment he requires seems daunting right now. I hope in a few months I will barely be batting an eyelid about putting on his boots and bars, but at the moment... I just wish my gorgeous, tiny, squishy little boy didn't have to go through weeks of plaster casts and years of boots and bars  in order to be able to walk.

Our little Starbaby gets his first cast on this coming Tuesday...