Eight months and twenty days

It's been three weeks since Alice's palate repair operation, which overall was a less traumatic experience than the previous surgery. Although she had an eight hour wait with nothing to eat before going into theatre, she's at a much more distractable age than she was last time. Similarly, although she was screaming her head off when she came out of the anaesthetic, we did induce her to smile within a few minutes (whereas before she was inconsolably miserable until the next day).

However, we still had a difficult time once we took her home. For a week she wouldn't drink any liquid, either from a bottle or from a cup, so any milk she had was mixed up with baby rice etc and taken off a spoon. She also stopped sleeping straight through for 11 hours at night (yes, I know how lucky we were) and instead refused to settle in her cot at all. We could only get her to sleep by taking her out in the buggy first, and she regularly woke in the night and wouldn't go back to sleep.

When you consider what she went through, two unsettled weeks isn't much to put up with... but my god it felt like a lifetime at the time. It can be quite difficult to see the wood for the trees at the best of times when you're looking after a small baby, but when even the tenuous routine you've established is disrupted you feel like you're never going to feel in control again.

However, here I am. And gradually I am remembering what it's like not to be exhausted.

Six weeks and six days

Wow. I thought that pregnancy tiredness was bad, but this is something else. Almost impossible to describe. In fact, I probably have been as tired as this before, but never before have I had to function through the tiredness for so long without giving in to it. Let alone been completely responsible for the survival of another human being. However, the thing that nobody can really explain to you before you've had your baby is that you CAN function through the tiredness, you can find reserves of energy you never knew you had, just from looking at the helpless little person who's forcing you to get up at ridiculous hours and intervals around the clock. Although I sometimes get angry and desperate and tearful, the main emotion I feel when Alice is crying and I look at her red scrunched up screaming face is pity for her. I just want to stop her pain, at any cost.

She had her orthodontic plate fitted on Monday, and although she seemed ok with it at first, it began to bother her a bit more once we got home, especially once we tried to feed her with it in. I could understand her distress, having worn the dreaded retainer myself in my teens which is basically the same thing. With the crucial difference that we couldn't explain to her what was going on in her mouth and how best she could adapt to it. So she was having trouble negotiating the reduced space for the teat and her tongue, and would get frustrated and tired before finishing her feed. Monday night was thus utterly miserable for all of us, as I had to give her a bottle almost every hour, she was taking so little - and crying pitifully in between as she realised that the alien thing in her mouth wasn't going away. (Sadly she is too young to be consoled by the fact that Mr Cash the orthodontist had made the plate using fetching pink sparkly plastic.) To make things worse, Matt has had flu so I've been on solo baby duty since Sunday.

Fortunately, Alice now seems to have decided that getting her full quota of milk overrides all other concerns and she's damned if she's going to let a bit of plastic and wire get in the way. I'm constantly amazed how adaptable she is. Far more so than me, anyway.

(Weight as of yesterday: 8lb 4oz, nearly 4lb heavier than at birth. Rocketing up towards the 9th percentile!)

Two weeks and four days

Well, Alice is now 18 days old, and since her dad went back to work it definitely feels like the 'babymoon' is over. I'm still smitten with her, but not so much with night feeds (especially when she's going through a phase of eating every two hours) or with the endless, mindless round of preparing formula and washing, sterilising, warming and cooling bottles and accessories.

I thought I was prepared for the consequences of her cleft, but now I realise that I was subconsciously expecting it to be like mine - a narrow cleft on one side of her lip, not the wide gap going through both lip and palate that she actually has. Aesthetically it didn't take long to get used to and she looks absolutely beautiful anyway, but I must admit to being deeply disappointed that I can't breastfeed her normally. I am expressing milk but we have to top her up with formula, something I never thought I would have to do. The ridiculous palaver of bottle-feeding doesn't help - I can't just stick her on a boob when she seems hungry, so it's a constant struggle to stay one step ahead with preparing feeds.

But she feeds very well (if a bit messily) from her squeezy bottle and at this point her cleft really doesn't make her different from any other baby, just more time-consuming. I don't know what the future will bring though, except that I'm already dreading the day we go for her lip surgery and her adorable face changes forever - even though I know I'll love her new smile just as much.