Week 2.2 - Welcome home

I can still clearly remember the first night at home with my baby son.

"Welcome home". It's a phrase normally punctuated with an exclamation mark, and infused with warm, fuzzy feelings of happiness, familiarity, safety.

Sure, happiness was in there. But familiarity and safety? Not by a long shot! Fear, on the other hand? The feeling I'd talked myself into a job I was vastly under-qualified for? Check, and check.

We got home in the afternoon - Sean, baby Matthew and me, along with a bunch of "Welcome Baby Boy" and similar cards and a collection of stuff that was really too much for such a small person to have gathered together as essentials in just over 24 hours of life.

Like someone with the 'flu, I felt relatively OK until night fell. Sure, we hadn't a barney what we were doing, but I had no doubt that given time we'd be wielding muslin clothes and getting legs as ridiculously wriggly as they were tiny into miniature trousers as confidently as the best of them. Maybe daily baths would even become a thing - just because I could, rather than as some awful self-punishment.

Already familiar with the exhaustion that was to become as normal in my life as Cornflakes for breakfast, the three of us headed off to bed at the same time.

Matthew seemed to cop the point of bedrooms quite quickly, heading off to sleep with ease.

Sean and I...didn't. We couldn't. Suddenly the huge responsibility we'd taken on made itself comfortable and settled its whole weight on our shoulders. Perhaps I'd read too much into the SIDS info, but all at once the job of successfully keeping our little scrap of a baby alive through that night and all the others to come became as challenging as climbing a mountain. In a wheelchair. With no water.

We didn't sleep much that night. I cried at a point.

Fast forward 18 months or so and there are still some nights when I don't sleep much. And cry. But the reasons have changed. Two nights ago the scrap of a baby who has turned into a bolshy toddler vomited on my face, which effectively put paid to quality slumber that night. And tears are a destination I'm sometimes driven to by the same toddler, whose relationship with sleep has changed since that first night to some sort of on-again-off-again one that I for one just can't predict.

But, thank God, the first night fear is but a memory.