Vicki Cockerill - NICU MUM Blog

There has been some unrest in the household this week. The reason? I am 34 weeks pregnant and I am nesting like a maniac. Irrational, impatient and neurotic, my desire to clean is something else right now. There are no words you can use to describe the overwhelming urge to completely bleach and disinfect the whole house, all its contents, animals and family members to your partner at 11pm. Or why you are reorganising your books that you haven’t touched in 2 years, and yes it does have to be done NOW. RIGHT NOW, no I do not care if we are going out the kitchen tops need scrubbing down. Cleaning products have basically become foreplay to me, and I have endless lists of what needs to be cleaned, chucked away or done before the baby comes. Here are a few signs to look for when you enter the nesting stage of pregnancy. 1.        You begin to dream of bleach and fantasise about cleaning products. 2.     ...

I have come to a realisation recently. Elijah is ill, A LOT. He is basically a germ factory. Or he is licking everything, I do catch him doing this quite often. I even caught him putting his head down the toilet the other day.  I don't think we ever go for longer than a month or so before germs invade the house, and take us out one by one. He does not really get ill any more than a child of his age, in fact I think he is considered one of the healthy ones. He even takes his squidgy vitamin once a day which I am pretty sure is just a wine gum in disguise. But, every so often BAM! The house becomes an array of half empty Calpol bottles, snotty tissues, vomit/snot/ any other unidentifiable bodily fluid on the sofa and round the clock Disney films with three sleep deprived zombies inhabiting it. One thing that is certain he will always be ill when we have something planned, work,a night out, or for the last two years on my actual birthday.  It comes in stages, ...

For those that follow me on social media, will know that last week we overcame a pretty big obstacle. We gave up the dummy. I never really planned on using a dummy but when Elijah was in NICU, he constantly wanted to suck and this gave him comfort so the nurses made him one. I vaguely remember freaking out before Elijah was one because he was waking up about 100 times a night for it. I was very sleep deprived so sought advice from friends how to kick it.   Cold turkey was the favoured option, we lasted 2 hours and a failed nap time before I wanted to chuck myself out of the nursery window. We sacked it off, and I gave in and relented with the excuse of, well he will need this for recovery after the op. We will address it after (that is pretty much the theme for my first year of parenting.) But, then the year crept up on us, and he was sleeping better, he would wake up and put it back in himself, unless he couldn’t find it,  which was normally embedded in his ear for some u...