What is this?

This is a very long, open and public letter to Baby Bean McGyver, the little boy curently residing in my belly, to be evicted in December, likely during Christmas dinner.

I promise to back everything up in print to read to him during the sleepless nights. Oh, and in case you are wondering, the title did come from a horribly catchy Gwen Stefani song that is always stuck in my jukebox brain.

I hope you enjoy reading as much as I enjoy writing. Thanks for stopping by!

Thursday 23 January 2014

Hey Baby! Nice to finally meet you =)

Hey baby!

You're here!

At the moment, you are sleeping in you pretty bassinet, looking cute as button and threatening to wake up at any minute. Please don't, as I've been trying very hard to write this post for a few weeks now and every time, you wake up!

So...wanna know how we've come to this amazing predicament of you being here with us, 4 weeks and 1 day old?

Last time I posted, I was around 37 weeks pregnant. After that photoshoot at the park, a lot has happened: Grandma and Grandpa arrived from Brazil. You auntie Sandra and cousin Julio also arrived, you Daddy took some days off work to relax and we all (and when I say all, please remember how many people were thinking of us in Brazil and New Zealand. It was like waiting for the Second Coming. And in the end, it almost was.) were counting down the hours to see you. We shopped, we cooked, we ate all sorts of yummy things, we planned for Christmas.

Christmas Eve, December 24th 2013, morning came and I started feeling some pain at 2.30am. I will spare you the gory and minute details of labor, let's stick to the short-story version.


I labored at home, making a beautiful trifle (never tried it though, it looked delicious.) and decorating cupcakes for the Christmas Party. Daddy woke up and went to work at 5am. Everybody at home woke up too and hang around with me while I had contractions. Daddy came back home at 9.30am, around 10.30am we finally went to hospital (This song was playing in the car when we drove and I'll never forget it because it also played in other relevant car rides in this story) and met Hannah at the door. In her words, I was laughing and smiling when I came through the door and she tought your birth would take forever and a day.

Waters broke, birthing pool. You came out at 12.30pm. Yes, around 1h30 after I walked in laughing. Disney-style, that's how we do it baby!

Welcome baby Oliver =)


 I was so shocked to actually having created a human being that I didn't even cry. I should have, because we were so so happy to finally meet you, and scared to bits too.

And that is the point when this story takes a weird turn, one that nobody suspected or expected.

You were born very mucousy, breathing heavily and wet like a 80-year-old with a bad cold. The midwives at the Maternity centre tried to aspirate your throat, but found that the tube wouldn't go further down. You breastfed for a little bit but that only made it worse. They put a monitoring thing on your wrist to keep checking your breathing and heart rate.

While phone calls were made to Chch, family came, Daddy left to spread the news at our Christmas party, food was consumed, flowers received, pictures were taken and joy was felt all around. You are so cute, with a crease in the right eyebrow and a dimple in your bum and smell of newborn. We fell in love and became mum, dad, grandma, grandpa. We became family right there.


At around 9pm, the midwives became concerned about your breathing and that's the moment right there when it all became this surreal tale: "We want to send baby Oliver and you to the hospital to have that checked out. The ambulance will be here to pick him up in a couple of hours."

Daddy rushed back from the party, everybody went home to pray, we cuddled and waited and worried at the Maternity centre. St. Johns ambulance arrived with a pediatrician and a nurse from the hospital. They worked on you, took blood, aspirated, measured, pricked, stuck, injected, examinated, all that to have you safely transported into town inside an incubator that looked like a spaceship ready to eat you up.

In the meantime, I cried, Daddy cried, midwives and nurses were the kindest people on Earth trying to console us and explain everything that was happening. All I can remember is you looking so tiny, so small with wires and tubes inside that horrible contraption. I would've put my own heart in that incubator instead of you then.

Your first car ride was in an ambulance to Christchurch Womens Hospital. Daddy and I followed in a sleepless daze and that song played again as we got in the car. 





Ok, I have to stop now, because this post is already a mile long. I'll write the rest as soon as possible, promise!