Visiting Hours

The feeling of getting your new born home is a great one. You leave the hospital full and trepidation and anticipation. All sorts of thoughts run through your mind about how you will cope. But once you get home that all disappears and you set yourself to do the best job you can at raising your child.

We spoke about how we wanted to make sure we got ourselves into a routine as soon as possible to try and make life easier for all of us. So when we got home we arranged things to try and make it all as simple as possible with minimal effort. Well, as minimal as possible with a new born baby in the house.

However, during that first week trying to set ourselves a routine became slightly more difficult than we imagined as we underestimated the number of visitors we expected to come round calling. All through the week we had different members of the family calling round to visit and meet the new arrival. Whilst the visits were and presents were all very much appreciated there were some times when we just wanted to be left alone in peace.

I had already joked with Clare a couple of weeks before that we should hold an open day where everybody that wants to visit gets a 20 minute time slot, and if they miss their slot then tough. As the week wore on this idea began to sound even better, although it was a little late by then.

Its hard during those first few days, we had a couple of restless nights while Isabelle was settling into her new surroundings and we began acclimatising to becoming parents. The steady stream of visitors’ means that you can’t really settle into a routine and or take chance to just sit back and relax when the opportunity offered itself. But it is great to know that you have all these friends and family around to support you should you need it.

I’m sure there will come a time when we may need to call on some of them for babysitting duties!