The first month
The story so far: Wednesday morning, April 19th. No sooner had our heroine Charlotte been born than she was separated from her parents and whisked off to the Special Care Baby Unit (SCBU) to be monitored, due to suspected poo-swallowing. Eww. The hospital As prospective parents, nobody tells you about the SCBU. Although we were cheerfully informed of the myriad potential horrors of labour, we blithely assumed that we would be able to cuddle our newborn child and indulge in the promised skin-to-skin bonding as soon as it popped out. The odds of a baby ending up there are admittedly low, but the sombre ward was still close to fully-occupied when we warily trudged in. Bassinets and incubators bore tiny boys and girls of varying fragility, with some parents maintaining pensive beside vigils. From the whiteboard in reception we could see that one child had been born at 28 weeks and must have been living there for months. Although from this perspective Cha...