A few days from home...

When you've just given birth, rest is the most important thing. You have to give your body time to recover from the trauma. So the midwives will tell you. Ellie doesn't agree. According to Ellie, when you've just given birth, Ellie is the most important thing. It's not easy to rest when you are waken every few hours by an enpurpled screaming machine. After a couple of sleepless days at home we decide to take up my mother's offer of a few days with her in peaceful North Lincs where we can continue to look after Ellie, but where, crucially, someone will look after us.

So for 5 days we try to get as much rest as possible. My mother lives in a village called Belton and because there is nothing at all to do there it is a perfect retreat. A few times Ellie gets terribly upset by something or other at 4am, and I end up strapping her to my chest in the Baby Bjorn sling and taking a walk. The weather is beautiful and one morning I find I'm up at daybreak, strolling through a field with my iPod playing some beautiful chilled out music watching hoards of baby rabbits bouncing through the hedges and it's so serene that it's an enchanting effect. I suspect that it won't be quite like this at 4 in the morning on a drizzly Manchester winter morning. But for now, it's quite blissful.

We swing past the hospital on the way home to get the harness checked out. All is fine. Her hips are still in joint. We'll be back in 4 weeks, but until then we can't take it off, and it's kinda getting a bit poo stained... But standards of normal hygiene don't seem to bother us much these days.