6 weeks old and Sophie is a wee toerag!

Sophie is a whole six weeks old today - or 33 weeks if you want to think of it that way - we go by both ways of looking at it!

We have really seen her determined nature coming through this week...she can really make it known if she doesn't want something! On Monday, her grandad and I went to see her and we could see a huge difference in the two days since we had last seen her - she was looking so much podgier in the cheeks, upper arms and shoulders. That was the first time we had seen a dramatic change in such a short time. She had her eyes open a lot of the time as well, and every time she opens her eyes she looks so worried, which is a really cute look! She does something with her eye that is exactly the same look as her Daddy does :)

Very worried little face!

Sophie was wearing a chin strap on Monday because she keeps opening her mouth and letting all the air come back out and she does not like that look! She spent all afternoon trying to pull the chin strap off, and often succeeding - despite the fact that it was velcroed on and quite hard to get off! She is surprisingly strong for one so small.....

Chin strap successfully removed by young Miss B

Sophie had hiccups on Monday night, and for the first time, we could actually hear them! It was the cutest little squeaky noise :) She seems to get hiccups quite a lot and always has done - I could feel them when I was still pregnant, and she also had them at one of the many scans I had towards the end of my pregnancy.

Sophie and her little friend Reece in the next incubator were having fun all afternoon on Monday taking it in turns to set their alarms off. It was constantly one of them then the other, ALL afternoon! They had the poor nurses running around like demons! Reece has now moved into high dependency and Sophie has a new neighbour. I don't think they will be such a good double act as Sophie and Reece were. I wonder if the nurses just couldn't cope and had no choice but to separate them!

I was allowed Sophie out for cuddles on Wednesday, which made my week! It was only the second time I'd held her and it was so special. She was really snuggled into me, and her alarms didn't go off at all while she was out - she was so happy and settled. She was out for about half an hour, but I could have sat there with her all day, given half a chance! She didn't feel anything like as tiny as the first time I had her out for cuddles. The nurse told us that as long as she is stable, we should be allowed her out for cuddles every three or four days now :)

The dreaded chin strap is back...

On Friday when Daddy took the milk delivery in, there was good news. Sophie had been off the CPAP for four whole hours overnight, with no dips! The longest she had been off it before was one hour. When I arrived to see her in the afternoon, she was off again and I saw her little face with no mask and also saw her without her hat. She was looking absolutely gorgeous, and I was so happy that Alan arrived from work earlier than expected because I was longing for him to see her like that! She managed 3.5 hours off the CPAP that time before having a couple of dips, which was the nurse's cue to put her back on again.

Our gorgeous girl off the CPAP

When I arrived on Friday, I was told the amazing news that Sophie had been weighed again and is now up to 3lb 5oz! We were expecting her to have gained weight since her last check at the end of last week, but not as much as that! Her feeds have now been increased to 12.5ml every hour. The nurse, Sarah, also told me that we are getting very close to a heated cot - she just needs to gain a little bit more weight and she will be good to go! Sarah said it may even be within the next few days. All in all, a day of good news.

On Saturday when we arrived to see Sophie, there was a none too fragrant aroma coming from her incubator! Simon the nurse thought I was crying and came over to check I was ok, but my eyes were just watering from the foul smell! Alan found this highly amusing....until he found out it was his turn to do the nappy change, heehee. It took him a little while to recover from that task....but at least I got to see him change a nappy for the first time!

Sophie 'helping' daddy with the nappy change

We had a lovely hour just the three of us, and then daddy was allowed to have Sophie out for cuddles. She was out with him for about an hour, while he talked to her about what it's going to be like when she comes home, all the animals we have and what her room is going to be like. She certainly looked as if she was enjoying hearing about it all! When it came time for Sophie to go back in, the nurse asked if mummy would like cuddles first....I definitely wasn't about to refuse! I had lovely cuddles for about half an hour, then had two delightful nappy changes to deal with...one straight after the other - nice! Sophie likes to make nappy changes into a challenge for us, by clamping her legs together (usually with our fingers trapped between her ankles) or using her tiny hands to try to push us away!

Uncle Greig and Aunty Claire visited in the afternoon and brought Sophie her first Tatty Teddy. Every baby needs a Tatty teddy :)

Today, we had a day at home and the spare room is now mostly empty and ready to start being turned into the nursery. We went to Homebase and looked at paint and borders - the plan is to have very pale pink walls - we got a tester but it's not quite right - and we found a lovely border which will be just perfect.

Grandad has ordered the nursery furniture this week - very exciting! It feels nice to be starting to do things in preparation for Sophie coming home, even though we are a few weeks away from that yet.

When we phoned the hospital this morning to see how Sophie was, we were told she had been off the CPAP for another four hours overnight, and they'd had to take her off it again this morning because she was wrestling with the mask and driving the nurses demented! She is so determined to be rid of all the equipment - she even pulled her feeding tube out yesterday. She is such a little toerag but we love her soooo much already! We can't believe how determined and stubborn she is at such a young age.

Uncle Brian and Aunty Steph visited Sophie this afternoon and sent us pictures of her which was really nice as we were both missing her like crazy - and we didn't like to think of her having no visitors.

5 weeks old - 2lb 14 and daddy's first nappy!

Sophie is now 5 weeks old - or 32 weeks if that's how you prefer to look at it, and has reached 2lb 14 oz which is over a pound more than when she was born!




She was slightly anaemic on Tuesday and had to have a blood transfusion, but the nurse assured me that almost all the premature babies have to have one sooner or later. They were just setting it up when I arrived to see her that afternoon, and had to get a doctor to come to put the cannula in her tiny hand. I couldn't watch that being done and waited in the corner till it was done, only to find out it hadn't worked and they had to re-do it in the other hand :( Then that didn't work either so they finally got it to work in her foot. It was too horrible knowing that all those nasty things had been done to our tiny little baby!

A fat-cheeked Sophie getting her blood transfusion

The blood transfusion did at least do its job, and Sophie was much better on Wednesday and looking a lot less peaky again.

Sophie received some really cute tiny little pink bootees as a present, and Alan took them in because they are small enough to fit her just now. They ended up on her hands though, as they were the only thing that the nurse could find that would stop her pulling her tubes out! Sophie looked as if she was feeling very silly with those on her hands :) She managed to wriggle out of them a few times....

Sophie with her bootee on her hand...

I have been getting much better at the nappy changes and can now do them completely unsupervised and fairly quickly, despite the fact that Sophie really doesn't make it easy with all the wriggling and kicking that she does! She likes to fix me with her beady eye while I'm changing her nappy, which is so cute.

Watching mummy...

She has been getting eye drops since the end of the week, to treat a wee eye infection that has possibly been caused by the CPAP - again something that is common in the babies.

Daddy got to pick Sophie up inside the incubator on Thursday and we were also shown how to pick her up and turn her over, by putting one hand under her head and the other under her bottom and just turning her with the hand that's under her bottom - looks very slick when the nurse does it but it'll be a while till we are brave enough to try it ourselves!

Waiting for a nappy change

Daddy also did his first nappy change on Saturday, which I missed :( Somehow, he managed to get one that wasn't too minging! Paul, the nurse who was looking after Sophie earlier in the week had suggested that I should keep a chart of how many nappies we each do in the hospital, and their content, and make sure that Alan catches up when we get home...I think that's not a bad idea!

Sophie's new shoes :)

Four weeks old - daddy's first cuddle, and the first time we saw Sophie's face!

Phew, what a week this has been! Cuddles with daddy AND us seeing her without her mask and hat for the first time :)

Daddy doing some cheek-stroking!

Sophie is now being weighed every three days and is putting weight on steadily. She is now 2lb 6oz which seems really big compared to her birth weight of 1lb 13.8oz. It's really nice to see her past the 2lb mark.

She has been a bit of a toerag this week and has been trying to pull all her tubes out, so she has been wearing some mittens that are far too big for her to stop her from doing that!

On Thursday, it was a lovely nurse looking after Sophie, so I asked her when Daddy might be allowed cuddles with Sophie. She asked what time he would be coming in and when I said he'd be in just after 5pm, she said he could get Sophie out that night!! I was so excited that he was finally going to get to cuddle his baby - probably nowhere near as excited as he was when I texted him to tell him, but excited nonetheless!

Alan's colleague Dougie was in to meet Sophie that night, and he took so many photos of the first cuddles :)

Daddy absolutely loved his cuddles with Sophie - he'd had a horrible day at work, but cuddles with his little daughter made everything alright again. It was so sweet to see them snuggled together and they both looked so happy.

One of our first family photos...

On Saturday when we went in to visit Sophie, the grumpy nurse barged Alan's dad out of the way and grumped "Let mum in"! I thought she was just being her usual grumpy self - especially when I started asking her if she wanted me to put the milk in the fridge or the freezer and she barked "Just look at your daughter"! When I turned round and looked at Sophie, there she was without her mask covering her face - she was off the CPAP and only had her feeding tube and another little tube under her nose! It was so amazing to finally see what our baby looked like after four whole weeks - and she is gorgeous! She had been off the CPAP for a whole hour and was about to go onto it again but the nurse had actualy kept her off till we got in and saw her without her mask - surprising, when it was the grumpy one!

Finally seeing Sophie's face

The next day when we went in, the nurse took the CPAP off and also took her hat off and we finally got to see what she properly looks like! She has a lot of very dark hair and she is just beautiful. We finally saw her looking like a proper little baby - it's been so hard wondering what she looks like all these weeks and impossible to imagine her ever looking like a full term baby, but she actually does look like one - just really tiny! We have seen so little of her face up till now - we could see she was cute but we had no idea just how cute!

Our gorgeous girl

Three weeks old - mummy's first cuddle

Sophie is three weeks old today - and would have been 30 weeks if she had stayed put! She has been weighed for the first time since just after she was born, and is now 2lb 4oz, which is great :) It's lovely to see her putting weight on and getting little podgy cheeks. Her feeds are being increased pretty much every day. She has been taken back off the ventilator and put back onto CPAP again but does have to get a funny chin strap on sometimes, to stop her from opening her mouth and letting all the air back out again!

Lovely chin strap....!

Daddy has been going into the hospital every morning before work with the milk delivery, and I've been going up every other day through the week with Alan's dad and/or my parents, and both days at the weekends.

All Sophie's doting grandparents visited her on Thursday and they are all absolutely besotted with her - it's impossible not to be!!

I had a particularly nasty nappy to change on Thursday - I won't go into too much detail but let's just say little Miss Baxter was not very ladylike, had the trots in her nappy and then again when I was taking the nappy off her....and then put her foot in it, literally! It was meant to be my first unsupervised nappy-change but I had to get the nurse to come and help me because she still had various wires attached to her foot so it wasn't just a case of washing her foot!

My first time lifting Sophie

The upside of the trots incident was that Sophie had to get a clean sheet, so I was asked to lift Sophie up while the nurse changed her bedding :) She told me I wasn't allowed to keep telling Sophie to poo just so that I got to do that!!

Sophie's Uncle Michael and Aunty Lesley visited on Saturday and fell in love with their little niece. I had the best surprise ever when I arrived that afternoon and Jane, the nurse, asked if I wanted Sophie out for cuddles!! That was the first time I had ever held her and it was absolutely amazing. Jane put her inside my top so that we had skin to skin contact (or kangaroo care, as it's called) and she was in there for a whole hour. She was soooo snuggly! She cried a tiny little bit when she was first brought out of her incubator, but soon settled down and seemed really content just to snuggle with mummy.

Very first cuddle with mummy - a special moment

Uncle Michael and Aunty Lesley got to stroke her cheek, which they wouldn't have been allowed to do if she was in her incubator. I felt so bad that Alan didn't get a turn at holding her and can't wait for him to get his turn. Jane held Sophie up for me to kiss her cheek for the first time before she went back into her incubator. It was the best afternoon ever!!

Meeting Uncle Michael

We are being allowed so much more to do with Sophie now, and she is really responding to us. You can see the difference when it's Alan or me touching her - she stretches out and wriggles as soon as we touch her and she still loves to grip our fingers or stroke our hands. Daddy has still escaped all nappy changes....

Sophie now has two toys in her incubator to keep her company. I spent ages raking the shops looking for a special toy for her - it's the first thing I have bought for her that is just from me, so I wanted to be really special and it took me a long time to find just the right thing. I ended up getting her a pink Miffy which is the perfect size for her incubator - and it's even better that it's pink! And for Easter, Granny and Grandpa gave her a Peter Rabbit. Let's hope she likes rabbits!

Two weeks old and we have a little piglet!

Saturday night was my first night back home, and my first night far away from Sophie. It was really awful not being able to just go downstairs to see her whenever I wanted to, but at the same time was lovely to have a night in my own bed for the first time in over a week!

Sophie aged 2 weeks, with the lovely Jane in the background - the first nurse who looked after her

There was a missed call on both our mobiles on Sunday morning, and we found out the number was the hospital but it didn't accept incoming calls! We were panicking in case sometime was wrong with Sophie. Eventually we managed to get hold of the number for the neonatal unit, after ringing the maternity ward and various other numbers that we had, and it turned out it was just Moira, the nurse who was looking after Sophie that day, wondering if we were going in with some more milk, as she was being a wee piglet! What a relief.

Alan has been on paternity leave last week and this week, so we have gone up to the hospital every day this week. We've had to go to see the midwife every morning on the way there and seem to have got into a little routine of seeing the midwife late morning, buying some lunch somewhere on the way up and having it in the hospital canteen before going in to spend the afternoon with Sophie. She has had loads of visitors and is turning into a very popular - and very spoilt! - little baby!

Sophie is getting better every day and we can already see a difference in the way she looks. We were told that during the first ten days or so, her skin would mature to the same stage as a full term baby and become much less red, and we saw that happen this week. She seems to be filling out a bit already as well.

On Monday I got to change my first nappy! I was quite scared in case I hurt Sophie but the nurse helped me and showed me what to do. I couldn't believe the power in those tiny legs - she was able to push me off when I was trying to take her dirty nappy off! It's not easy trying to change a tiny nappy through two holes in an incubator, but I will no doubt get the hang of it soon enough.

Young Miss Baxter decided half way through the week that this breathing lark is just too much hard work and had fun winding mummy and the nurses up by constantly dropping her heartrate and setting her alarms off. Eventually they decided to put her back on the ventilator for a while, as she is still very little and her lungs are really immature so she just needs that little bit of help for a few days. She has done well to be on the CPAP for so long at her age.

Sophie's feeds increased to 2.5ml every hour on Wednesday which is a lot more than the 0.5 every three hours that she started out on just a week ago. She opened her eyes for the first time (that we had seen, anyway!) on Tuesday and looked sooo cute keeking at us!

She is also off all the antibiotics that she has been on, and generally doing really well. The nurse showed me how to wrap my hands round her to make her feel as if she is still in the womb - it makes them feel secure. Sophie loved it and so did I - it was the closest thing I've had to a cuddle. She has started reaching her hands out to touch us when we stroke her, and she also grips our fingers - she has such a tight grip! I feel much more like her mummy now that we are having a bit more contact with her and I've changed a nappy and been allowed to feed her through the feeding tube.

Sophie's monitor with the alarms she loves to set off!

All the nurses keep telling us how feisty Sophie is, and how she knows how to tell them if she doesn't like something! I saw her kicking a nurse when she didn't want her nappy changed at the beginning of the week, and when the nurse moved Sophie's leg onto her blanket, Sophie pushed her off with her foot and put her leg right back where she wanted it!

Granny and Grandpa ordered Sophie's pram this week and it arrived on Wednesday - much quicker than expected! It somehow makes it all seem so much more real having a pram sitting in the living room! We will need to learn how to put it up and down and find out all the things it does - plenty of time for that though. We just can't wait to have Sophie home to put in it now.

It's getting harder and harder to leave Sophie, the more time we spend with her :(

I'm recovering well from the c-section although still feeling really tired and the painkillers and blood pressure tablets are making me feel quite horrible. I've worked out that's what is making me fall asleep half way home from the hospital every night!

Daddy giving a feed

One week old (or 28 weeks!)

Well, that's young Miss Baxter's first week in, and she is doing really well.

When she was born, she weighed 1lb 13.8oz and was 13 inches long. She breathed on her own for the first 30 minutes before getting tired, and she was then put on the ventilator for a while just to give her a bit of help.

A slightly jaundiced Sophie under the UV lamp, day 2

I was finally allowed to see her on the Monday lunchtime, when she was around 21 hours old. I'd been given a hideous bed bath just before that (the most humiliating thing I've ever experienced!) and had to get myself out of bed and into a wheelchair, which was not fun at all, and very painful! Alan wheeled me to see Sophie, and I couldn't believe how tiny she was. She was very red and thin, and when the nurse told me to touch her, I was scared to! I touched her with one finger very quickly and came straight back out of the incubator again. She just looked so tiny and fragile. I only lasted about 5 minutes before starting to feel faint and dizzy, as I was due painkillers and it's so hot in the neonatal unit.


In the afternoon, Sophie's grandparents came to visit. My mum and dad brought a lovely rabbit for her, and Alan's dad brought me a cuddly cat in case I was missing Jessicat :) They all fell instantly in love with their tiny granddaughter.

Later that day I was moved back up to a side ward and the next day I was up for a shower and spent longer with Sophie.

Sophie was slightly jaundiced early in the week and had to go under a UV light. She looked so cute in her little mask! She had lots of visitors in her first week, and got so many pink and fluffy presents! She has been getting so many lovely pink outfits - even the ones for tiny or premature babies are too big for her!

Just a few of Sophie's gifts!

I have been learning how to express milk for her and on Tuesday night she started out on 0.5ml of breastmilk every three hours. She gets it through a tiny syringe into a feeding tube and is tolerating it well. I have to wake up every three hours in the night and take the milk out to the midwives when I'm done. On the Wednesday morning at 5.30, one of the midwives suggested I might like to take the milk down to her myself, so she took me down to the neonatal unit in the wheelchair! I got to stroke Sophie and talk to her and I spent about half an hour with her. The nurse looking after her told me that she was already beginning to respond differently to me to how she responds to the nurses! She must know I'm her mummy already :)

By the end of her 1st week, Sophie's skin was already maturing

Sophie's daddy has of course been coming in all day every day and we've been spending time with Sophie as well as getting lots of visitors. Alan and I are allowed in the neonatal unit between 9am and 10.30pm but we have to also work around visiting time in the unit (3-7.30pm and visiting time on the ward (2.30-4pm and 7-8pm). Young Sophie needs a secretary, as we have four visitor passes per day for her and so many people wanting to come and see her! My room is absolutely full of flowers, balloons and pink gifts, and Sophie already has a much better wardrobe than I have.

Snug as a bug in a rug

I am still getting monitored for my blood pressure etc and was allowed out of hospital on Saturday (6 days after having Sophie). It was touch and go as to whether they were going to let me out, as my temperature was slightly up when it came time to go! They did let me but I have to get checked by the midwives in Berwick every day. When I saw the midwife on Saturday night on the way home, she nearly sent me back to Edinburgh as my bp was higher than she would have liked but luckily she put it down to a long stressful day!

27 weeks and the dramatic arrival of baby Sophie Mary Anne!

What a whirlwind of events have happened since I last updated this blog.

At 26 weeks and 5 days I was admitted to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, having been sent to an appointment there for monitoring. It's never a good sign when you are asked to fill in a menu card shortly after arriving! They decided that they would probably need to keep me in until Baby B was born, which really scared me. At least I was put into a side ward after spending the day being monitored in a ward along with someone who had already had her baby by c-section the previous day and someone else who was in for monitoring.

Once I was settled in the side ward and Alan had fixed up the phone/TV/internet package things started to become more bearable! Alan stayed with me all day and I had lots of blood tests, urine tests, blood pressure monitoring, time on the CTG machine to monitor the baby's heartbeat and movement and a scan which showed that the baby was still doing ok.

That evening we were given a tour of the neonatal unit and the chance to speak to a paediatric doctor to discuss what would happen when the baby arrived.

The next day was just more of the same and during the night on the Saturday night, I woke up feeling really ill. I had the worst - and weirdest - headache that I have ever had in my life...so painful when I was lying down that I just could not bear to lie down at all....and my fingers were so swollen that I could not bend them. The thing that had actually woken me in the first place was baby B going absolutely nuts leaping around in my stomach - my whole stomach was jumping from the outside ...typical that it was the first time it was really doing that properly when Alan was not there to feel it! At least I knew baby B was still doing ok though. A midwife came in at 6am to take blood (lovely start to the day!) and found that there was not a single place left in either arm where she could take it as I was so mutilated! She got a doctor to come and put one of those hideous things in my hand so they could take blood that way :( Then the dreaded blood pressure check and it was through the roof...I had about 4 doctors in trying to work out how to get it back down again and they gave me some different medication.

I felt much better after that and went in the shower, only to feel as if I was about to faint. I have never had such a fast shower in my life! When they came back to check my blood pressure again, it had dropped worryingly low, which was why I almost fainted, and this was the start of things going very wrong.

I was put on the CTG monitor again for an hour, and was then told that I was being sent for a scan. I didn't have time to get Alan up to the hospital for the scan, and ended up sitting in the waiting room on my own along with loads of couples who were there for scans. I have never felt so alone or so scared in my life. While I was sitting there waiting I started to get really weird flashing lights in front of my eyes, which is another of the symptoms I'd been told to look out for, and the headache was getting worse and worse. Alan was later told that I was just an hour away from organ failure...

The woman who did the scan was so horrible, using lots of medical terms that I did not understand at all. She then said to me "Of course, you know from Friday's scan that the baby is not doing at all well"! I went straight back to the ward and burst into tears on the poor doctor and midwife but they were really lovely with me. The doctor explained that she had decided to do an emergency c-section that afternoon because things had started to become dangerous for me and for the baby.

I phoned Alan and 7 minutes later he came flying into the room! I was feeling really ill by this point and was just lying on the bed feeling horrible! By all accounts I didn't look all that great either! The anaethetist came to talk to me about whether I wanted a spinal or general anaesthetic (I decided on a spinal so I'd be awake for the birth and Alan would be able to be there) and then I was given a lovely stylish gown to change into and eventually was taken along to the operating theatre. I was absolutely terrified when I was getting the spinal but once it was over, I was fine. I just kept saying to Alan "I'm going to be a mummy TODAY!"

There were soooo many people in the room, including quite a big team of paediatricians ready to whisk the baby away as soon as it was born. There was a very strange moment when I was lying on the operating table and they went round everyone in the room introducing themselves! The spinal felt really weird and I was convinced my legs were in the air but Alan assured me they were flat on the table. Alan was allowed to sit up beside me and he held my hand all the way through. The doctor told us when she was about to lift the baby out, which was about five minutes after they started, and we heard crying, which was amazing because we'd been told not to expect to hear the baby cry at that gestation. We both had tears in our eyes!

The doctors were trying to get Alan's attention to go and see the sex of the baby but they didn't manage to get him quickly enough so they told us it was a girl, and took her straight away to the incubator. She was born at 14.44. We decided to name her Sophie Mary Anne - the middle names are after her two grannies. It was the most amazing feeling in the world when she was born, and knowing she was ok after all the stress and worry. It was so difficult not seeing her though.

By 15.15 I was in the high dependancy ward with a lovely midwife called Betty looking after me for the whole afternoon. Alan started making the phonecalls to let people know that Sophie had arrived, and after about two hours he was allowed to go and see her. He took a photo of her to bring back to show me.

First photo of Sophie, 2 hours old

Daddy's first gift to Sophie was a beautiful pink rocking horse, and he also brought in a pink teddy bear from her granddad, so even though my baby wasn't with me that first night, there were still signs around my bed that I'd had a baby girl. It was so hard not even getting to meet her that night, especially when they brought a woman into the ward with her baby who had just arrived at full term, and her husband who was very loud and jokey.

Sophie's first gifts

Sophie was born on Mother's Day, which was very strange, as her daddy was also born on Mother's Day. Her birth was a very happy occasion but also sad, as Alan's mum is not here to see her granddaughter, and we miss her very much - but we still feel she is very much around to watch over her beautiful granddaughter and we are sure she had a hand in Sophie's safe arrival.