Walk this way, stork this way

Kerry, Amy and I went on the Stork Walk this afternoon. This is basically a guided tour around the maternity unit of the local hospital in order to familiarise yourself with the location and facilities and suchlike. The tour commenced in fine NHS fashion with the midwife opening the doors to the delivery suit and exclaiming “Oh dear, there seems to have been a power cut in here for some reason”. A current of alarmed concern shot through the room of heavily pregnant ladies, each no doubt imagining giving birth in the dead of night with their partners frantically striking match after match in order to give the doctors enough light to see what they are doing. Of course that is pure fantasy. None of them will probably even catch a smell of a doctor while they are there.

It transpired that the emergency generators were being tested that day, hence the brief power outages. The rest of the tour went alright, and everything seemed pretty much in order. I now know where the ward is and what to do about parking and all the kind of stuff that I really don’t want to have to be worrying about if we end up having to make a panicked dash to the hospital in the middle of the night.

Amy was very well behaved throughout the whole affair. She spent nearly an hour of being led from room to room without a single complaint. She was particularly impressed by the pneumatic beds, and also took great delight in telling all the staff on the ward that she had got some brand new shoes.

After the stork walk we went to a third birthday party. I was chatting to one of the other dads there who has recently had another child. He confirmed that our current lackadaisical attitude to the imminent approach of our second child was not unusual.

“I insisted on finishing cooking and eating my dinner before we went to the hospital.” He confided. “I was bloody starving all the way through the birth last time, I didn’t want that happening again.”

He also told me that he forget to bring the maternity bags with him and had to go back home to fetch them: “She was already calling me a stupid bastard and she hadn’t even gone into labour yet”.

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Related posts:

1. Layla Elizabeth Sutcliffe, born under a red moon.
2. We’re home
3. Welcome to week 35
4. I need to win the lottery
5. Tales from the maternity ward, part 1