Читать книгу The Complete Parenting Collection - Steve Biddulph, Steve Biddulph - Страница 60

My daughter is now a young woman, yet it seems like only yesterday that she was being born. That was a day to remember! We had planned on a home birth, but had a back-up plan for a hospital transfer if necessary. And sure enough, the labour ended with an emergency Caesarean at about 3 a.m. – not at all what we had hoped for. The pact I’d made with my wife Shaaron was, ‘Nobody else takes this baby’. So I was there in the operating theatre, and our baby went straight from the weighing scales and into my arms.

While Shaaron recovered from the operation over the next few days, I slept on a stretcher bed on the floor of her hospital room, our baby tucked beside me, which often caused shrieks of shock from nurses who stumbled in for the 2 a.m change of shift. It was a great system – Shaaron knew our baby was close and safe, not off in a nursery somewhere, and I could hand her up to Mum for a feed at any time. Sometimes a nurse would discreetly ask Shaaron if this was what she really wanted. She would smile and say, ‘Yes, of course!’